dryad dance

Came across and was stupidly affected by another discourse thread, one side current of the whole “what is biological sex” mess of the last week. In this case views from an intersex person, which does mean I want to acknowledge the challenges faced by this group rather than minimize them; obviously I cannot speak for them, and mostly I can just speculate.

In this case the person was expressing how either full-on denial of “biological sex” as a concept, or equating it with gender, would be denying and making invisible their experiences. This bothers me because as noted, the idea of/how someone being “biologically male/female” matters to me; I experience dysphoria from being concepted on the wrong side of such a division. For this perspective I have usually argued several things:

“Biological sex” without further definition is poorly defined. This is not the same as denying it, but rather saying that it is not a straightforward, simple, obvious categorization; it is a construct insofar as that we have to decide on boundaries for spectra of bodily properties (effective bimodalities are still continua). That does not make it unreal, only definition dependent.
Moreover, we can and should reference that biological property of the brain self-identifying (my “opt-out”/”opt-in” terminology) as a deciding factor where necessary in defining “biological sex” for organisms where this makes sense, like ourselves.
Third, the properties of the sex property continua are not static under transition but changing.

This challenges the position of the person whose words I read in that there are circumstances where we would let gender, in fact, be the deciding factor on the “biological sex” of a person. In response to claims of intersex erasure or validity denial as a result of this, I would respond two things – the first, that the overall composite level leaves intact the various properties (which are the more concrete features affecting either a dyadic or intersex person’s existence). The second, that this may have relevance as a response to the experiences of intersex people – the failure of acknowledging that assigning biological sex first and foremost should be left up to ourselves underlies the oppressions some intersex people do face, as far as I understand it.

(Elaborating briefly there on my own limited understanding – there exists a class of intersex cis people assigned the sex they identify with without anything unusual noted at birth; with intersexuality discovered during puberty or even much later as part of a reproduction issue. These individuals in most cases will see themselves wholly and fully male/female as assigned, whether they acknowledge an intersex label or not in addition. Some such individuals may be trans (and imagine the challenges of being a CAIS XY trans man – you have XY karyotype and testicles, but cannot ever respond to testosterone in any way), and may recognize trans experience as well. More vocal in the discourse are those who were nonconsensually operated on as children to enforce either assignment made, often without being informed. To me it seems that for either group, the problem lies first in not being allowed to make one’s own assignment of “biological sex” and whatever cascades off of that, and second in the experience of having atypical characteristics.)

So I would say that recognizing either scope of experiences and needs comes with no requirement for a coherent “biological sex” concept to omit self-identification as one aspect, nor for that type of concept to not be recognized as complex. Recognition of the biological continua themselves go a long way and are also part of my trans experience – I seek to changed sexed properties of my body also for their own sake, I suspect. That those properties themselves (and the nonconsensual medical treatment downstream of them) affects and informs many intersex experiences is obvious, and while acknowledging and labeling it may be a choice in some regard, it is not an unconstrained source. I am not saying either trans or intersex people choose their bodies, or live lives unaffected by their bodies, quite the opposite. Intersex identity is no more fake than trans body dysphoria is.

The person whose words I read made the odd claim that the sex assignment of bodies is better described as labeling as typical or atypical, than as male or female, but this feels absurd – literally most characteristics typical of a male body would be considered atypical for a female body and vice versa; the typical/atypical, while clearly determining whether an early-diagnosis intersex person experiences surgeries they do not consent to or not, is only defined once one has clarified what it is typical/atypical in reference to. More fully, surely recognizing we are assigned (and later, perhaps, re-assigned under own volition) male or female is not controversial? The course those processes takes then leaves us with cis/trans, dyadic/intersex experiences which we may end up acknowledging.

That is, I posit we can recognize the very real and important influence of sexed body properties for the life histories of intersex people without 1) adhering to a simple composite “biological sex” definition that cannot incorporate self-identification and 2) failing to recognize how sexed body properties can be changed. I do not see where there is visibility or recognition of intersex lived experiences and the impact of the body that is lost under these systems.

The point was well made that comparing dyadic trans people to intersex people fails to recognize the involuntary nature of much of the intersex experience (something, however, which also applies to the trans experience in absence of transition), and also that while the cause may differ, a medically transitioned dyadic body may well occupy much the same region in the spaces of sexed property continua as an intersex body does. To deny this latter part is to say we somehow still are always only confined to our birth-assigned sexes. It is also important to notice both that 1) many intersex individuals experienced tremendous trauma and 2) many dyadic trans people would intensely want to be intersex, even knowing all that, because that would mean in some small ways being further away from one’s assigned sex.

Further the point was made how trans identity could not exist without a gender assignment at birth system; this is wrong; if we self-assigned genders later (sort of what I did?) then the discrepancy with the body norm (regarding, again, sexed body properties) within those sexes/genders would still cause dysphoria and a need to transition.

The quip was made – echoing that which I heard from TERFs – that unless there was a reality to biological sex, then defining us as trans would not work in the first place, in absence of reality of source/target sexes. As noted above, my definitions of male/female, men/women are not independent of sexed body properties, simply recognizing the whole as allowing for opt-out/opt-in (to degrees, thereby enabling nonbinary existence also here). That is, once more, this definition need neither be circular nor deny reality of transition outcomes, and is no more “just a social construct” than anything else.

through-a-scanner-glitteringly

So on Gliske again, came across reviewer comments. Two named, not sure which. I believe first must be Ivanka Savic, she was mostly critical – though not for the eugenics or misgendering – but for not claiming credit of ideas she considers hers. From what I can see she has published a lot of interesting things, including re: how HRT improves sense of body ownership and changes sexed perception of scent. I sort of want to work with her, though I heard from people nearer she is somewhat of a nasty person to collaborate with. These comments if hers would paint a similar picture, less a bigot, more an uncaring asshole. Her papers have not been as bad terminology-wise.

One reviewer, apparently anonymous, is a sexologist, not neuro. They (I suspect he) explicitly asked for the Blanchardianism, claims young transitioners have no body issues (then again, not as sexed bodies then), and that aversion therapy hasn’t been properly tried yet, implying they would like for it to. Claiming it has not because Zucker disputes he has done so. Reviewers overall more accepting than I would like. Then again, this is what happens when we get to suggest reviewers. This is why we do so.

I no longer think this is a side project for Gliske, he spent grant funds to have the time to do it. In initial version there was apparently a lot of reference – removed by reviewer request – to sleep disturbances, which he has worked more on. He claimed based on too little data for reviewers to like it that this would be part of trans pathology. Parents, don’t let your children stay up all night, they might be transed!

But what mostly have me commenting, to get it out of my head, is in reviewer response he gets again onto the concept of gender being encoded as “same” or “different”. I agree on the level that the core gender-constructing brain response is a universal capacity to classify perceived bodies as same or other in sense of sex, which wired one way or the other leads to decisions on desire and competition and model learning. But the way he seems to imply a model for it, he perceives trans modality as wanting to be the bodies one classifies as “other” whereas cis modality is wanting to be the bodies one classifies as “same”. This model evokes body dysmorphia, plastic surgery addiction, continually searching for something new to transform into. It would predict that transition can never be enough, that full body medical and full life social transition would just give a new intolerable state one must escape into something else. This toxic idea, of course, was one of those I worried over, that kept me questioning myself.

Can it hold? It would predict that transition cannot enduringly reduce dysphoria, unless it indirectly leads to a change in the brain so that it comes to 1) wants now to instead embody sameness, not otherness, and 2) self-perception is that one has the gender one transitioned as, or rather, reacts with “same” to oneself. Alternately, one still sees ones self as “opposite”, and continues to crave “opposite”. End result same, only in the latter such idea, our genders would somehow be something qualitatively different than cis people’s genders. It is convoluted that one would continue to regard one’s own body as “opposite” once it has stabilized, and assuming then some virtual AGAB identification one happily feels one’s body is opposite to, also feels convoluted. And dysphoria-inducing, as any other scenario that implies there is some essential true identity as my gender that I could never attain.

Transition is complex though. I keep talking of the synergy between medical, social and internal transition. By internal, I mean the alterations in how one perceives oneself and others, how one reacts, how one feels. Some such are spontaneous, some require effort; transition involves making that effort. Moreover, there are mixtures of worries and memories and insecurities, euphoria and dysphoria and problematic validation, doubt, fears of illegitimacy, and the eventual rise of a new, more relaxed normality. In the end it is important I think for me to recognize I am legitimate by virtue of my subjectivity and agency alone, even had I had not been able to reference anything external.

My simpler same-different model echoes how we classify others as same-sex or different-sex. Additionally, I postulate, we do so to ourselves. Cis people inhabit bodies and lives which they classify spontaneously as same-sex as themselves. Trans people the opposite. Transitioning changes that, but beyond ourselves, does not alter who feels “same” or “opposite” with regards to sex, nor (mostly) how we feel about that. By changing what sex we can see ourselves as, we can go from seeing ourselves as paradoxes, mismatches, to simply normal. This reduces distress, reduces sense of lack of body ownership, and makes us eventually less preoccupied with gender. There probably are direct dysphoria reactions from various aspects of HRT itself acting on the brain, but the changes to our bodies are crucial also, something Gliske appears not to realize. Knowing others can see me as a woman makes me comfortable being seen. This is also why some dysphoria reduction can be achieved already by presentation and social transition alone, which again is not fully recognized by this “model”.

I followed up references made to a 2019 Savic paper where her team put 15 cishetero men and 15 cishetero women in a brain scanner and systematically showed them their own body, that of same and opposite sex others, and morphs between them, assing perception of “me/not-me” by self-declaration and imaging data. This is in principle highly relevant. They show own-body perception to involve mostly same brain regions in these men and women; Gliske references this in support for his same-other brain classifier dichotomy but of course it fits equally well with mine. There are other parts of the paper (Burke et al., 2019: Sex differences in own and other body perception [ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hbm.24388 ] ) that are interesting; seeming congruent with somewhat (N = 15+15, brain imaging statistics caveats, presumably overlapping distributions) greater salience of own body for women, others’ bodies for men, more possible inspect-for-partner vs inspect-for-rivalry in men, etc. The descriptions the paper makes of women sounds like trans girls honestly – own body critical and focused, identifying other women also as self, etc. But tiny, who knows what can be reproduced and then hardly absolute.

It would be a literature of interest to look into but it also severely scare me, because what if brain imaging gets better and more robust so that it would become emergent that trans women (or just me, the awful impostor…) did not react the way I think we do in terms of perception and response, but like twisted versions of our AGABs. Important to remember then – the subjectivity is what matters in this case, brains are plastic and might not locate functions uniformly, HRT has already been shown to change brain functional connectivity. The latter also supported indirectly by another paper I randomly came across – placing CAIS XY women in brain scanners yield the same responses as for cis XX women when shown nudes, compared to cis XY men. So whatever is there in such activation at least is not chromosomal. It may reflect some organizational effects, not just activational, but over time, who knows what we can become?

And as noted, the real crucial insight is – my agency and my feelings, however they arose, however they are implemented, are what matters for me. I believe strongly my brain has differences from that of a cis man, but whether it does or not, I am changing over time into someone I am much happier being, and my life as a result is better. I will that life into reality, no matter what stands against me.

the aeaea manifesto

Last few days have had so much energy eaten by discourse that I need to put my thoughts down, I have work to do and a life to live. This may not be eloquent or useful, but will summarize my responses to two recent papers; one of which I read in detail; both of which end up screenshotted all across trans twitter and so keep reactivating me. For some reason in combination I end up in apathetic dysphoria freeze/spirals like I have only very rarely done post-transition, and it has been relevant to understand why.

First I recently wrote of: literature review (Gliske, 2019) of brain scan studies identifying dysphoria correlates, only new thing being author postulates these are causes not symptoms and that direct modulation may (some day) alter them, reducing dysphoria. Such conversion therapy need not hinge on the flawed theory of the author, but is a more general philosophical question now gradually actualized – we are developing both invasive and non-invasive brain impact methods (transcranial magnetism, electrodes…) and it does not seem entirely unreasonable it will become possible with a willing subject to combine with methods like in EMDR – activate certain pathways and selectively dampen/erase them over and over, as a way to alter habitual reactions or the response to thoughts and memories.

Any such method will of course be highly variable in efficacy, take many years to get past initial horrorshow stage, and with side effects. The closest I can see possible in the case of dysphoria is something like an augmented PTSD or phobia treatment, where eventually one feels just a dull, neutral ache which activates no panic. It is the modern version of “learn to endure it”. There exists trans people who try now doing the latter; many of whom are in impossible situations where they feel they can never become cis passing, never accepted, etc; those would probably – will probably – become the test subjects. Some will consider themselves successfully “cured”, others will not. For those, I suppose I do not begrudge them whatever they do, I am simply sad for them and angry for a world where puberty made so much so difficult for some of us.

Others – me, and perhaps most of us – would neither accept the perfect “become cis of your AGAB” magic pill or the above laser-guided exposure therapy “learn to endure it” treatments. We want to be what and who we are, we just want smoother and more effective transition. It is the potential consequences for us that frighten me. Essentially, when there has emerged – and I can’t really afford to just blanket say it cannot – some sort of trial therapy like the above, with a handful of detransitioners touted as “successes” because they no longer have debilitating dysphoria manifestations, then there will begin to be voices saying that we already then have that sort of conversion therapy as an alternative. Those voices will be heard by conservatives and by health insurance systems. If it is cheaper to make us less depressed and suicidal by conversion therapy, than to let us transition socially and medically, they may not deny us the latter legally, but would have a much easier time denying us support (social and insurance-wise) in pursuing it. What we suffered from being read and understood wrong, and in the wrong kind of bodies, would be considered our own faults, since we did not choose to have our painful, impossible wish lobotomized away.

Here then the second paper (Byrne, 2019). I had not planned to read it, but sitting down now to collect my thoughts I did. I technically have more formal training in philosophy than in neuroscience but am more outside this field, so perhaps I miss out on sensible reading aspects someone better anchored would – somehow I doubt that. Byrne is head of philosophy and linguistics at MIT, and in this his first paper on sex and gender he took help by noted anti-trans voices including Blanchard, Stock and also anti-trans trans people like Andrea Long Chu and Debbie Hayton. From the start I think there is a fundamental disconnect here between Byrne’s views and mine, as he believes words have some sort of meaning which exists beyond the pattern of their use, interpreted most generally. This is where perhaps actual trained philosophers could tell me that this in fact is a widely accepted view, though it still is not mine – I see words and concepts as patterns of human perception, action, emotion, position and thinking, with anything than the full set of all human thought at any moment being a symbolic (statistical) simplification, and with statistical and imperfect correspondence to anything outside subjectivity. Never mind that though.

Byrne wants to defend the concept that “woman” should mean “adult human female”, and that it explicitly refers to something biological, not something social. Broadly speaking he lists various ways in which people broadly use the concept and speak and think about womanhood to mean, usually, just that, and he paints this idea as something persecuted and controversial among philosophers but not among sensible ordinary people. The text is rambling, tone widely shifting, type and extent of reasoning fluctuating and he makes some casually thrown in problematic assertions, chief among them, from some few anecdotes, that third gender people across the world really mostly have been femme gay men (my intuition being: many many people throughout history, if given the option to transition legally and medically, would have; many ambiguous states were second best options, just like mine was, but of course not all). He also randomly makes up an intersex condition instead of using the perfectly applicable CAIS XY one, then goes on to say that intersex women neither are women or female, but that they should be called that, and treated as such, out of kindness – second class womanhood, and very jarring against the rest of the text which highly praises some sort of honesty to imagined concepts; if one’s concepts means one should not speak and act according to them, then are they really sensible concepts to hold? He also willfully ignores how “cis woman” or “birth-assigned woman” is perfectly serviceable for addressing people where that holds.

All in all the argumentation is thin, repetitive and there is little to summarize beyond, “based on various assumptions, this is how we use this term, or ought to use it”. Instead I best summarize my impressions by my counter position. This is that, as noted, words and concepts are their usage, therefore sometimes very fuzzy. Words like woman (girl, etc.) have cultural and contextual meaning that go far beyond the biological; this ambiguity does not cause us any problems in practice, we understand to use them in this way and are able to give them specifying qualifiers when we have to. Many important usages of the term has nothing to do with biology and everything with social positions; in many cases such usage overlays partly with a usage that references biology. Again, this is not in practice confusing. We are able to communicate this just fine. So saying the concept is solely biological is not true, because only some forms of it is.

That said, I have no issue at all with those forms of the womanhood concept referencing “adult female humans” a lot of the time they are used. This is because I do not use the term “female” in the same way that Byrne does. First, that term too has the same multiplicity of effective meanings as do “woman”; we use it also to reference social positions and symbols a lot of the time, not merely biological. Here I know there is disconnect – my use of the word is spreading but not as accepted yet. More so still within the areas that this discourse actually is about, namely the status of trans and intersex persons. My concept and linguistic use of “female” in the biological sense applies to any person that identifies as such. I have written of it elsewhere but will briefly reiterate this idea.

Essentially, as a biologist, I reject the unqualified use of sex/male/female as biological terms. There are any number of sexed properties – within anatomy, endocrinology, reproductive lineage tracking, genetics, gene expression, and for animals – human ones also, perhaps – in behaviour. These are not discrete; we can define an infinite number of ways of tracking aspects of the same concept, so one could speak of as many separate but correlated sex characteristic continua as one wants. Usually but not always they are bimodal but not separable. I believe that some philosophers apply a “cluster definition” to define “male” and “female sex” out of this, but in the end, as for any other concept in biology, we need to make definitions when we establish terms which are not compelled from the data, but are choices we make – this is where also STEM concepts become social constructs. We cannot take an average of an infinite number of dimensions, so there is not a single obvious way to choose where in this space to put a boundary between “male” and “female sex”.

Much easier in each subcategory. My body has largely female endocrinology, for example, no real reproductive capacity any longer, largely male karyotype, intermediate anatomy of a lot of tissues. And in that aspect of neurology and behaviour which is also part of my biology, I declare myself “female”. When trying to decide then on that short hand which is (unqualified) sex, or biological sex, I have the following concept, and it is one I try to propagate to others, and which I want eventually also to propagate in research literature: default to anatomy, gonads and karyotype in that order, but if the person themselves opts out of either maleness or femaleness, or opts into either femaleness or maleness, through honest self-declaration, then consider that the determining factor.

This does mean that for some person like mitochondrial Eve, whom Byrne references and say we know without need for qualification she is female and a woman, I will believe her female since I know she had female gonads; I do not know but have no reason to believe she would have opted out; since I know only she is likely female, I will consider her likely a woman, and use she/her pronouns to describe her until I know better. Byrne references some newborn child with XX karyotype and a vagina; here again I will consider them likely female but I am not sure it is a good idea to speak of them as she, the girl, until they tell me so – here, in fact, would be somewhere we could shift the Overton window leftwards, a currently unacceptable proposal which would still be well motivated – consider no child a boy or a girl until they decide they are, do not speak of them as such, let their initial unchosen names be neutral. This is a position I will not fight for right now but that I favor in principle as a way to not simply let the bigots be the ones expanding the space of what is no longer too outlandish, it is sensible but not yet sellable.

For most people, they will not consciously self-identify as male or female, men or women, but they will be fine with the labels following from above scheme of disambiguation – anatomy, gonads, karyotype – and I will reference them as such unless I hear otherwise, or I have reason to believe perhaps they might in their heart of hearts be inclined to opt in or opt out of the default definition. This is seldom complicated. In everyday situations I don’t ask the receptionist their pronouns before speaking with them; I use names and other social cues to guess until I learn otherwise, but when I learn otherwise, I make damn sure to remember it.

For trans people (I won’t speak for intersex people here and now), we clearly made our choice: either to opt out of our AGAB, opt into our non-AGAB, or both. This already defines our (unqualified and biological) sex, even before we undergo any interventions (and not all of us do). We also occupy social spaces of man/womanhood, girl/boyhood. But beyond this, medical transition alters some of our sexed properties, as I outlined by example for myself above. When I finally have surgery, I will no longer be gonadally male, and yet another few percent of my tissues and structures will be anatomically female. With more years of hormone therapy, more of my gene expression patterns will change, and I will become slightly more physiologically female. We don’t know exactly what does and does not change. Some of my future research aims to test this. Not least in part because I can then determine better what technologies for transition we currently lack.

So in summary, I and my trans sisters are adult human females unless you specify, for example, karyotypic adult human females. I suppose Byrne can call me a karyotypic man if he wishes, and I would acknowledge this, but in the unqualified sense I am simply a woman. The whole kerfluffle of defending “adult human female” is irrelevant for these issues since we should problematize the concept of “female” itself including from a biological standpoint. Which is not the same as denying biology or erasing the needs of cis females. That research I mentioned? The other reason I want to do this is because I want to understand how hormonal and other factors make bodies sick and healthy in different ways in men and women (using here, as usually, the terms as statistic entities, and statements about them being statistical rather than essential in nature), so that the issues cis women have faced with inadequate medication and health advice, with increased mortality as a result, will be addressed. This is the opposite of either ignoring or failing to act on inequities resulting from biology.

(The above should also make clear something else I have alluded to. I do not see sex and gender as fully separate things. I see both as socially constructed. I see this social construction as being informed by biology, including the biology of brain and behaviour. I do not consider a sex/gender distinction particularly politically useful, and I see conceding “sex” as something immutable and binary and obvious as a dangerous mistake when made by trans activists.)

So then finally, back to where I was eventually heading, why does the combined discourse of Gliske and Byrne frighten me so? Not only on the practical level (access to transition healthcare), but on an existential level? It is because for me, core to my identity as a (trans) woman is that I need for others to see me as one. When they divide the world into men and women, I need for them to group me with the women (if no division is made, all fine!). I need for this to be heartfelt and honest, for them to genuinely apply any sex- and gender-differential emotion or action or phrasing to me exactly as they would to any cis woman. I will never perfectly have this, of course. And in the end, it is my own view of myself that matters most, but that view is informed by those around me. If society as a whole decides on a conceptualization of femaleness and of womanhood which I am excluded from, then I cannot feel at home.

I feel we have made very significant headway (but also some of it was always there – defining these terms from karyotype is a 20th century thing, definitions before that were likely anatomical but may have had strong social components too, especially in third gender cases) in propagating definitions that include trans people. “Trans women are women, trans men are men, non-binary people are both or neither as they say they are” is widespread enough to positively surprise me. Responses to Gliske (not so much to Byrne) from within his own scientific community echoes this already. We have made strides in visibility and recognition.

Trans-exclusive thinkers (feminist and otherwise) argue that changing definitions in this way comes at a cost. They reference (minuscule, bogeyman, but there you go) risks of abusers gaming the system to harm cis women, loss of sex-specific statistical knowledge (though at worst that is a 2-3% change in any measurement because we are very few), and the discomfort of cis women who have been traumatized by people who look like men and no longer feel safe with them around. Byrne, I am sure, along with others like him would complain there is a lack of simple elegance in my definition above, compared to something as simple as “both XX karyotype and a vagina”, and would argue this lack of elegance also is a cost, in a thought economy sense. Hilary Clinton feels it is awkward to have to expand her view of what womanhood can mean, and other old-school feminists feel their suffering under patriarchy is somehow not acknowledged as strongly if there are women who have not suffered all of it. Not a huge cost, any of this, but a small cost at least.

It is easy to show that what trans people experience under dysphoria – evidenced in our suicide attempt rate to date – is a much vaster cost than any of those minor encumbrances. It also outweighs easily – for many of us – the costs that come from the imperfections of current transition – being a target, as a non-passing trans person in a cisnormative patriarchal world, medical side effects, imperfect surgical options, generally loss of fertility along most paths. It is still easy to show that the scenario where we do transition, and where other people alter their definitions of men and women, male and female, so as to correctly include us, thereby removing main triggers of our dysphoria, is the one of most total utility and happiness. Cis people can suck up the inelegance of definition, the awkwardness of language, the slight fuzziness of statistics and the novelty of tall women washing their hands in a public restroom, because at least it means fewer trans people live in total despair.

But if something like what Gliske surely aims for becomes practice, and becomes widely believed to be an option for us to reduce symptoms of dysphoria? Would then more people side with Byrne, considering the encumbrances I mentioned more important than the remaining non-dysphoric reasons we have to transition? Fundamentally, is my wish to be recognized as a woman, in the absence of a clinical distress phenotype, still important enough to outweigh those encumbrances?

This is what I have been so distressed about. I fear it might not. I fear that my agency and wish will be considered secondary to minor comfort factors of cis people, and so that fewer people would see me as a woman, treat me as a woman, talk of me as a woman, include me as a woman.

The future is ahead of us. We cannot know where it will go. I will hope that allies and friends and family will see me and my kin as what we are regardless of what symptom treatment options will emerge, and that together we will keep the meme of my more inclusive definitions of male and female, of sex and gender, active in at least the societies where I can live. Perhaps we will lose some parts of the world, like there are parts we have yet to gain. There are countries I cannot visit. There may emerge more. I particularly worry about the US and UK, though I also frequently am hopeful.

Throughout these worries I thought of a term for that space where I am acknowledged as who I claim to be. Whether this is only my own immediate sphere of myself, that of my kin, friends, family, colleagues, city, country, expanding forwards, this space is Aeaea. This space is the sanctuary I may inhabit because it, unlike what is outside, is not forbidden to me while I remain myself. No matter who denounces us, Aeaea remains, and is as large as we make it. Here we are welcome, here we are safe.

quack tales

I usually don’t comment publically on new papers outside my main field but have to in this case. This is because Gliske (2019): “A new theory of gender dysphoria incorporating the distress, social behavioral, and body-ownership networks” manages to combine a lot of useful literature (I have to reread it in preparation for future planned work) and make the 180 degree wrong conclusion, in a way clearly motivated by a desire of the author for there not to be trans people.

In absolute brevity this is a literature review summarizing how sparse imaging data indicates trans people are atypical with regards to brain networks linked to the main components of clinical dysphoria: 1) distress, 2) (reduced) sense of body ownership, and 3) perception/awareness of socially gendered behaviour. The author’s hypothesis is that this atypicality causes dysphoria, and consequently suggests treating the brain networks directly could “cure” it, going so far as to urge for ceasing to carry out currently accepted standard affirming care.

The author acknowledges as possible, but never engages with, the far more immediate interpretation that a sense of gender incongruency causes 1) distress, 2) (reduced) sense of body ownership, and 3) (intense) perception/awareness of socially gendered behaviour, reflected over a lifetime in these networks. The author even cites how treatment, including hormone treatment, both alleviates these symptoms and reduces (to the extent it is studied) the signal from these networks. If they were causal, why would transitioning reduce these symptoms? Why would they not remain equally in play with instead good congruence with the target gender?

His (single author, who here can be assumed to be a cis man) only real response to this is the suggestion that both transfeminine and transmasculine HRT increases effective estrogen impact on the brain, and that it simply is that estrogen “cures” this network damage, whether supplied in circulation (in trans women) or through aromatization (in trans men). But if the circulating levels trans women on HRT receive are sufficient to do so, then why would not the same levels do so in pre-HRT trans men? One can construct scenarios but all in all this seems highly to overcomplicate.

The author even gets close to pet theories of mine that both gender and orientation are keyed off assessment of others as “same” vs “different”, but goes off into a speculative Blanchardian rant rather than to explore how own-body-as-“different” would make ample sense as a source of the brain signatures he has just summarized. Discussion on vasopressin receptors as underlying this “same” vs “different” response in sexual orientation is interesting and I must follow that literaure more, but I don’t think it will lead near the conclusions the author wants to draw.

Again, he is arguing to “fix the brain of trans people” and to stop promoting gender affirming care. He does this based a summary of what is known of the neural correlates of dysphoria, but clings to an interpretation of those correlates as causes rather than effects. This is contrasted against a strawman of “male/female brain” theory, with ideas of a subtler network for gender identity glossed over – but if we wanted to find something like that, we should look at that which determines whether a male/female body/person is interpreted as same/different than oneself, which would not be there on the level of large structures, but on connections between other parts which might otherwise look identical between men and women because they are equally used in both, only in different direction.

I am not opposed to studies into this field at all. This paper was useful to me in terms of sources also. But a quack summarizing literature, deciding symptoms must be causes, then advocating and hoping for medical conversion therapy because he does not want there to be people transitioning, is not good science at all.