Is There Science to Explain Gender Confusion?
We hope you’re coming this Thursday to our Back to Reality Summit—Tickets close at midnight, so buy them NOW! We’re boldly addressing the questions and answers surrounding these epidemic levels of gender confusion and the push to ‘transition’ kids to the opposite gender.
One of our expert panelists is Jason Evert, a theologian, counselor and philosopher who answers tough questions on life and relationships at his website. Jason’s book, “Male, Female, Other?” analyzes common claims people make to justify ‘gender affirming care’ that leads to life-long suffering from chemical and surgical ‘transition’.
In this excerpt from his book, he answers one of the most common claims—that someone can be ‘born in the wrong body’. Come to the Summit on Thursday and hear from Jason, our two other panelists, and our keynote speaker, Chloe Cole! ~ Kim
Excerpt from "Male, Female, Other?"
Claim
Some people have the brain of one sex but the body of the other.
In a Harvard online journal, Katherine Wu reported, “Transgender people appear to be born with brains more similar to the gender with which they identify, rather than the one to which they were assigned.”1 For example, studies of trans women show that regions of their brain are more similar to biological women than to men. These studies and many others explain why scientists have postulated the idea of an intersex brain.2
What we can learn from these findings is that one’s gender is innate and that some people are born trans.
Reply
In the popular children’s book I am Jazz, the main character, Jazz, declares, “I have a girl brain but a boy body. This is called trans- gender. I was born this way.”3 While it cannot be questioned that Jazz sincerely feels this way (and those thoughts are located within Jazz’s mind), the idea that a female brain can reside within a male body is pseudoscience.
Some studies have proposed the idea that people who identify as trans have brains that more closely resemble the brains of the sex with which they identify, rather than their biological sex. For example, in 1995, Jiang-Ning Zhou published an article entitled, “A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality.”4 In it, he compared a region of the brain known as the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc) and found that for men who identified as trans, this area of the brain was more similar in size to females than to males.
News headlines followed, announcing, “Possible Transsexual Brain Trait Found.”5 However, those who read the headlines most likely didn’t realize that the study sample included only six deceased men, all of whom had received feminizing hormones. Five of the six men had also received an orchiectomy (an operation to remove the testes). The author of the study admitted, “As all the transsexuals had been treated with estrogens, the reduced size of the BSTc could possibly have been due to the presence of high levels of estrogen in the blood.”6
Research shows that cross-sex hormones change the structure of the brain, bending regions of the male brain to more closely resemble those of women, and vice versa. In an article entitled, “Changing Your Sex Changes Your Brain,” The European Journal of Endocrinology explained, “anti-androgen + estrogen treatment decreased brain volumes of male-to-female subjects towards female proportions, while androgen treatment in female-to-male subjects increased total brain and hypothalamus volumes towards male proportions.”7 Dr. Mark Yarhouse pointed out yet another problem with Zhou’s conclusions, noting, “Also, when we consider research on identity, it is hard to imagine it being located in the hypothalamus. Self-concept is not rooted there but rather in the cortex.”8
Five years after Zhou’s initial study, he published a second, entitled, “Male to Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus,” that measured the number of a specific type of neuron in the BSTc.9 It showed similar results in the BSTc region of the brain: that the neuron count of men who identified as transsexual was within the range of the thirteen women in the study. However, this study was subject to many of the same limitations as the first.
Then, in 2011, researchers published new findings that studied individuals who identified as trans, but who had not yet taken cross- sex hormones.10 In it, they found that the white matter microstructure of women who identified as trans was more similar to males than females. Three years later, other neurologists discovered that the white matter microstructure of some who identify as trans was somewhere in between that of men and woman.11 Still other studies have shown that the brains of people who identify as trans are aligned with their biological sex rather than their gender identity.12
Drs. Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh summed up the current state of research on the subject, writing, “[T]he current studies on associations between brain structure and transgender identity are small, methodologically limited, inconclusive, and sometimes contradictory.”13 They added that the studies to date “demonstrated weak correlations between brain structure and cross-gender identification. These correlations do not provide any evidence for a neurobiological basis for cross-gender identi#cation.”14 Numerous limitations within the current body research led the American College of Pediatricians to conclude:
A properly designed brain difference study needs to be prospective and longitudinal; it would require a large randomly selected population-based sample of a #xed set of individuals, would follow them with serial brain imaging from infancy through adult- hood, and would have to be replicated. Not one brain study to date meets a single one of these requirements to be considered rigorous research design.15
However, even if such a study existed, at least #ve other challenges would remain. The first is the question of neuroplasticity. Dr. Paul McHugh remarked, “Even if evidence existed that brain studies showed differences, which they do not, it would not tell us whether the brain differences are the cause of transgender identity or a result of identifying and acting upon their own stereotypes about the opposite sex, through what is known as neuroplasticity.”16 This term refers to the fact that repeated behaviors alter the structure of the brain.17 Put simply, it’s possible for one’s actions to cause brain differences rather than for brain differences to determine one’s actions.18