Transgender kids’ brains resemble their gender identity, not their biological sex

[I_am_not_mafia]

There have been studies which claim this in the past;  the article seems to not indicate what is new in the study, which makes this any different. Previously, when looking up differences between male and female brains, it seems that most scientist where fairly adamant, that there where not definitive differences between the male and female brain, but perhaps some general rules of thumb, no different than statistical data comparing height or muscle trends between men and women. 

When dealing with the subject apart from gender dysphoria, it seems that most scientists would not claim that there was any distinctive difference  from a physical point of view between men and women that given a brain scan; they could tell you if they where male or female apart from an only slightly educated guess no better than if they where given the patients height.

I would look for more information about the study.  Would they be willing to do a blind study/test?   The study may be new, but the claim isn't.  And previous claims before seem to be based on bad science; driven more by an agenda.

There is a difference between saying that male and female brains are very similar, and saying that there are similarities found in the brains of one gender and this is consistent with the claims of trans people identifying with that gender.

The former is like arguing that there is no such thing as biological sex because people who claim to be men or women each have arms, legs, kidneys, heads, 23 chromosones etc. The latter is like saying that biological sex does exist because almost all women have ovaries.

Brain studies are typically not like biological sex where you can specifically point to an organ not owned by the other gender. But even with biological sex, there is still an overlap with a lot of people being intersex who otherwise do share all the other features of one sex. For example the chomosomes on one gender and the sex organs of another.

Generally you are right to think of it in terms of similar to patient's height. Men and women have the same parts, but some parts are more or less developed than the other gender. In the same way, that men and women generally have the same organs and the few that are different are generally grown from the same tissue to a greater or lesser extent. For example breasts are larger for women but the penis is longer than the clitoris.

You can get tall women and short men. But you can't tell the difference between men and women just based on height. You need many more variables. If you plot all the variables on a graph then you end up with two distinct clusters that have some overlap in the middle. It is not possible to draw a line through the graph whereby each member of the population is clearly in one cluster or the other. This applies to both biological sex and also to gender identity. So you need to look at commonalities.

There are now enough studies to show that there are definite commonalities with male brains which are different to the commonalities of female brains and those of trans people are in the cluster that matches their gender identity. These commonalities are typically how one area is more or less developed in the brain of one gender than the other.

And it is now generally possible to be able to tell someone's gender identity based on brain scan alone.