Quote from: Schmuckle on January 28, 2016, 06:09:08 PM
Blink, you beleive in male and female brains? Have you researched this a lot? I don't do much reading on the topic. I just know its very controversial. Would love for it to be true, lol.
"Male and female brains" is an oversimplification for conversational ease. People who want to deny transsexuality is a medical condition will tell you there is "NO" difference in male and female brains - that's not accurate. It's not perfectly clear cut, either. The reality is more complicated.
With our current technology and medical understanding, they can't predict with 100% accuracy whether a brain is male or female. But they have found significant differences, things that there tend to be "more" of in male or female brains. This bit here is usually bigger, that bit there has a higher concentration of this type of cell, that sort of thing. I'm not a doctor and I can't explain it correctly, but that's the basic idea.
Research on the brains of transsexuals has found that - even prior to or without HRT - our brains are significantly different than what they would expect them to be based on birth genitalia. Instead, for example, the brain of a trans man will more closely resemble the brains of cis male controls rather than cis female controls. Again, that's
prior to or without HRT - HRT induces further changes. Human biology is more complicated than some people want to believe. People who want everything in tidy boxes of "100% male" and "100% female", but in reality 100% male or female would be an anomaly in itself. Cis people's brains aren't 100% one or the other either. Point being, research done by scientists, with a better understanding of this stuff than the folks who want to pass us off as confused or crazy, indicates a
physical cause for our condition.
The best explanation I've found is the idea of a brain body map. The idea is, the brain is mapped out to the body, but sometimes the "map" does not match the body. That can cause varying amounts of distress. It's suspected to be the cause of phantom limb syndrome (when someone has lost a limb but still "feels" it to varying degrees). It is suspected to be a cause of Body Identity Integrity Disorder, which is the opposite of phantom limb - someone consistently feels like one of their limbs shouldn't be there. So far the most successful treatment they've been able to find for BIID is surgery to remove the limb.
I encourage you to search online for "transsexual brain study" or similar terms.
