> fMRI studies have found differences in the brain that are highly correlated with gender dysmorphia
No they haven't, that study was debunked. There is currently no physically detectable way to identify gender dysmorphia or trans identity, there is only self-report.
Sure, so to clarify, the study that claimed to find differences in trans brains:
* Did not control for sexual orientation (same-sex attracted people exhibit preferences and behaviours of both sexes, and many adolescents who start as trans desist and come out as gay)
* Did not control for whether the person was on HRT or puberty blockers (people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex)
* Did not control for body perception disorders (body dysmorphia results in distorted perceptions of one's own body)
> many adolescents who start as trans desist and come out as gay
Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%), and that lack of social acceptance is a huge factor in deciding if someone desists or not — the less social acceptance, the less likely someone is to be able to comfortably transition socially, the more likely they're going to "desist".
In other words — not only is the "desistance rate" for treatment vanishingly small, there isn't a straight line between "desisting" and "not being transgender", and one of the most recurring explanations for "desistance" in the study groups basically boiled down to "society has bullied them into hiding themselves".
> people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex
Citation needed. In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.
> body dysmorphia results in distorted perceptions of one's own body
Correct! And given that you know this, you should also know that treatments for body dysphoria do not work for gender dysphoria, and that for almost 100 years now, the only effective treatment for gender dysphoria has been transitioning.
> Citation needed. The actual hard evidence with respect to regret rates with GICs are very clear that "desistance", using your word for it, is vanishingly low (less than 1-2%, c.f. knee surgery with 20-30%)
No, the actual detransition rates are completely unknown because gender researchers had crappy long-term follow-up with patients, eg. they stopped tracking individuals beyond only a few years, and simply dropped people from the data entirely if they ceased communication, which is a clear bias towards favourable stats for transition. The poor quality of the evidence in this field is why virtually all Western nations are taking progressively stricter approaches to trans care to improve the quality of the long-term data.
Furthermore, this 1% regret rate number doesn't even pass a basic sniff test. The regret rate for literal live-saving surgeries, like artery bypass, are upwards of 25%. A 1% regret rate is just completely implausible and I honestly can't believe anybody swallowed it.
The desistance I was referring to are cohorts that experience gender dysphoria for various reasons and then ultimately desist. A large subset of this cohort are gay, sexually confused or uncomfortable with puberty for various reasons, and throw in a bunch of other comorbidities and the affirmative model is a recipe for disaster. The lawsuits from detransitioners have just begun, and I think they will only increase for a few more years. Only the will we have a better picture.
> In the 70s - 80s there were experiments to try and treat both intersex people and transgender people by giving them the "correct" (cis) hormone, and the subjects involved found it so intolerable they committed suicide.
This causation for their suicide is conjecture (trans people have many mental health comorbidities), but I don't see how this is even relevant to the point I was making. Do you really need a citation that testosterone and estrogen supplementation changes behaviours and neurology in accordance with the sex to which those hormones is primarily associated? Just because it does so, doesn't mean it would solve whatever ailed the trans or intersex people, and I never claimed it would.
The point was that hormones alter your neurology closer to that sex, so if you perform an fMRI on cis women, trans women on HRT for a number of years, and trans women not yet on HRT, then those on HRT will look different and closer to females than those not on HRT. This confounds any fMRI analysis that purports to show that "trans brains" have some innate structural similarity to their gender.
> No, the actual detransition rates are completely unknown because gender researchers had crappy long-term follow-up with patients, eg. they stopped tracking individuals beyond only a few years, and simply dropped people from the data entirely if they ceased communication, which is a clear bias towards favourable stats for transition.
There are multiple longitudinal studies of trans people many years after transition, and their numbers fit the already-existing numbers known by GICs — but I'm sure given your predisposition for research on this topic, you've already seen them and disagree with them. I'd agree that more research is fine, but the fact that the vast majority of trans people report feeling way more comfortable after 5 years of transitioning, to me makes it very clear. Who follows up with knee surgery patients after 10 or 20 years? Do we have long term data that 30 years after a bypass surgery someone isn't regretting having it? The existing data we have for trans people is comparative in length and scope to the followups performed on said people with life-saving surgeries. I'd agree that more data = better, sure. But I really doubt that you're actually going to find the smoking gun here that you're so blatantly looking for.
Also, it should be said that, again, the main reason we don't have very, very long term data on trans people is because most of the trans people that transitioned in the 1920s - 1980s kept it very, very close to their chests and later went stealth. It is literally only the last 10 or so years that acceptance of trans people has hit a point that many don't feel an impetus to go stealth in the first place. Wanting very, very long term data is like asking "Where are all the studies on old gay people, if being gay is natural" and ignoring that the AIDS pandemic happened — it's ignorance of social factors precluding data gathering.
> The lawsuits from detransitioners have just begun, and I think they will only increase for a few more years. Only the will we have a better picture.
To be honest, I'd wait another 30 years for the anti-gender cult[1][2][3][4] to run it's course first, before we start getting actual data :)
> Do you really need a citation that testosterone and estrogen supplementation changes behaviours and neurology in accordance with the sex to which those hormones is primarily associated?
Yes, I'll take the citation please.
What you said was "people on opposite sex hormones start developing behaviours and preferences of the opposite sex". Which is dubious in terms of the evidence available for that position in relation to humans, as the majority of evidence for that in terms of sex hormones were done on rats — which, notably have a very different psychology to humans. There is a phenomenon where some trans women realise that they are straight and attracted to men, after transitioning, but it's very unclear whether or not that's simply the case that they feel able to be attracted to men — occam's razor kicks in here, I think. Regardless, it would be difficult to get figures on this because speaking from personal experience, the vast majority of trans women I have met and been in contact with (probably a couple of hundred or so) are dating (cis and trans) women.
> The point was that hormones alter your neurology closer to that sex, so if you perform an fMRI on cis women, trans women on HRT for a number of years, and trans women not yet on HRT, then those on HRT will look different and closer to females than those not on HRT. This confounds any fMRI analysis that purports to show that "trans brains" have some innate structural similarity to their gender.
But you should already know, Sandro, that for the last ten years multiple authors doing fmri studies on trans people have been performing them on non-hormone treated, and hormone treated trans people. The data is already there and collected.
If someone started grinding up those pill things and putting them in your salt shaker, you wouldn't be able to prove that you didn't like the results - unless we can believe self-reports.
Believing swlf-report for an n of 1 question of personal preference is very different from trusting a self-report survey meant to extrapolate the results of one cohort to a larger audience.
Sex-segregated spaces for one. For another, is anyone obligated to call a Catholic priest "father" simply because his beliefs give him a special title? Of course not. Clearly gender is not treated this way.
No they haven't, that study was debunked. There is currently no physically detectable way to identify gender dysmorphia or trans identity, there is only self-report.