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[–]sisterinsomnia 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The human brain is somewhat plastic, and this means that our brains will start looking different over time if they are used in different ways, even if they might not have looked different initially. An old study of London cab drivers from the era when they had to memorize an enormous number of addresses showed that the long-term memory location in their brains grew much bigger when they had to study all that stuff. Other studies show that depressive episodes can leave permanent marks in the brain and so on.

So when we compare brains of men and women and of trans men and trans women, we should keep this in mind. The more women's lives, on average, differ from men's lives, the more apparent differences we will find.

The research field of looking for sex differences is, by the way, almost always chosen by people who already believe in innate differences and are looking for them. There is no field of sex similarities, and clearly there should be.

When a study finds no sex difference in the brain, the results are usually written up as being about something different altogether, so we never notice how very many studies actually do find no differences. Good to be careful in assigning too much value to yet some new study "explaining" female subjugation as just an obvious fact caused by innate differences. Those studies have cropped up for more than a hundred years, and when one is refuted another pops up. Then it takes a few years for the new criticisms about that study to be published, but by that time the popular media has moved on...