Meet the neuroscientist shattering the myth of the gendered brain

submitted by DR373737 from (theguardian.com)

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[–]Aquadog 20 insightful - 1 fun20 insightful - 0 fun21 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

The one "gender" study on brains that I know of for TiMs used a sample size of 26 people and only looked at MRI imaging. MRI imaging is very unreliable when predicting behaviours, yet people are acting like it's the holy grail of "gendered brain" testing.

[–]jet199 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Oh yes, it's complete snake oil.

We all know the brain operates on a microscopic level with millions of different connections controlling behaviour. The idea you can see this from a big picture of the whole thing is laughable.

[–]GConly 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

There have been about a dozen studies. Hundreds of participants overall.

MRI imaging is very unreliable when predicting behaviours

But it's good at looking at the structures. I've had one myself. An MRI can pick out differences in structure to the mm. It's how drs keep track of tumor growth.

The structures correlate well to physical sex and when they don't it's almost always because the subject is gay.

The later MRI studies don't support the wrong sex brain theory anyway, but they do support homosexuality as being innate. If you trash them you're just damaging the argument for accepting being gay as something you can't change and ignoring research that's showing brain sex development is not what is behind being trans.

And being gay and not wanting to have sex with TIMs is kind of a thing here. The brain sex is real/sexual orientation isn't a choice because of brain development supports the lesbians not wanting to sleep with TIMs etc.

[–]Aquadog 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I'm not totally trashing them, but they are unreliable as markers for a lot of things-mental illness included. For example, people with schizophrenia may have some structures that are under developed, while other people might have brains that look totally healthy and normal. They can show bursts of activity when not much might be happening at all: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27357684/

There's also been evidence that the software used as benchmark to analyze these fMRIs may show false positive rates up to 70%. While fMRIs are a good tool, they are not gold standard for predicting behaviours.

[–]spinningIntelligence 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Lesbians not wanting to have sex with TIMs doesn't need approval from an MRI machine. Even if it were proven tomorrow that homosexuality is 100% a conscious choice (it's not), that wouldn't make it any more permissable for men to pressure lesbians into sex.

Homosexuality isn't okay because it's innate, it's okay because it doesn't harm anyone. And there's also a 0% chance of accidental pregnancy.