Men’s and women’s brains

Do trans women have women’s brains, and if so, does it matter? Do trans women think like women?

In the 1990s, I learned about the BSTc, a part of the amygdala which is twice the size in men than in women, slightly larger in gay men, and women’s size in trans women. Problem solved, I thought, trans women have women’s brains. It can only be measured by dissection, though, so is no use as a diagnostic tool, and my internalised transphobia spoke up: what if I don’t? What if that means I am not trans?

Women’s brains have more white matter. White matter connects brain areas with other areas further away. So more white matter means more connectivity. Rather than using a single part of the brain for a particular function, women are more likely to use different parts.

All brains show differences between the left and right side, from nematodes up, and Iain McGilchrist in The Matter with Things explains this is because all animals need to eat without being eaten. The left side pays specific attention to prey, and the right side pays global attention to everything going on, as predators could come from anywhere. The right hemisphere is larger than the left in both sexes, but the effect “seems to be” more marked in males.

“Seems to be”- it seems that McGilchrist does not consider there is enough research to be definite. Lay people will often not know for any common assertion whether it is based on detailed and conclusive research, on one suspect study, or has been debunked. There is more research all the time.

Differences in brain structure might produce different behaviour, but might equally well prevent differences in behaviour by compensating for other sex differences such as the effects of sex hormones. For example, the right frontal cortex is crucial in the empathy between mother and infant, so might be less well adapted to making risk decisions, as it does in the male.

Testosterone in utero makes the right hemisphere grow faster in males than females, by inhibiting left hemisphere growth. But the same level of testosterone in males and females will have differing effects, and women may use different parts of the brain for particular tasks depending on whether they take contraceptives, or where they are in the menstrual cycle. I know from taking synthetic progesterone the effect it had on me.

I don’t know that I have any particular androgen insensitivity, though once I started on testosterone blockers my T levels dropped. I don’t know what might lead doctors to check. So my brain development in the womb was probably fairly male-typical, just as my development of sexual characteristics elsewhere in the body was. An AI shown enough brain scans of trans people can discern whether other scans are of trans or cis, but that only means there are recognisable differences in the brains of trans people, not that trans women have “women’s brains”.

Researchers can find what areas of the brain perform what tasks by studies of people with brain injury, or by brain scans. Differences in which hemisphere performs a task may be missed if researchers use equal numbers of men and women.

In a study of musicians, the compositions that had the highest ratings were by composers with a brain difference which all the men, and only some of the women, had. So the dominance of men in the culturally recognised history of great composers may be in part physical, though it is also Patriarchal.

Females have greater verbal facility, and males better visuo-spatial skills. Women use words to think through a nonverbal task. Ah, I think, I have no mind’s eye, and great verbal facility. But that does not by itself make me a woman.

If I tried totting up the ways where I was more like a woman, I would be guilty of sexist assumptions as well as proven differences, and my internalised transphobia might never think the list I came up with was sufficient, even now. What makes me a woman is my ineradicable conviction that I want to express myself this way, like trans people have in all cultures for millennia. I don’t believe in a soul, or even a mind separate from the effects of neurons, so that conviction is the effect of my physical brain.

I am a woman, therefore I have a woman’s brain, even if its sex differences are not the same as cis women’s.

Men and Women: healing the wound of the planet

What is wrong with the relationship between Men and Women? Sixteen questions on how it could be put right, from Jamie Catto:

15) Where do non-binary, trans and LGBTQIA people intersect with these questions?

Mentioned as an afterthought, on the outside looking in, at the sharp point showing the conflict clearly. As the wise others, who can’t play the game, so have a clear view of its rules, or as people broken by normality and desperate to fit in, even if it means negating ourselves. Hoping to save the World, or hoping to survive. Let’s start with some of the easier questions.

14) Are there different laws in your country depending on your gender?

I have a detailed knowledge of the Equality Act rules on women’s services, where trans women can go, and the rules on when we might be excluded. Rape is defined as the penetration of a vagina by a penis without consent, and in Scotland these specifically include trans people’s surgically constructed organs. Only heterosexual sex counts as “adultery” or “consummation” in marriage law. I could get more technical if you like.

3) What checks and precautions do you take to feel/be safe when you go out in the evening?

If I have more than one drink I want to sleep in the same building. I just don’t go out, especially since March 2020. When I go out I don’t take precautions particularly and sometimes I have only just avoided trouble.

4) What would it take for you to feel safe without taking those precautions?

A bit more money, so that they did not seem like precautions- taxis everywhere, go out when I feel like it. Walking through a park alone at night? I just don’t.

13) Do you think men and women have different brains?

I know they do. Women have more white matter than men. The Bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, central section (BSTc) is twice the size in men that it is in women, slightly larger in gay men, and the same size in trans women as in cis women, but no use as a diagnostic tool because it can only be measured by dissection. I looked into this stuff, trying to work out whether I was truly transsexual, before I realised the only question is, would I be happier transitioned.

Men and women have similar psychology. There is no trait, vice, virtue, emotion, or aptitude, which is in one sex and not the other, or is not equally valuable in both, but gendered expectations exaggerate or squish traits, which harms everyone. People vary within sex far more than across it. So,

1) What are the most uncomfortable stereotypes you feel are associated with your gender?

Stereotypes affect us because of the demands or expectations of other people. I face the “tolerant”, who judge whether I am trans enough- “Have you had the operation?” I also face the hostile, for whom I can never be right- performing femininity I am a reactionary, enforcing a stereotype, but if I play with the stereotypes I am a man, not even a “transwoman”. Some accept me as I am. So stereotypes are uncomfortable which are furthest from who I am, like with everybody, and so will be different for everybody. But stereotypes which I fit are also uncomfortable, because they can be used against me.

The one which has harmed me most is conventional heterosexuality. I don’t identify as lesbian because I have my father’s sexuality: a pansy, or soft male, attracted to viragos, or strong women. I was so terrified of not being seen as a Real Man that I did not know that, and before transition I could not form relationships as I wanted a partner to complete my Normality disguise rather than to relate to. My mother died and my father found a new partner who was right for him, but I see men with the wrong woman who wants them to “be more manly”, and they try, making themselves miserable.

Stereotypes are harmful because they don’t take into account human variation and persist because seeing a human as they really are is hard, and the stereotypes often kind-of fit.

7) Do you want more touch that doesn’t necessarily have to lead to sex?

I want cuddles. To have sex would mean breaking down so many trauma-induced barriers that it may not be possible.

6) Do you have anything you need to be forgiven for?

Yes.

8 ) What would it take to be seen as you are without other genders’ preconceptions and definitions of what your gender is and should be?

When someone has expectations of me, it sets up a fear reaction in me: I must fit in or I will not be safe. So I have to accept myself as I am, know myself, and heal away all the inhibitions which prevent me from seeing who I am, which are reinforced by disgust and horror at who I am, and an inability to perceive who I am, or see that as in any way good. This has been a lot of work. One phrase I have for it is “step into my power”, which gets in the way for me, as my concept of power does not fit who I am. It has been a lot of work, and I am getting there. I am not weak, sick, perverted, disgusting, ridiculous and deluded, as I thought, but loving, creative, beautiful, soft, gentle, peaceful. For me a better word than “power” is “grace”.

What questions did I leave out?

2) What would it take for Men and Women, and the nuanced genders in between, to step into their full potential together?
5) How can Men heal the abusive and violent sins of their ancestors?
9) What do the different forms of violence and abuse, on both sides of the gender divide, look like?
10) What positive progress do you notice in these areas? What gives you hope?
11) How do you perpetuate the sense of battle and divide between the sexes?

The “nuanced genders in between” are mentioned in the second question, and still an afterthought, because all these questions assume a conventional heterosexuality, with a man “wearing the trousers” in a relationship with a woman, and I can’t begin to answer them. I am not a man in that sense, and while I have suffered harassment as a woman- a man coming on to me on a bus, abused as a “whore” or “slut” when I did not conform to a man’s expectations that I would do what he demanded- it has been less, and as an adult. And I yearn to surrender myself, but to a woman, not a man. My scars are different.

16) What questions are missing from this list?

The questions address various aspects of

How are you hurt?
How have you hurt others?
How can we make things better?

So, ask those general questions directly.

And finally,
12) What would you like to do that you can’t do now if you changed gender?

I did! It liberated me to be myself!

Come, join me.

The Soul

Do human beings have souls? If not, does it matter?

Humans observe human capacity, and put it down to Gods or Devils, muses or spirits. Prometheus stole fire from the Gods, because humans could not make it or control it without Divine intervention. At one moment I am unconscious of a poem, and then it flows through my mind, apparently fully-formed, and that must come from Inspiration, something outside myself.

There’s a particularly stupid article in the NYT today, where Avi Shafran argues against materialism, which he diminishes to “electrical activity within our craniums”. If we humans are nothing more than our physical cells, and the innate human awareness of our souls and sense of free will are mere illusions, we have no ultimate value beyond that of any insect. And no compulsion, beyond an ultimately meaningless utilitarian social contract, to bind ourselves to any ethical or moral system. A society that denies the soul idea is, in fact, in the word’s deepest sense soulless.

Shafran makes a leap without an attempt to justify it: humans are capable of creation and destruction, so there must be something beyond the mammal that we see with our eyes, which he calls a soul. His only definition of it is “an entity which can be sublimated or polluted by the conscious exercise of free will”, but he implies it produces all our best and worst acts, and our spiritual value. If a devil possesses the traitor, as Dante imagined, we might hope he is a thing apart, and we are not capable of such wickedness.

Humans observe human capacity. We see the banality of evil and the heights of altruism, the acquisitiveness of a Charles Koch and the organisation for the common good in the Beveridge report. Shafran’s example is Yo Yo Ma playing a cello concerto, where we can see the technical ability and the emotional content, the power to move human beings and possibly to purify or ennoble us.

The ennobled human, the good they do and the beauty they create, are real whether or not evolution is capable of producing a brain with these capacities, or a multitude of brains capable of appreciating them. It might be terrifying that such capacity could age and die, that the creative power of, say, Leonard Cohen should simply be gone, a function of complexity which fails at last and dissolves into simpler molecules. Yet the creative power of Daniel Barenboim and others endures. We lose the person, yet keep the music; and there are more people, developing and extending the creative tradition.

And I too will die. My brain will submit to entropy and be burned or buried. The Earth will become too hot, so that its oceans evaporate long before it is absorbed into the red giant Sun.

It is not just a brain. It is a nervous system, capable of sensation from all over my skin, of moving my body and increasingly complex tools, of communicating with others so moving them to action and contemplation. That which is me is so bound up in the body and its physical needs, affected by tiredness, sickness and pain, that I cannot imagine a “me” without that body and those sensations, that physical way of achieving closeness. My words can move in your mind so that we become momentarily one, but those words relate to that physical reality, the mystery of what it is to be human.

The compulsion to be ethical comes from our humanity, from being one of a social species incapable of survival alone. Practices we call “spiritual” have value, and as humans we are drawn to them for what they achieve, individually and collectively.

The range of human possibility from transfiguration to depravity is hard to imagine, and so we use metaphors of spirits and Spirit. If there is no immortal Soul that does not make us worthless insects, but more precious, as evanescent. If not me, then who? If not now, when?

The “extreme male brain”

Is there such a thing? Do trans women have a “female brain”, or people with Asperger’s Syndrome or Autism a “male brain”?

Here’s the Disability Studies Quarterly, giving a good kicking to self-proclaimed experts on Asperger’s, which may also apply to such as Blanchard. Asperger’s is rhetorical, says Jordyn Jack: discourse fills the space that certainty in medicine leaves unoccupied. It’s not making stuff up, exactly; it’s creating a theory from little evidence because you can’t create a better one. Like GID, Asperger’s was messed about by the DSM revision: now it is lumped in with Autism, before, it was separate. The fault comes when Blanchard or Baron-Cohen cling to their theories in the face of contradiction, using them as a framework for their understanding, and excluding other possible understandings.

Another thing we might find useful in this Disability Studies article is the will to find something valuable in a condition. It is not something less than normal to be managed; it is something different, to be celebrated. It contains genuine gifts which the “sickness” model does not recognise: they are not disabled, they are “neurodiverse”. Certain traits of Aspies are responses to extreme stress from not being understood; they arise from how society treats disabled people, not the condition itself.

Baron-Cohen has the idea of a single axis or spectrum- incrementum is the word Jack uses- from female to male. Baron-Cohen’s evidence for this includes the greater weight of the male brain, and greater size of the amygdala, though the differences are small. BC links his idea of a scale from empathising to “systemizing”, ie finding order and structure, associated with engineering, computing and hi-tech, but not with “good people skills”. BC’s “systemizing quotient” test associates stereotypically culturally masculine interests with systemizing. The sex differences are a result of the questions chosen. The cultural understanding of nerdiness is skewed to stereotypically male interests.

In the 1940s, the term “computer” referred to a human working on repetitive calculations, this work was done by women, and the first electronic computer programmers were women. The work became man’s work when it gained status.

Emotional intelligence is increasingly recognised as essential in the workplace- teamwork, communication and interpersonal skills, initiative and adaptability, even in technological jobs. Where empathy is measured by physiological responses, sex differences disappear.

Autism might be understood as an “intense world syndrome”, characterized by a hyper-reactive and hyper-plastic brain that makes the world seem over-stimulating. Autistic individuals, then, may experience an excess of sensory and emotional input—not a lack thereof. Symptoms such as repetitive behaviour and withdrawal—which are not explained by the EMB theory—can be understood according to the “intense world” hypothesis as coping mechanisms individuals use to deal with overstimulated senses.

My Aspie friend agrees with the accepted symptom, that he has a lack of understanding of non-verbal communication, but he is particularly empathetic. His two friends I have met- note the weight of my anecdotal evidence- do not seem abnormally “masculine”.

What emotions are

Is consciousness a bad thing?

In recent articles, the New York Times and NY magazine distinguish activity in the brain, concerned with threat, from the experience of fear.

For NY magazine, consciousness divides humans from all other animals. No others are conscious. Animals have instinctive, defensive behaviours like fleeing or freezing. Human beings have a range of responses diffused through the brain which together go with consciousness of anxiety or fear.

In studies of patients where the link between the hemispheres was severed, as a last chance treatment for epilepsy, Joseph LeDoux saw that consciousness creates explanations or ideas about behaviour. For example, the right hemisphere alone is shown a cartoon, and laughs. The left hemisphere creates an explanation: “You guys are so funny”. Listening to talk radio in the night, I am unaware of the gaps when I doze off: my conscious experience is of a continuous entertainment, which is of course what it should be. Put that way, consciousness is a bad thing, deluding me into false explanations of my experience; yet some of my experience is explicable, and I consciously consider my behaviour through more and more sophisticated explanations.

When a human perceives danger, the brain readies the body for action. The human becomes aware of feeling fear if the brain is conscious of its own activity, and has the ability to conceptualize all of that, to label it linguistically, and to integrate it with thoughts and memories. Having the concept “fear”, the brain sees certain responses as fitting that concept.

The unconscious responses and the conscious feeling are distinct phenomena, in different parts of the brain. Nothing gets in the way of truth as much as language does, says LeDoux, though language is the only way to communicate scientific evidence. Communicating feeling without language is possible, consciously and unconsciously.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is an academic psychologist, rather than a journalist communicating how much of the interview he has (mis)understood. We experience anger and other emotions as clear, identifiable states of being… Every alleged emotion region increased its activity during nonemotional thoughts and perceptions. Well, is any thought truly non-emotional? One may experience fear without an amygdala, so my casual use of words such as “hypothalamus” or “limbic system” is inaccurate. Perhaps I am best to stick to the words “heart” or “gut”. I read of reptile brain, mammal brain, human frontal lobe- then read that even simple vertebrate brains have a similar hind-brain/ mid-brain/ fore-brain structure.

A single brain area like the amygdala participates in many different mental events, and many different brain areas are capable of producing the same outcome. Emotions like fear and anger, my lab has found, are constructed by multipurpose brain networks that work together….emotion words like “anger,” “happiness” and “fear” each name a population of diverse biological states that vary depending on the context…You might shout or be silent. Variation is the norm.

Types of “Anger” might be distinguished, and wordsmiths have made a start: cold or hot, for example. So my conscious understanding increases.

White matter

Transsexual people exhibit different brain structure. A team at the National University of Distance Education, Madrid, performed MRI scans on 24 males, 19 females and 18 female to male trans folk, who had had no treatment. They found significant differences between male and female brains in four regions of white matter, and the trans men had white matter in those regions resembling a male brain. The team made a separate study of 18 trans women, finding that the structure of the white matter was half way between that of the males and females.

Words like “superior longitudinal fascicle” may trip off my tongue as easily as base-nodule of the stria terminalis central section. It may have implications on body perception.

In 2011, the New Scientist (where I found this) suggested that trans-identifying children with such white matter anomalies could benefit from treatment to delay puberty, but no such work had yet been done. The New Scientist referred to Sean Deoni’s work on white matter development in infants, but publication considered a causal link between breast feeding and improved intelligence, previously demonstrated epidemiologically. Here is the 2011 Journal of Psychiatric Research article, on the Spanish research.

As soon as April 2011, Neil Whitehead opined that any brain differences were caused by “years of repetitive thinking, fantasy and preoccupation with body image”. Reading the NS report, “each” M-F had the brain differences, and “the female to male transsexual people had white matter in those regions which resembled a male brain”, but Whitehead says “a modest majority had brains more like their heterosexual female counterparts”. This could be evidence of lying, though the two reports could be choosing different aspects to emphasise.

Whitehead’s is a prejudiced site: its home page states that “Huge amounts of impartial scientific evidence now make it abundantly clear that homosexuality is not biologically hard-wired and that change is possible”. This is a minority view.

This is all of limited use in deciding whether to transition. The question is, will you be happier transitioned? How much do you want it, and how accepting is your society? It has some use in persuading the undecided, though people like Whitehead will oppose it. More persuasive is the fact that people want to transition. Why not just let us?

More long words: White matter microstructure diffusivity.

Meditation

As I said, the left brain has a clear rational focus on the matter in hand, the right brain has an intuitive grasp of context. I was thinking while meditating the other day (I never said I meditated properly) that this could be the experience I have in meditation which I find so delightful: the left brain, having nothing to do, stops, and I am in the right brain, just Aware of everything. It feels mindblowing. Perhaps some unlawful drugs do the same thing.

In a walking meditation at the Field of Love, we were told to put one hand on the shoulder of the person in front, and place our foot in the place their foot had just vacated. This is a ridiculous task, and not possible for a large group of people for any length of time, but I am a biddable soul and I tried to follow the Rules, though I would rather walk through the woods actually looking around me. And then, in the open field, I was in that blessed In-the-Moment place, just aware, all my senses feeling enriched. And I could pay all my attention (left brain, says McGilchrist) to a wild flower. That clear, focused attention on every detail of it, then back to Right brain, wide awareness.

Sometimes it seems to me that I can get in the moment by paying attention to the tiniest detail: a speck on the wall, a blade of grass: in looking at the thing which does not affect my immediate interest, and paying it attention, I can switch into Right brain mode. Useful, I would think, for walking through the forest, spear in hand, looking out for deer to eat and wolves to flee. Beautiful, certainly, in the city, in the crowds, in the commute; a pure joy when looking at a painting or hearing a string quartet- but how, useful? How, now, in this complex world we have made, could this Right-brain awareness be useful?

Awareness and brain function

That sense of Unity with all creation, of being in the space, aware of all that is around, may be a Right brain phenomenon. I first felt it in my first sharing-circle, with the Scott Peck-inspired Community Building in Britain. I could have heard a pin drop. Calm, quiet concentration, awareness of surroundings, all senses seeming more alert and powerful, and then focusing on the individual talking at the time. So. It is not just the right brain awareness, it is also the ability to shift into left brain focused concentration where necessary. What is lessened is the Monkey-mind, that thinking on things past and things future.

In playing the piano, I understand some very basic brain function, shared with invertebrates, controls the complex movements my fingers make leaving my limbic system peace to work on the expression of emotion.

Theory. The Monkey mind is the feelings I have not fully felt, my fears and desires, shouting so loudly just as a toddler does when she does not feel heard. One answer, then, would be to pay her full attention, to gentle her like a terrified dog, to become aware of her hurts and cravings. Then, I would hope, her insistence might be less.

The fractured self

Iain McGilchrist, a psychiatrist, gives a ten minute lecture on Youtube on the different effects of the left and right brain. The left brain has a clear rational focus on the matter in hand, the right brain has an intuitive grasp of context. McGilchrist argues that our society is far too much dominated by the left brain, quoting Einstein:

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society which honours the servant but has forgotten the gift.

He also says that the frontal lobe allows us to step back from the immediacy of experience and response, and judge it: which allows us to deceive another, but also to empathise.

I had been aware that the amygdala in the base of the brain, shared with reptiles, deals with the imperatives of the four Fs, and indeed I have experienced time appearing to slow down, where the amygdala under immediate threat takes over and lays down memories more quickly than the frontal lobe does. If the corpus callosum, the link between the hemispheres, inhibits communication between them, that could explain why writing sometimes seems to float up from my subconscious, or a “muse”: it comes from the other hemisphere.

As a teenager, presenting male, I “threw like a girl” (not a good thing) and twice I threw something without thinking or caring and was surprised to hit the target (in one case, the back of someone’s head). And I read that in playing tennis, after perfecting each stroke and response, the best players show very little brain activity in performing those shots: not all the judging and thinking, just the perfect part of the brain for the shot.

Years ago from the blog Overcoming Bias I got the idea of near and far thinking including the idea that our opinions about particular issues can be very different from the choices we make. My own example was that coming from my particular religious background, I opposed a woman’s right to choose abortion, and would tell people so, until one asked for help in finding an abortion clinic. Then I sought to help her get what she wanted. Ones opinions of the world in general can be very different from ones choices, faced with an actual dilemma.

One final view of the fractured self comes from The Daily Race, a blog on race and discrimination from a Christian perspective. In “A Whole Committee of Selves“, Starlette McNeill writes:

These selves would include the mammy self, the buck self, the brute self, the hyper-sexualized and asexual self, the Uncle Tom and lack Nationalist self, the house and field negro self, the integrationist and segregationist self, the hopeful and suspicious self, the passing self, the mulatto, quadroon and octaroon self, the coon self, the shuckin’ and jivin’ self, the African self, the nigger/nigga self, the Negro self, the Black self, the African American self. Each has its own personality, position and power.

Octoroon, meaning a person with one Black great grandparent, is a word I find fouler than miscegenation, a word seeing an ancestor as a Taint, and a word symbolising almost but not quite passing as Normal. And I see it in myself. And the shuckin’ and jivin’ self, trying to get by under the radar.

For the power of suppression, consider those people whose most important characteristic is their Welshness, symbolised by Cymraeg, the language. This communal characteristic has become a symbol of identity, even individuality, because it has been so held down in the past.

So what does “I” or “the self” mean? My attempt at an answer tomorrow, but I would be very grateful for answers below.

Some of my verse now has its own page.