This article appeared in the National Geographic, which shows how far trans people have come. However, it's far from perfect as an article. While research that confirms the physiological differences in trans people are dismissed as not being conclusive using rather dubious (ie, inaccurate) justifications, the following is included with no references, and no evidence:
"Eric Vilain, a geneticist and pediatrician who directs the UCLA Center for Gender-Based Biology, says that children express many desires and fantasies in passing. What if saying “I wish I were a girl” is a feeling just as fleeting as wishing to be an astronaut, a monkey, a bird? When we spoke by phone last spring, he told me that most studies investigating young children who express discomfort with their birth gender suggest they are more likely to turn out to be cisgender (aligned with their birth-assigned gender) than trans—and relative to the general population, more of these kids will eventually identify as gay or bisexual."
The article seems to have an inconsistent approach to scientific research. Treating research
such as this (New Scientist)
in a very sceptical way, even though such studies arescientifically
valid, albeit with small sample numbers (necessarily). It mentions that
the process of transitioning for some subjects might have skewed the
results, but every study I've looked at took this into consideration and
included suitable controls to check for that. The results of research
like this have mostly been clear and unequivocal despite the small
sample sizes.
So this - is a very dishonest representation of the research so far carried out on the physiological causes of trans.
These studies have several problems. They
are often small, involving as few as half a dozen transgender
individuals. And they sometimes include people who already have started
taking hormones to transition to the opposite gender, meaning that
observed brain differences might be the result of, rather than the
explanation for, a subject’s transgender identity.
As if controls to take the effects of HRT into consideration was something that not one scientist had thought of when designing their study!!
So I found this from a description of one the studies I identified, which is fairly typical:
None of the transsexual subjects had received any hormone
treatment prior to the study. Using an MRI, the researchers found that
the transwomen had more cortical thickness than the XY males in three
regions of the brain. The transmen showed evidence of masculinization of
their grey matter. In all transsexuals studied, the key differences
from their biological sex were found in the right hemisphere.
(Zubiaurre)
More truthful summaries would be found in the New Scientist article referenced above, or this blog which mentions many and varied studies in this area. There are many, many more studies out there which can be found using Google. And new studies are carried out all the time.
This area clearly needs more work and a lot more money ear-marked for
bigger studies, but it is obvious already that physiological differences
exist in trans people, and that the studies required to show these differences in a conclusive manner will be carried out and that this is only a matter of time.
It swallows the line that 75% of "such
boys" - ie, those who express a desire to be a girl - turn out to be gay
men without challenging it at all. There are no studies referenced. But
what we do know is that s
ome rather flawed studies have been carried out that claim to show this
- but actually don't. Basically, gender non conforming children were
assumed to be trans, and included in the studies. They weren't children
who "repeatedly stated desire to be, or insistence that he or she is,
the other sex" which would be a far better criteria for identifying
trans kids.
From Huffington Post:
For starters, the most cited study (Steensma)
which alleges a 84 percent desistance rate, did not actually
differentiate between children with consistent, persistent and insistent
gender dysphoria, kids who socially transitioned, and kids who just
acted more masculine or feminine than their birth sex and culture
allowed for. In other words, it treated gender non-conformance the same
as gender dysphoria. Worse, the study could not locate 45.3 percent of
the children for follow up, and made the assumption that all of them
were desisters. Indeed, other studies used to support this also suffered
from similar methodological flaws.
When Dr. Steensma went back in 2013
and looked at the intensity of dysphoria these children felt as a
factor in persistence, it turned out that it was actually a very good
predictor of which children would transition.
In other words,
the children who actually met the clinical guidelines for gender
dysphoria as children generally ended up as transgender adults. Further
research has shown
that children who meet the clinical guidelines for gender dysphoria are
as consistent in their gender identity as the general population.
Also, there is the assumption made, and not challenged, that it is far worse to allow a gay boy to live for a short time as a girl and then go back to being a boy (way before any medical transtion would occur) than it would be force a trans girl to live as a boy and then have to transtion to be a girl at a later date - after much psychological damage has been done, in most cases.
This blog on Eric Vilain's work and claims...
Vilain and Bailey then paint the far more complex medical and surgical
transition for trans girls in a negative light (“serious” interventions,
hormones during puberty — the wrong puberty, by the way — estrogen “for
life,” surgery as simply “satisfactory” and with “not uncommon side
effects.”) Given the choice between a little psychological pain and the
litany of medical despair what parent wouldn’t choose the former?
So, Dr. Vilain and I agree (personal correspondence) that there is no
definitive research, a point trans ally Dr. Jack Drescher makes
frequently, but a total dependence on research when lives are at stake
is unethical. Even if it’s true that 75 percent of gender dysphoric boys
turn out to be gay, it is also true that denying the gender dysphoric
boys who are actually girls the right to transition is cruel and
abusive, and too often life-threatening..... This entire approach is built on a
single assumption — that it is worse for a boy to live as a girl for a
period of time and then return to live as a boy (desistence)
than to deny a trans girl her freedom to determine her life according to
her wishes. That denial is cruel and unusual punishment and should be
viewed as unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment. I wouldn’t be
surprised if those parents, who struggled to set their trans (or gay,
for that matter) children “straight” before becoming enlightened and
letting their children be themselves, wouldn’t wholeheartedly agree.
