Article in the National Geographic on Trans

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 some 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.