Male / female brains

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Originally Posted by NicoleScott

A male child is born and is a perfect physically complete boy. Throughout the early years he is dressed in boy clothes and given boy toys. Yet he knows he is a girl. Isn't his brain telling him this? Doesn't he have a female brain? If so, how can male and female brains be the same? No physical differences, you say? Is the brain only cells, or does the brain include what's in it? Or do you call that the mind, and the brain just the physical?

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A very succinct statement of the issue. I've written at length in a similar thread that we might view the physical brain (flesh and blood) as analogous to the hardware of a computer, and the consciousness with which we live and learn as analogous to applications software, and the primary neural "wiring" of the brain cells in various areas of the physical brain (responsible for, e.g., emotions) as a kind of firmware, instructions that facilitate consciousness without our being aware of their actions and operations.

At my advanced age, having dealt with this since early childhood and gone so far as to live through an eight-year full-time experiment, I am absolutely convinced that there is something different in the brains of crossdressers, homosexuals, and their fellow variants that make us this way. If it was in the software developed by nurture, it wouldn't be so stubbornly resistant to change, and looking at gross brain structure doesn't show us the details of the neural roadmap. The rainbow of different manifestations? There are millions of neural connections, and, accordingly, many millions of ways they might have been connected abnormally during gestation and early development.

Absolutely, something in our brains tells us to do this. That some of us stare it down early and others deny and delay for decades is quite another matter.

From a medical standpoint, I've seen brains, I've held brains, I've dissected brains. True, if I had one brain and then another, I could not tell by just looking whether it is male or female any more than I could tell a male vs. female heart, liver, spleen and who knows what. But that is not the issue. Even in MRI studies which have demonstrated certain subtle changes in the brains of males vs. females in some of the deeper nuclei in regards to size and shape, what does that mean? Because it is different what is the significance? Well....Its all about function. Therefore, the keys are more in areas looking at function rather than structure. That's why studies involving EEG (to a lesser extent) and even more so looking at PET scans or other radionucleotide studies relying upon uptake by functional activity, which are more involved with evaluation of metabolic activity, seem to hold more answers which some studies have suggested and that they may correlate size differences (MRI) with changes in function (PET). Some studies have suggested that in males with gender identity issues, their PET scans in many cases were closer to the PET scans in female brains suggesting that some of those areas with minor structural changes have altered metabolic activity, indicating a change in function, more closely resembling female brains. Is this the result of hormonal influences in utero.....possibly. I can't say that this is proof positive, nor can I say that this is always the case. But it is a start.

But then on the other hand, does it make much of a difference? In my case, I think it helped me a few years ago after years of soul searching and questioning who I am, to understand myself more and accept who I am. But now, it makes no difference to me and is more of an area of interest because I know who and what I am and don't need to explain it one way or the other. I think those outside medicine may in some cases look at science and medicine differently than those of us who have been intimately involved. Believe it or not, Medicine is an imperfect science, always changing, always evolving, always exploring and rarely a slam dunk in anything. I know that what I learned 40 years ago, much of it is obsolete now. But rather than downplay medicine and science for its imperfections, we are here today because of what we knew 40 years ago which gave us a basis to grow upon. Chances are, that there are multiple factors that make us who we are and we will not always be the same. The nature vs. nurture argument. But I don't think that we should discount what science and medicine suggests and solely replace it with here say and guesses. You can believe what you want which is perfectly fine.....nobody is going to be hurt because one thinks differently. We all have different agendas. Our opinions vary. But in the end, I'm still placing my money on science and medicine.
Peace to all.
Dr. J.