Maybe you could even measure these differences with even crude MRI scans of people’s brains. It would be interesting to scan a thousand cis men after certain verbal prompts asking how they feel about their gender identity. [...] You should get about the same result if you ran the experiment again on cis and trans women.
I claim that we already have enough empirical evidence to conclude with very high confidence that “gender identity” is not a useful construct for understanding the psychology of gender dysphoria.
For the trans women in particular, I claim that a solid majority of them will have an “autogynephilic” etiology: that is, non-exclusively-androphilic trans women are basically straight men who let their fixation on erotic cross-dressing and cross-gender fantasy spiral out of control and get reified into a highly-valued self-identity. (Something like this may be true of a minority of trans men, but that’s much rarer.) This claim predicts that self-reported confidence in one’s gender identity will not correlate with any sexually-dimorphic brain features in MRI studies.
For more information on the findings supporting these claims, see Kay Brown’s FAQ, or Anne Lawrence’s monograph Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism.
I claim that we already have enough empirical evidence to conclude with very high confidence that “gender identity” is not a useful construct for understanding the psychology of gender dysphoria.
For the trans women in particular, I claim that a solid majority of them will have an “autogynephilic” etiology: that is, non-exclusively-androphilic trans women are basically straight men who let their fixation on erotic cross-dressing and cross-gender fantasy spiral out of control and get reified into a highly-valued self-identity. (Something like this may be true of a minority of trans men, but that’s much rarer.) This claim predicts that self-reported confidence in one’s gender identity will not correlate with any sexually-dimorphic brain features in MRI studies.
For more information on the findings supporting these claims, see Kay Brown’s FAQ, or Anne Lawrence’s monograph Men Trapped in Men’s Bodies: Narratives of Autogynephilic Transsexualism.