this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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I would be curious what this would predict for trans (including those both on and off hormone therapy), intersex, or homosexual individuals. My guess is that at a minimum in those cases it's accuracy of predicting either their gender or sex would be very poor, although it would be absolutely fascinating if it accurately predicted their gender rather than their sex. The opposite result (predicting sex but not gender) would also be interesting but less so.
I disagree. It could be wildly interesting if somebody born a male got a scan and it revealed a female brain. Dunno if "anti-trans" people would agree then that a sex-change is valid or if they'd disagree and start finding other excuses.
Assuming I'm understanding your point that would be a mis-categorization. I'm assuming you meant a straight non-trans male was scanned and the result predicted a female brain was scanned (a result matching neither the sex nor gender)? I was saying it would be less interesting if it scanned say a female-to-male trans person and returned a result of female (correctly guessing the sex but not the gender), than if it had returned a result of male (that is correctly guessing the gender but not the sex). It would also be interesting if it could detect trans people in general as their own unique group.
I do mean person born a male that wants to become female. Anti-trans people often make points that trans people are just forced into being trans by the trans-mafia (or whatever term they use) aka social pressure. A brain scan indicating a female brain would counter that. But as I said, they'd probably find other excuses "it's a mental disease that can be treated" and so on and so forth.
That would embolden the anti-trans crowd.
Science is ongoing though, so who knows what the results will be.
Unfortunately no matter the outcome there's likely danger there which is why legal protections are going to be critical. If it doesn't accurately detect trans people they'd argue it's evidence that being trans is a choice and that they could just decide to "be normal". If it does accurately detect trans people in some ways that's even more dangerous because now you've created a trans detector that could potentially be used to target people.
Ultimately from a scientific perspective there's still so much we don't know about how our brains work and even less known about how gender and sexual orientation are determined. Projects like this provide valuable clues about all of that, but there's still so much that's unknown that any result is potentially useful. I personally would find it more interesting though if it did accurately detect someone whose trans as it would suggest there's physically detectable brain differences.