Samantha Allen is a senior reporter for The Daily Beast. She holds a Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University. In 2013, she received the John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology from the Kinsey Institute. Previously, she was a Sex + Life reporter for Fusion.
The hunt for the “transgender brain” is just as fraught as the quest to find a “gay gene.” Neither will give way to lasting acceptance for LGBT people. And because there are bound to be outliers and exceptions to any rule, neither will ever definitively answer why some kids grow up straight and others queer, some cisgender and others transgender.
What’s more is that both have the potential to be exploited: One need only consult the historyof doctors trying to lobotomize or shock homosexuality out of existence to realize the dangers of tying LGBT identity to a specific part of the brain or a stretch of DNA.
And yet, every time new research comes out claiming to have found a structural difference between cisgender and transgender brains, we pretend as if it could validate the existence of transgender people once and for all, ignoring the potential dangers. Such is the case with a scientific presentation earlier this week at the European Society of Endocrinology that has since made the media rounds.
The technology and science outlet Inverse declared in its headline that scans of transgender young people’s brains presented at the conference “could put an end to gender dysphoria.”
The science on this is very initial but, to put it briefly, Dr. Julie Bakker at the University of Liège found that the brains of some transgender adolescents in a small sample displayed activity that was more in line with their gender identity than with the sex they were assigned at birth.
That’s not to say that this science couldn’t be important. It could be. As Inverse correctly pointed out, it could theoretically be useful for brain imaging to help young transgender people consider transition-related medical care before puberty gets too far along.
There are potential positive applications of research like this, if used judiciously and morally—but those are big ifs. Indeed, if the idea of deciding whether or not a child is transgender based on brain imaging makes you nervous, it should. That could go very wrong.
When a news outlet asks “Can a Brain Scan Detect Whether a Person Is Transgender?”parents hear very different things: Supportive parents might see an opportunity to screen their gender non-conforming child in order to prepare themselves for the possibility that the child may want to transition.
But parents who are adamantly opposed to transgender rights might want an MRI scan so they can usher their gender non-conforming child into harmful conversion therapyprograms, or worse.
Studies about the causes of LGBT identity can be put to truly awful use. As The Atlantic reported in a thorough and eye-opening 1997 article, various cruel and inhumane techniques were deployed in the post-war era to try to turn gays and lesbians straight: hormonal injections, hysterectomies, shock therapies, and even ice-pick lobotomies. Read more via Daily Beast