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The evidence simply does not justify the sweeping "brain sex" conclusion (thelemmy.club)
submitted 5 days ago by [M] to c/critical_analysis@lemmy.today
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https://nitter.click/SwipeWright/status/2102028205183910006

🚨NEW: Our critique of a major "brain sex" study is now published.

@AdamRochussen, @NeuroSGS, and I evaluate a central premise of gender activism and medicine: that trans-identifying people have brains that are shifted away from their sex and toward their "gender identity."

The "brain sex" concept is so central because it purports to provide an empirical scientific basis for the notion that a child can be "born in the wrong body" and would therefore benefit from body-altering medical procedures to align their body with their mind/brain.

The problem is that this concept is pure pseudoscience and propped up by deeply flawed methods and badly misinterpreted data.

One of the most prominent studies is Kurth et al. (2022), published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, which claimed that the brains of transgender women are shifted away from their sex and toward their "gender identity." The paper became one of the journal’s most accessed articles and has been cited in major media outlets, scientific papers, legal arguments, and policy discussions involving pediatric gender medicine and sports.

We point out that the paper's headline conclusion rests on a series of serious methodological problems.

Each group contained only 24 participants. The authors used poorly justified parametric methods, one-tailed post hoc tests, made no correction for multiple comparisons, and omitted important robustness checks. Once accounted for, the main finding is no longer statistically significant.

An even more glaring failure of the study was that it failed to account for sexual orientation, despite its known association with neuroanatomical variation and despite the authors having the relevant participant data needed to examine it!

We each repeatedly requested the anonymized participant-level data from the paper's lead author so we could independently evaluate the findings.

We received no response.

The evidence simply does not justify the sweeping "brain sex" conclusion for which this study has become famous.

Our full critique in @Theory_Society is open access. Read it at the link below, and please cite it and share it whenever you encounter the false claim that trans people have brains that more closely resemble the sex they identify than their own sex.

🔗 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-026-09747-2

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[–] [S] 0 points 5 days ago

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-026-09747-2

Abstract

Kurth et al. (2022) concluded that the brain anatomy of transgender women is shifted away from their biological sex and toward their gender identity. We evaluate whether the study’s evidence supports this conclusion by focusing on its statistical methods and treatment of sexual orientation in its analyses. The principal finding relies on a very small sample, a weak justification for parametric analyses, one-tailed post hoc tests, no correction for multiple comparisons, and limited robustness testing. The study also did not properly account for sexual orientation as a potential neuroanatomical confound despite having the relevant participant data to do so. These methodological choices consistently bias the results toward smaller p-values and stronger apparent support for the authors’ stated hypothesis. The evidence presented therefore does not justify the study’s headline conclusion.

You may have seen the image from the critiqued study. The odd shape of the middle blob one of the issues identified.

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