Catherine Dulac Finds Brain Circuitry Behind Sex-Specific Behaviors
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
From what I understand, she showed that for mice, gender-specific behavior is triggered mostly by pheromones and their processing in the nose. This is such a strong effect, that knocking out the gene will make male virgin mice behave like female mothers.
I wouldn't be surprised if something similar also exists in humans, because many languages have phrases like "fail the smell test" for an unsympathetic person.
Wild speculation, but maybe there is some key circuitry in our brains that also doesn’t activate if we cannot smell?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987372/
https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/15/4/579/205993
We use our noses to detect them.
It is a wonderful article.
I don't know about other languages, but I don't think there's any connection in English.
Brain is hardware, and sex is software driven by hormones?
The question I have is: will this lead to therapies that can help people with gender dysphoria become comfortable in their unmodified bodies?
I do really have to wonder how it would be used (ie, forced-detransing someone) but on the other hand, if someone is not comfortable in their body and has no means to modify their body to their liking, could this help them in the long run? Or are they supposed to live in ongoing anguish because one part of them doesn't line up with another part and they can do nothing about it?
This is an interesting idea, with wide-ranging ethical implications.
And yeah, forced anything is bad. I've been forced to not transition, and it was utter hell. Just because you think that this could have good uses, doesn't erase the fact that being transgender is a capital offense de jure or de facto, in much of the world today. Development of such a treatment would be immediately followed by it being forced on people.
Why would someone want to develop gender dysphoria? It is associated with a significantly heightened risk for multiple mental illnesses and suicide.
It would make sense that someone would want to get rid of gender dysphoria, not the other way around.
>>I've been forced to not transition, and it was utter hell.
How were you forced to not transition? Did someone threaten to punish you in the event that you made an attempt to? Or was it just a matter of the procedure not being available to you?
Anyway, would it be hell to not transition, if you didn't have gender dysphoria?
>>Development of such a treatment would be immediately followed by it being forced on people.
This is speculation, and your speculation on how such a treatment would be used doesn't create a moral justification to exert totalitarian force on others to prevent them from developing the treatment.
This is a cross examination, not a curious conversation. Read the site guidelines; I'm not going to share that very painful story with you, because you're not doing this in good faith.
Please don't hide behind victimhood to victimize me. My life is not worth is less than yours, my perspective is not less valid than yours, and my suffering is not less objectionable than yours.
Why assume that this is the kind of application that would be used? Do you really think it's so uncommon that someone might have the seeds of these feelings and really rather that they just go away? If it's something that can be handled therapeutically and allow the person to live in the skin they were born in without dysphoria, doesn't that seem like something an awful lot of people would probably consider, especially if it's not invasive?
I guess because trans people are treated like lepers and because conversion therapy used to be a pretty common thing.
> Do you really think it's so uncommon that someone might have the seeds of these feelings and really rather that they just go away?
No, I don't think it's uncommon. Which is why I engaged your post instead of downvoting and moving on.
> If it's something that can be handled therapeutically and allow the person to live in the skin they were born in without dysphoria, doesn't that seem like something an awful lot of people would probably consider, especially if it's not invasive?
And, we're back to conversion therapy. I don't necessarily disagree with you here. I think my reservations don't come from the therapy itself, but rather the circumstances under which it's recommended or administered.
For instance, is it better to take HRT and be closer to the person you feel by default? Or is it better to take b-yr-c15-53lf trans-blockers to get back to living your happy norm life? Is it being pushed by a therapist? Am I discovering it myself? It brings up a lot of questions about vulnerability, self, identity, etc.
Says you; here in Canada at least transpeople are a protected class and have as many or more rights than the next person.
This is not the same thing at all as conversion therapy, and it is unreasonable to suggest that there should not be research and development into techniques, therapeutics, and methods to help people who would rather not actually be trans. This is not mutually exclusive with allowing people to be trans, or granting them protected class status! It's merely another option, and in no way is it implied that it should be forced on anyone.
In fact, "conversion therapy", as long as it is 100% consensual on the part of the person taking it, should be fine. Why shouldn't it? Because it won't work? Homeopathy and plenty of other things that "won't work" are legal. It's the lack of consent that is the moral issue, not the fact that someone might want assistance at living a simpler life, which being cisgendered no doubt is, at least at this time.
> For instance, is it better to take HRT and be closer to the person you feel by default?
This really depends on the outcome that you're after, but the higher-after-HRT-and-operations suicide rate of transpeople makes me wonder whether it's actually the better outcome or not. Since this is 100% contextual and differs widely by individual, the only correct standpoint in a free society is to allow both options.
> Is it being pushed by a therapist?
Some therapists are going to be gatekeepers, some are going to push you towards HRT, it's luck of the draw at this point based on the personal biases and ethics of the therapist. The fact is, we're supposed to be recognizing and validating people's feelings; and it's entirely believable that there is a class of people who feel gender dysphoria and simply want it to go away. These people are underserved by the current system.
But, also:
- Nature/Nurture is almost unsolvable for humans, at least within the confines of commonly accepted ethical standards
- Even where you can show statistically significant between-group differences, they are almost certain to be swamped by variability between individuals. Example: Women are, on average, slightly older than men (because of higher life expectancy). The p-value here is as close to zero as you'll get in the real world.
But, given two randomly selected people, one male and one female, knowing the above is close to useless! The probability of the woman being older differs from 0.5 by no more than a fraction of a percentage point.
- The difference b/w mice and humans is that humans have the ability to overcome biology with reason.
But perhaps it's more accurate to look at this from a "four quadrant" (simplified) perspective, with nature/nurture on one axis and hereditary/nonhereditary on the other axis. So you'd have hereditary nature (biological determinism) factors in one quarter, non-hereditary nature (biological variation, mutations, things like most cases of Down syndrome) in another; hereditary nurture (socioeconomic status, which affects a lot, cultural aspects and family values), and non-hereditary nurture, where (among other things) I'd be eager to place things which are under the individual willpower control even though they're not technically "nurture".
> But, given two randomly selected people, one male and one female, knowing the above is close to useless! The probability of the woman being older differs from 0.5 by no more than a fraction of a percentage point.
True, but sometimes it is the edges of the distribution that are really interesting, and there small differences in the mean can have a big impact.
For instance, what is the male/female ratio in nursing homes, or among people older than 100? I don't know, but I'm willing to bet that it's a noticeable difference.
Similarly true with the difference between male/female aggression as it pertains to the prison population.
I'm more interested in furthering 'the discourse' than reclaiming silly karma points. It's just nice to know where people think I'm wrong, and beings able to discuss why that might be.
Frankly some of my best comments have been downvoted. If there's nothing obviously deficient and no one offers a correction, I consider it possible that it was because it threatened someone's worldview. People will go to great lengths to protect their worldview, downvoting is nothing on that scale.
I really wish downvoting was replaced with a flagging feature. The official guidelines are pretty easy to follow and fairly effective in labelling the sorts of comments that take the conversation backwards. If someone is arguing in bad faith, they're likely in contravention of one of the guidelines, in which case moderation is a more appropriate tool for the problem.
> The official guidelines are pretty easy to follow and fairly effective in labelling the sorts of comments that take the conversation backwards.
I think there are marginal cases for every rule.
Perhaps, but I think having the >500 karma rule for flagging would ensure users understand the gravity of their actions, somewhat. I find up-votes on comments to be rare, and down-votes to be a couple of orders of magnitude rarer. Part of that will be transitive of the rarity of the down-vote privilege, but I think those people having been subjected to fairly received down-votes makes them use the power with a little more discretion once they've earned it.
> I think there are marginal cases for every rule.
Don't disagree with this, but the HN interface is a blunt tool. I'm of the persuasion that a flagging privilege would likely have a positive impact vs a down-voting privilege, but it's hard to know without an experiment, and also hard to measure. The system as it is, is 'good enough', and most members are conservative regarding the interface, so there's hardly a motivation to try.
> The hunt for male and female distinctions inside the skull is a lesson in bad research practice, writes Lise Eliot.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00677-x
Edit: Funny I'm being downvoted for linking to Nature.