Brain scan can tell kids if they're transgender, study shows

Both the physical content and actions of a subject’s brain can show that they are transgender, even before they’ve started puberty. 

The study, conducted by Dr Julie Bakker at the University of Liège’s Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology, backs up research from March which showed that trans people are born that way.

Bakker explained in her study, titled Brain structure and function in gender dysphoria, that the scans’ results corroborated subjects who reported having gender dysphoria.
“We found that hypothalamic responses of both adolescent girls and boys diagnosed with gender dysphoria were more similar to their experienced gender than their birth sex,” she wrote.

The professor said that this “supports the hypothesis of a sex-atypical brain differentiation in these individuals.”

As well as this finding, Bakker also discovered that the amount of grey matter found in a brain can reveal both male and female subjects’ genders.

She said: “Grey matter volumes of both gender dysphoria groups deviated from the volumetric characteristics of their birth sex towards those of individuals sharing their gender identity.”
Bakker added that these results were exciting.

Earlier this year, researchers at the University of São Paulo’s Medical School compared the brains of trans and cisgender adults and discovered that they are significantly different.

It was found that the insula – a region of the brain – had a distinct volume depending on whether it was in the brain of a trans or cis subject.

The insula plays an important role in people’s body image, self-awareness and empathy.

Giancarlo Spizzirri, first author of the study – which was published in Scientific Reports – said that the result led them to believe that people are trans in the womb.
“We found that trans people have characteristics that bring them closer to the gender with which they identify and their brains have particularities, suggesting that the differences begin to occur during gestation,” he said in a statement.