Kurth Florian, Gaser Christian, Sánchez Francisco J, Luders Eileen
School of Psychology, University of Auckland, Auckland 1010, New Zealand.
Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology, Jena University Hospital, 07747 Jena, Germany.
J Clin Med. 2022 Mar 13;11(6):1582. doi: 10.3390/jcm11061582.
Transgender people report discomfort with their birth sex and a strong identification with the opposite sex. The current study was designed to shed further light on the question of whether the brains of transgender people resemble their birth sex or their gender identity. For this purpose, we analyzed a sample of 24 cisgender men, 24 cisgender women, and 24 transgender women before gender-affirming hormone therapy. We employed a recently developed multivariate classifier that yields a continuous probabilistic (rather than a binary) estimate for brains to be male or female. The brains of transgender women ranged between cisgender men and cisgender women (albeit still closer to cisgender men), and the differences to both cisgender men and to cisgender women were significant (p = 0.016 and p < 0.001, respectively). These findings add support to the notion that the underlying brain anatomy in transgender people is shifted away from their biological sex towards their gender identity.
跨性别者表示对自己的出生性别感到不适，并强烈认同异性。当前的研究旨在进一步阐明跨性别者的大脑是与他们的出生性别还是性别认同相似这一问题。为此，我们分析了24名顺性别男性、24名顺性别女性以及24名在接受性别肯定激素治疗前的跨性别女性样本。我们采用了一种最近开发的多变量分类器，该分类器能对大脑是男性还是女性产生连续概率（而非二元）估计。跨性别女性的大脑特征介于顺性别男性和顺性别女性之间（尽管仍更接近顺性别男性），并且与顺性别男性和顺性别女性的差异均具有统计学意义（分别为p = 0.016和p < 0.001）。这些发现支持了这样一种观点，即跨性别者潜在的大脑结构从他们的生理性别向其性别认同发生了转变。
