Berent Iris, Hooley Jill M
Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave., Boston, MA, 20115, USA.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Mar 17;15(1):9185. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-93174-3.
Transgender individuals consider their gender (a psychological construct) as distinct from their natal gender, assigned based on their sex (i.e., their body). Does this incongruence reflect a dissonance between sex and gender, specifically, or a broader tension in the perception of minds and bodies? To address this question, here we gauged mind-body intuitions in transgender and cisgender individuals. Results showed that transgender participants considered the mind as more ethereal, as more resilient to the obliteration of one's body by death (in Experiment 1) and to its swapping with another person's body (in Experiment 2). Remarkably, these intuitions emerged even when participants were asked to consider psychological traits that are unrelated to gender (e.g., forming sentences). They also correlated with participants' own gender identity. These results reveal striking psychological differences between transgender and cisgender individuals. In the eyes of transgender people, the self is aligned more strongly with the ethereal mind, rather than with the body.
跨性别者认为他们的性别（一种心理建构）与基于其生理性别（即身体）所指定的出生时的性别不同。这种不一致究竟反映了生理性别和社会性别之间的失调，还是反映了在身心认知方面更广泛的矛盾呢？为了解决这个问题，我们在此评估了跨性别者和顺性别者对身心的直觉。结果显示，跨性别参与者认为心智更具空灵性，在实验1中，心智对人死后身体消失更具抵抗力，在实验2中，心智对与他人身体互换也更具抵抗力。值得注意的是，即使要求参与者考虑与性别无关的心理特征（例如造句），这些直觉依然会出现。它们还与参与者自身的性别认同相关。这些结果揭示了跨性别者和顺性别者之间惊人的心理差异。在跨性别者眼中，自我与空灵的心智联系更为紧密，而非与身体联系紧密。
