The critical gender theorists don’t seem to have an answer for this…
The old joke about so many Leftist ideologies is that they work in theory but never in practice.
Critical gender theory posits that men can magically become women and women can become men by simply wishing it so, and that it’s impossible to differentiate between male and female because those are “social constructs” and feelings, not biology, determine gender.
And yet, those same “social constructs” — preference for dresses and make-up versus playing sports and tinkering with trucks — are the indicators that someone might have been “born in the wrong body.”
Science has taken a credibility hit in the past few years because of the pandemic, but there are still some areas of science that haven’t been completely ideologically captured by the Left and sucked into their pseudo-religion — one of those areas is neurobiology.
A 2017 article in Stanford Medicine Magazine explains that there are biological differences between male brains and female brains. They even function differently and there are differences in predisposition to cognitive and neuropsychiatric disorders.
From the article:
…[T]he long list of behavioral tendencies in which male-female ratios are unbalanced extends to cognitive and neuropsychiatric disorders. Women are twice as likely as men to experience clinical depression in their lifetimes; likewise for post-traumatic stress disorder. Men are twice as likely to become alcoholic or drug-dependent, and 40 percent more likely to develop schizophrenia. Boys’ dyslexia rate is perhaps 10 times that of girls, and they’re four or five times as likely to get a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.
UC-Irvine professor of neurobiology and behavior, Larry Cahill, Ph.D., says that the human brain is a sex-typed organ with distinct anatomical differences in neural structures and accompanying physiological differences in function.
Brain-imaging studies indicate that these differences extend well beyond the strictly reproductive domain, Cahill says. Adjusted for total brain size (men’s are bigger), a woman’s hippocampus, critical to learning and memorization, is larger than a man’s and works differently. Conversely, a man’s amygdala, associated with the experiencing of emotions and the recollection of such experiences, is bigger than a woman’s. It, too, works differently, as Cahill’s research has demonstrated.
In 2000, Cahill scanned the brains of men and women viewing either highly aversive films or emotionally neutral ones. The aversive films were expected to trip off strong negative emotions and concomitant imprinting in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure found in each brain hemisphere. Activity in the amygdala during the viewing experience, as expected, predicted subjects’ later ability to recall the viewed clips. But in women, this relationship was observed only in the left amygdala. In men, it was only in the right amygdala. Cahill and others have since confirmed these results.
They recall emotional memories more quickly, and the ones they recall are richer and more intense. If, as is likely, the amygdala figures into depression or anxiety, any failure to separately analyze men’s and women’s brains to understand their different susceptibilities to either syndrome would be as self-defeating as not knowing left from right.
Source: Stanford Medicine Magazine
These differences begin in utero when the male baby’s brain is flooded with testosterone mid-way through gestation which affects both the development of body parts as well as the brain.
Sex-based differences in brain structure and physiology reflect the alchemy of these hormone/receptor interactions, their effects within the cells, and the intermediating influence of genetic variables — particularly the possession of an XX versus an XY genotype, says Cahill…
…Trying to assign exact percentages to the relative contributions of “culture” versus “biology” to the behavior of free-living human individuals in a complex social environment is tough at best. Halpern offers a succinct assessment: “The role of culture is not zero. The role of biology is not zero.”
Source: Stanford Medicine Magazine
This is what the Trans-activists might call “hate facts” — it might be true, but they would allege that it fuels “hate” against the trans community. No, it just means that there should be caution before subjecting an individual to life-altering treatments that will make them permanent medical patients.
In April 2022, Helena Kerschner, a woman who de-transitioned after a year and a half on testosterone, spoke to Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro about her experience with testosterone.
Here is a partial transcript:
BEN SHAPIRO: So, you decided that you wanted to get testosterone treatment. How did you go about obtaining the testosterone?
HELENA KERSCHNER: Yeah, so um, it’s actually pretty ironic because at the time I had these beliefs where it’s like, “Oh, we live in such a transphobic society it’s going to be so hard to get testosterone,” but once I actually went through it, it was incredibly easy. I just made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood and I went there and it was one hour-long appointment. I talked to a social worker for another maybe 20 minutes and then I talked to a nurse practitioner for another maybe 20 minutes and then they, like, cleared me for everything and helped me do my first injection.
SHAPIRO: So there was no actual medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria? There was no actual psychological screening or anything like that? You basically walked in you said you wanted testosterone they gave it to you?
KERSCHNER: Yeah, um… and again ironically they diagnosed me with an endocrine disorder they didn’t even diagnose me with gender dysphoria. On my medical records it says I have a diagnosis of an endocrine
disorder and that’s why I needed the testosterone. So, um yeah… very, very strange but no, no psychological evaluation or diagnosis of gender dysphoria or anything just kind of like walked in.
SHAPIRO: Okay, so you started off taking testosterone and was it relatively low dosage or high dosage and what effect did it have on you?
KERSCHNER: Yeah, so um another interesting part of this story is that when I sat down with that nurse practitioner and she began to kind of talk to me about the dosage that we were gonna do, she suggested a rather low dose to start out with. But me, being in that kind of — you know, poor body image headspace, I told her I think that I have extra estrogen because my hips are big. So, I think I need more testosterone and she didn’t push back against that at all. She pretty much just agreed and said, “Okay well, where would you like to start?” and then I said like, “How high can we go?” and she suggested a much higher dosage and so I actually ended up starting at 100 milligrams of testosterone per week, which when you look at the kind of guidelines that various healthcare providers have for this, that is kind of usually the higher end of the dosage. So I went from being just like an 18 year old female to having 100 milligrams of testosterone in my body all in one day.
SHAPIRO: And what were the effects on you physiologically of taking that much testosterone?
KERSCHNER: I didn’t end up having very many physical changes but I had a lot of very intense psychological effects that happened to me. So obviously, you know you have like the sex drive aspect that’s a really big aspect of it and for me that was incredibly overwhelming. I had a very difficult time with that. I’m a kind of more physically reserved person and I had never dated anyone before so it was just that was extremely overwhelming for me. I was not prepared for that at all. And then in addition to that, I had emotional changes that I kind of describe it as at first it was just a lot of irritability and I just felt on edge all the time. I felt like I was just jumping out of my skin all the time — restlessness, irritability. And then as the months progressed, about a year into it, it turned into this kind of feeling where I didn’t have emotions anymore it was just like any time I felt anything — whether you know it might have been sadness or frustration that would just kind of immediately turn into rage. So I just felt completely out of control of myself. I was spiralingb down into just like…dysfunction and just really living an unhealthy life. And these rage attacks would get so bad that I just — I felt like I really had to externalize it. It’s not that I wanted to hurt anybody but when I would be overcome with this, I wanted to break something. I wanted to hit something and so being this person who was completely unprepared for these feelings, I kind of ended up taking it out on myself and I ended up hurting myself pretty badly a couple of times. One of those times actually led to me having to go to the hospital and when I got to the hospital they checked me into a psychiatric unit. So, that it was just a incredibly dark difficult time of my life that I do not wish on anyone.
With the horrific school shooting in Nashville on Monday, committed by a woman who self-identified as a man, there are questions about how a woman’s body and brain can handle a sudden flood of testosterone.
While it’s not yet clear if the transgender shooter had been taking testosterone or was just presenting herself socially as a man, there have been a number of female de-transitioners who have said, as Kerschner did, that the aggression that hit them when they were taking testosterone was unexpected and frightening.
If that is what happened in this case — that a woman who very likely had underlying mental health problems was simply given testosterone to “affirm” her transition to become a man without much thought about how it would affect her psychologically — then all of the people pushing “affirmative care” without question or mental health assessments need to take a good, hard look in the mirror because these deaths are on their hands.
It’s not “compassionate” to “affirm” delusion and use these confused individuals as guinea pigs for the pharmaceutical industry and the Medical Industrial Complex because of some wacko deconstructionist theory on gender that has no basis in reality.
Even Helena Kerschner called the transgender ideology cult-like.
This is what is being shoved down our throats. We need to stand up and reject the ideology wholesale, and pray for all of those people who have been confused by radical gender activists.
Psalms of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass is a collection, from the book of Psalms, regarding how David rolled in prayer. I bet you haven’t heard these read, prayed, or sung in church against our formidable enemies — and therein lies the Church’s problem. We’re not using the spiritual weapons God gave us to waylay the powers of darkness. It might be time to dust them off and offer ‘em up if you’re truly concerned about the state of Christ’s Church and of our nation.
Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.
This is a great gift for the prayer warriors. Real. Raw. Relevant.
Source:
Goldman, Bruce. “TWO MINDS: The cognitive differences between men and women.” Stanford Medicine Magazine. May 22, 2017. https://stanmed.stanford.edu/how-mens-and-womens-brains-are-different/
