A detailed look at children's brains might show how sex and gender are different, new study says

Sex and gender are often conflated or equated in everyday conversations, 
and most American adults believe a person’s gender is determined by sex 
assigned at birth. But a new study of nearly 5,000 9- and 10-year-olds 
found that sex and gender map onto largely distinct parts of the brain.

The research gives a first insight into how sex and gender may have 
“measurable and unique influences” on the brain, study authors said, just 
as other experiences have been shown to shape the brain.

“Moving forward, we really need to consider both sexes and genders 
separately if we better want to understand the brain,” said Dr. Elvisha 
Dhamala, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Feinstein Institutes 
for Medical Research and the Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, 
California, and a co-author of the study, published Friday in the journal 
Science Advances.

The researchers on the new study defined sex as what was assigned to the 
child at birth. In the US, clinicians make this assignment based on 
genitalia. Most people are assigned either female or male, according to 
the research; the rest are intersex, a person whose sexual or reproductive 
anatomy doesn’t fit this male/female binary.

The researchers defined gender as an individual’s attitude, feelings and 
behaviors, as well as socially constructed roles. They noted specifically 
that gender is not binary, meaning not all people identify as either 
female or male.

Both sex and gender are a core part of human experience. They’re key to 
how people perceive others and how they understand themselves. Both can 
influence behavior as well as health, the study authors say.

The researchers looked at brain imaging data from 4,757 children in the 
United States, 2,315 assigned female at birth and 2,442 assigned male at 
birth, who were ages 9 and 10 and were a subset of the Adolescent Brain 
Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, the largest long-term study of brain 
development and child health in the United States. Over a period of 10 
years, the children in the ABCD study underwent comprehensive 
neuroimaging, behavioral, developmental and psychiatric assessments.

Beyond tests such as MRIs, the scientists did surveys of the children and 
their parents that were focused on gender, both at the beginning of the 
research and then a year later. The children were asked about how they 
expressed their gender and how they felt about it. The parents were asked 
about a child’s sex-typed behavior during play and whether the child had 
any gender dysphoria, a term that mental health professionals use to 
describe clinically significant distress felt because a person’s sense of 
their gender does not match their sex the assigned at birth.

Parents were a key part of the study, said study co-author Dr. Dani S. 
Bassett, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania with appointments 
in the Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical & Systems Engineering, 
Physics & Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry.

“When kids have a particular kind of gender behavior or gender expression, 
that will influence how their parents and also other caregivers and 
friends and family … et cetera interact with them,” Bassett said. 
Information about a parent’s perception of a child’s gender gives 
researchers a better sense of the child’s social environment and how it 
may affect their brain development.

The authors used a kind of artificial intelligence called machine learning 
that built a model that could predict a child’s sex and reported gender 
from their brain scan. When the researchers looked the children’s brain 
scans, the results seemed to show that sex influenced different regions of 
the brain that are involved in visual processing, sensory processing and 
motor control and some regions involved in executive function, which lets 
an individual organize and integrate information across time.

Gender seems to influence some of the more sensory-specific networks that 
are associated with sex, but it also seems to have a broader influence and 
can be detected on different brain networks involved in executive 
function, including things like attention, social cognition and emotional 
processing.

“The fact that we’re able to capture how gender maps onto the brain 
basically just tells us that gender is influencing our brain,” Dhamala 
said.

The structure of the human brain can be shaped by expertise and 
experiences. Research on London taxi drivers — who must take extensive 
tests to show that they can navigate the city’s streets without maps or 
GPS — seems to show that they have significantly larger posterior 
hippocampi, the part of the brain related to spatial memory and 
navigation, than in people who aren’t taxi drivers.

“Similarly, as individuals and as humans, we are experts about ourselves 
and our genders. So it makes sense that gender will also be mapped within 
our brains,” Dhamala said.

What the new study cannot do is predict what gender a person may identify 
with beyond one limited snapshot in time captured by the scans and 
surveys. Gender, the authors note, is not something that is necessarily 
static, and a person’s understanding of their gender can change throughout 
their lifetime.

The study also can’t determine what things in someone’s environment will 
influence their brain function in terms of sex or gender, nor can it 
identify what a person’s sexual orientation might be.

“Sexual orientation is independent from gender and from sex,” Bassett 
said, and it may be differently mapped in the brain.

The researchers say they hope to someday learn more about how sex and 
gender interact in a person’s life and how they influence one another and 
the brain throughout a lifetime. They also hope to see how different 
cultures affect a person’s gender and their brain development.

A 2022 poll showed that most American adults — and the vast majority of 
conservatives — believe that a person’s gender is determined by the sex 
assigned at birth. The distinction is key to gender-affirming care, 
medical treatment for people who identify as a gender that is different 
from the one they were assigned at birth. Conservative politicians have 
pushed for a record number of bans on such care, and nearly half of US 
states have enacted bans on gender-affirming care for minors.

The study did not look at whether sex or gender were congruent or 
incongruent in any study participant. Rather, it looked at the child’s 
binary sex and gender across self- and parent-reported measures. The study 
couldn’t provide any specific findings if sex and gender were incongruent.

“Going forward, the hope is that we can motivate other scientists to 
consider science and gender in their analyses in the data collections in 
their programs and research,” said study co-author Dr. Avram Holmes, an 
associate professor of psychiatry at Rutgers University.

The field of neuroscience has only just begun to acknowledge and address 
the presence of biases and barriers to inclusivity within research, Holmes 
said.

A fuller understanding of the way the brain works in terms of sex and 
gender could also have practical implications and potentially help 
scientists find better ways to treat people with brain-related illnesses. 
For instance, the study pointed to how people assigned male at birth are 
more likely to be diagnosed with substance use and attention deficit 
disorders.

“It’s not that sex and gender necessarily drive illness rates, but the 
cultures people are embedded in can also influence the likelihood they may 
or may not develop a particular illness,” Holmes said. “So the types of 
environmental pressures a child undergoes across development could 
increase or decrease their risk for experiencing illness, independent of 
their initial brain biology.”

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/12/health/sex-gender-child-brain/index.html

So the short end of this is fucked up educational systems and weak-assed 
left-wing parents are responsible for kids being all screwed up sexually.

HINT:  Don't let your kids watch Disney movies at young ages either.   
Charlee Corra is a sick person and will ruin your children's lives.