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by faeriechangling 871 days ago
The "Extreme male brain" theory aged like milk, that autistics have more "male" brains than the rest of the population. Years after that theory we saw extremely high incidence of MtF transgenderism among autistics. Living as a woman doesn't really seem like an extreme male brained thing to do.
2 comments
atlas_hugged 871 days ago
Oh yeah! That part of his research, especially, just screamed out of touch with reality.
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coldtea 871 days ago
It aged quite well, it's just the name that didn't age well, because in 2024 you can't say males have more of X trait and women have more Y trait for political reasons.
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faeriechangling 870 days ago
That certainly plays into the unpopularity of the concept, but even independent of that, this doesn't address the central criticism that autistics seem to be more likely to be MtF transgender.

We know that MtF transgender people that the brains of transgender women resemble the brains of cisgender women, than the rains of cisgender men resemble the brains of cisgender men.[1] Transgender women have extremely androgynous brains, not extreme male brains.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/

Generally, if you rephrase the concept as the "Emphasising-Systemising theory of autism" it becomes a lot less implausible. "Extreme maleness" implies being more male across the board to an extreme, and that does not appear to be the case with autistics, they might have a few male-coded traits but they're not extremely male.

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neurowned 866 days ago
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8955456/

That study, and others with similar results, do not control for sexual orientation - even though it's already well established that homosexuality correlates with some brain structures being atypical for one's sex.

In the studies that do control for sexual orientation, no such shift towards the opposite sex is found to correlate with gender dysphoria.

Instead, what has been shown are differences in structural and functional connectivity within the default mode network of the brain, which is essential for body perception and self-referential processing. See for example https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17352-8.

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