Participants had lost gray matter
There’s a new study of changes in the brain caused by hormones. I find it rather disturbing. Rachel Gross reports for Slate:
Research has shown that women have the advantage when it comes to memory and language, while men tend to have stronger spatial skills (though this too has been disputed). But due to ethical restrictions, no study had been able to track the direct effect that testosterone exposure has on the brain—until now. Using neuroimaging, Dutch and Austrian researchers found that an increase in this potent hormone led to shrinkage in key areas of the female (transitioning to male) brain associated with language. They presented their findings at last week’s annual meeting of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology in Amsterdam.
Shrinkage. Just plain old shrinkage. It sounds very drastic. (And I can’t discuss it without thinking of that Seinfeld episode about swimming and shrinkage…)
For the study, researchers scanned the brains of 18 individuals receiving high doses of testosterone as part of female-to-male gender reassignment surgery before and after hormone treatment. After just four weeks of receiving testosterone, participants had lost gray matter (which mainly processes information) in the regions of the brain that are used for language processing. That change amounted to a “real, quantitative difference in brain structure,” said researcher Rupert Lanzenberger of the Medical University of Vienna.
Sobering, isn’t it.
I just…
I just totally cannot even. inorite?
There there. You can always draw us a picture.
Given that hormones and neurotransmitters are the same chemicals in different parts of the body, this should surprise no one, and it’s interesting research because these are longitudinal studies of single subjects rather than group-differences studies. On the other hand, we all need to remember that within-group differences are often far larger than between-group differences and not get all enthusiastic for how boy brains are totally different from girl brains. I’ve been astonished to see some progressive, allegedly science-literate bloggers argue that brains are definitively and inherently gendered (and not as a matter of environmental influences!).
I’m very UNenthusiastic about the whole idea.
Re brains: I don’t know how you guys walk around with those things.
I’m the one who brought this to Ophelia’s attention, and the tenor of the comments is prompting me to describe why, even though this sort of information makes me very nervous, I’m still strongly considering starting testosterone.
In my teenage years and early adulthood my ability to get on in the world was severely compromised by depression and anorexia/bulimia. In my late twenties, I experienced a dramatic and unexpected remission after I started wearing men’s clothing (which I originally decided to try b/c I thought it would help me attract lesbian partners). The body image problems I experienced which caused the depression were all focused on the female parts of my body- breasts and hips, specifically. Wearing clothing that masked my female shape reduced the discomfort to manageable levels.
For several years, wearing men’s clothing and not thinking too hard about gender worked well for me. I started working again, dating, making friends, etc. I knew, on some level, that what I felt was similar to what trans people described, but I just thought trans people were making fools of themselves by refusing to accept the reality of their bodies and their biological sex. I believed the sensible, stoical thing to do was to simply accept some level of discomfort and get on with my life.
But, when I saw what testosterone actually does, everything changed. Testosterone makes people with bodies like mine look and sound and smell like men, full stop. If I go on testosterone, no one will need to be told what I identify as, no one will need to know that I was born female, I’ll just look like a dude and be accepted as a dude and that will be the end of it. That’s how it works, for trans men.
I’m still very curious about what caused my discomfort with my body and why looking like a man and being seen that way by other people might alleviate it, and I think it’s very important to take the side effects of HRT seriously and weigh the pros and cons, but I spent years in and out of hospitals for eating disorder and undergoing therapy for body image issues, and nothing even began to touch my problems until I started wearing men’s clothing. There isn’t another treatment for being trans other than transitioning, at least as far as I’ve been able to discover. If there was, I’d certainly go for it rather than mess around with my grey matter.
That’s a very illuminating account.
How to judge what is the (more) sensible, stoical thing to do depends so heavily on various factors, some of which are social and others of which are physical. Your experience of remission from wearing men’s clothes must be helpful with trying to figure that out – you know that worked, and that seems like a good reason to think that testosterone would work even more.
Certainly the fact that social acceptance of tweaking the reality of bodies is increasing rapidly must be helpful.
That’s a bit disturbing Ophelia. I’ve had several friends start HRT since I’ve met them and they’ve all seemed quite a bit happier for it, I haven’t noticed any significant changes in cognitive capabilities, but that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t happened. Hopefully, it’s a small effect.
@VR Urquhart I’m just some person you don’t know on the internet so please take anything I say with a grain of salt, but based on what you’ve written here, I definitely think you should try HRT. You sound almost exactly like one of my female-to-male trans friends when he said changing the way he dressed helped a lot with body image issues, but that HRT made social acceptance so much better.
What a dopy comment. I’m just saying that gave me a lot to think about. I blame my grey matter – I’ve just been swimming and it shrank.
VR, I have no idea what to advise you – so I wont. It’s got to be your choice and I wish you well whatever you decide.
Having been on the receiving end of endogenous testosterone all my life I can attest to pro’s and con’s. I miss the strength and power and the ability to switch on controlled aggression so easily when needed. I miss the intensity of feelings that seem to be associated with T. At the same time now I’m in late middle age I enjoy not being so subject to the negative side effects of uncontrolled aggressive impulses and being able to focus more on the wider and more nuanced palette of experiences relationships can bring.
If you decide to go down that route it is sure to be a journey. I hope you blog about it if you do. I think it would help many people understand things better. Having said that, I don’t want to suggest that you become a public lab rat to satisfy our curiosity.
With my background I cannot comprehend the combination of bravery and desperation that would lead someone to willingly take chemicals as powerful as this.
(Mine was the dopy comment, I meant. Not Matthew’s!)
Thanks for the understanding replies. I’m certainly not going to rush anything- some of the effects of T are permanent, for one thing. It’s a slow process of trying to figure out what might work for me, what tradeoffs are acceptable, that sort of thing. I can, of course, stop HRT if it’s not helpful, but there are some permanent effects in the area of hair growth and whatnot. It’s not something I’ll do lightly, or do if I think there are better solutions, and I think that’s how most trans people approach it although, of course, people of all sorts are capable of all sorts of stupidity.
If I remember right, the super-high levels of female hormones during pregnancy also has some kind of brain-shrinkage effect. I wouldn’t get too excited about any data on physical brain characteristics and hormones. The brain is hugely complex, what neuroscience understands about it is like the difference between a tree farm and the Amazon rainforest, and we (science) really has almost no idea yet what any of this means.
Possibly, sex hormones make neuronal pruning more efficient, so you’re only keeping the useful neurons and not wasting energy on the ones just taking up space.
Possibly, allocation of always limited physiological resources means that there are negative feedback loops between sex hormones and neurons. Sort of like you don’t digest a big meal and run an Olympic sprint at the same time. After all, if sex is on the agenda, you’re probably not going to be working out the Pythagorean theorem at the same time. (Although that wouldn’t hold for pregnancy. Nothing to stop anyone thinking about the equivalence of matter and energy while gestating.)
Anyway, all I’m trying to say (jokingly but seriously) is that we really don’t know what it means. The relationship between the physical brain and cognition and behavior is too complex at the level of normal functioning. Other data, such as risk-taking behavior when testosterone is high, has much more easily understood implications.
Having suffered PCOS for years and been treated for it, the main difference I’ve seen in me with testosterone levels appropriate for men (oops) or testosterone levels appropriate for healthy women (yay, shutting down my weird ovaries) is that I don’t actually
want to punch people as muchhave as many problems with being patient.