In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

I Still Can’t Catch a Ball.

piny

Maybe I should raise my dose? My spatial skills have always been absolutely terrible. I’m so clumsy that I occasionally walk into doorframes: I’ll overshoot a little, or accidentally swerve right or left just as I’m going through the doorway, and bam! Iincidentally, I have gotten a teensy bit better at reading maps and following directions, but I think that’s because I’m not dissociating from everything around me anymore.

Anyway, bitch/lab linked to this article on Max Wolf Valerio, a longtime activist and writer whom I respect a great deal (darkdaughta and I had an abortive discussion about his take on the word “transsexual;” I should really get on that reasoned response I was gonna write).

The article talks a lot about hormones, specifically testosterone; Valerio believes that they’ve changed his brain a whole lot:

But for Valerio, the real surprise was the way testosterone transformed his brain. “If I looked at an object, it seemed more defined, more three-dimensional,” he says. Words came with more effort, and emotions became harder to articulate. His sex drive soared.

When Valerio was still Anita, she and her lesbian friends thought men’s leering, lustful behavior was nothing but posturing. Now, he’s felt male lust for himself.

And someone in comments nailed why this shit makes me so uncomfortable:

I always worry that this kind of oversimplified story makes things harder, not just for those in trainsition (”shit – my spacial reasoning skills don’t seem to be increasing – this must not be working”, but folks around them (”crap – are you feeling male lust for me?”.

It’s sexist! Sexist, sexist, sexist! The idea that there’s more of a difference between than within is sexist! And if Valerio sincerely believes it as a general rather than a personal statement, he’s being sexist! And sexism is not good for transpeople!

What if Max had said that he felt exactly the same, or that testosterone made him weepier, sweeter, kinder, clumsier, more in touch with his emotions? All of those things have happened to transguys in transition; they’re all true of plenty of cissexual men. Transsexuals are used to support other people’s pet theories about what makes a man and what makes a woman all the time. People such as the author of this article will cling to the tiniest, most strained data set as though it means anything:

Scientists have studied transsexuals seeking clues to male-female brain differences. Ruben and Raquel Gur of the University of Pennsylvania worked with a female-to-male transsexual, also named Max, and found that as the testosterone kicked in, he improved on spatial-skills tests, but got worse in verbal fluency.

Their findings back up larger studies from Europe, offering tantalizing hints to our inborn differences.

One person! I should care? And how did the scientists control for the skills this Max believed he was supposed to be developing?

We’re not some sort of perfect control group. We didn’t grow up in cages, and we don’t enter them when we get our first shots. We are not sex sans socialization. Transmen face the same pressure to be masculine as men; in some ways, that pressure might be even more focused. And, just like men and women who don’t transition, we seem to vary a great deal both in terms of expression and in terms of talent.

16 thoughts on I Still Can’t Catch a Ball.

  1. I agree. I think more studies need to be done, involving larger samples, before such studies can be accepted as hard science. Furthermore, I think there is a need to account for cultural gender biases in such studies, which unfortunately may make accurate case studies in the current zeitgeist nearly impossible. Thanks for this post.

  2. Aren’t there studies being conducted on, say, testosterone for women as a treatment for some medical condition or another instead of for transition?

    It would seem that you’d need to have studies involving people who aren’t changing gender to eliminate any placebo or anticipatory effect. It could be that the whole idea of what men are “supposed” to perceive is affecting what Max is perceiving, or at least what Max is attributing to the testosterone and not simply to greater awareness of perceptions that existed as Anita but weren’t of concern until Max came along. I don’t know if I’m expressing this well at all.

  3. Zuzu, testing spatial skills can’t be that hard, right? Start with a sample group of transmen who intend to take T, and a second sample group of cisgendered women about to begin T for other reasons. Test them on some spatial test until practice effects plateau, then keep testing through the beginning of hormone application. See if the skills improve post-T in either group; and in one more than the other. Now, that might be a study that tells us something.

  5. Not to mention the dang-blasted placebo effect. If someone expects to get more visual/spatial and less verbal, then they’re very likely to do just that. To actually mean much, the tests would have be be double-blind and controlled. Performance tests are insanely sensitive to participant expectation (there are some scary results showing that you can get a significant drop in standardized test scores for black teenaged males simply by reminding them verbally of their black-maleness just before the test – lends a whole new angle to those little sheets you fill out before the test asking for age, gender, race)

    I always wonder – if those are the effects of testosterone, what would it do to me? I’m already in the 98th percentile on three-dimensional visualization. Would I simply get less verbal? What about my very articulate father? I assume he has testosterone running around in his bloodstream – doesn’t seem to have slowed down his tongue any.

    Phooey on all the genderists that take a tiny difference in the outliers and tries to turn it into a credo for behavior.

  6. zuzu:

    Women produce testosterone naturally, albeit in smaller quantities. It is the hormone of lust in both sexes. Some post-menopausal women take it to increase sex drive.

    As to other uses or effects I don’t know.

  7. Zuzu, testing spatial skills can’t be that hard, right? Start with a sample group of transmen who intend to take T, and a second sample group of cisgendered women about to begin T for other reasons. Test them on some spatial test until practice effects plateau, then keep testing through the beginning of hormone application. See if the skills improve post-T in either group; and in one more than the other. Now, that might be a study that tells us something.

    You’d also need a control group of transmen who were not taking testosterone, wouldn’t you?

  8. Piny, I’m not sure. If you got your baseline from the T-taking transmen before they started the hormone regimen, their prior performance lets the researcher measure how they are affected by the combination of T and transition. The non-transgendered T-taker group lets the researcher see the same effect without transition, so as to disaggregate the two.

    But as Tapetum pointed out, that does not control for placebo effects.

  9. But as Tapetum pointed out, that does not control for placebo effects.

    Well, but you’d also have to compare for the “placebo effect” of identity: if you believe you’re a man, you’re more likely to behave the way you think men should.

    You’re the science-talking guy, though. I’m not terribly good at empirical logistics.

  10. You get that by having a sample group of women who don’t believe they are men. But I’m no research-protocol maven either. I’m relying mostly on native intelligence and litigator bullshit 😉

  11. You get that by having a sample group of women who don’t believe they are men. But I’m no research-protocol maven either. I’m relying mostly on native intelligence and litigator bullshit 😉

    I’m saying that in order to see what effect testosterone has, you’d need to see “testosterone – identity,” “testosterone + identity,” and “identity – testosterone,”

  12. There are plenty of women with good spatial skills, and men without them (me and Mr Older, for example). These generalizations are just too easy.

    I remember reading about one of the earliest F2M transexuals, and I was mightily offended by the fact that all his relatives thought the transition was a good thing because of how — well, how unpleasant he’d been as a woman. And reading the story, I thought “Oh great, she was an asshole, and now he’s an asshole.” Apparently, at that time (over 40 years ago) all men were understood to be assholes, and that was okay. But I was sure that something else was going on there, though I couldn’t tell what exactly, because of the assumptions and generalizations. Maybe he was just tired of all the trash that had been talked about him.

  13. We could do a double-blind survey on cisgendered women who wanted to take testosterone for their sex drive–give half of the women testosterone and half placebo, and then do the little spatial tests. Since transmen are taking large enough doses of testosterone where it would have definite physical effects (facial hair, etc.), it wouldn’t be possible to have a double-blind study because it would be apparent for most of the participants if they were on T or not. But the doses for cisgendered women for libido enhancement are low enough where they don’t usually cause drastic physical changes.

  14. Zuzu, testing spatial skills can’t be that hard, right? Start with a sample group of transmen who intend to take T, and a second sample group of cisgendered women about to begin T for other reasons. Test them on some spatial test until practice effects plateau, then keep testing through the beginning of hormone application. See if the skills improve post-T in either group; and in one more than the other. Now, that might be a study that tells us something.

    Nope. Just think – you’re a cisgendered woman on T, in a study to test [whatever they told you it was about]. What tells us that you don’t also expect it to have an effect on their verbal skills, or 3D visualization, so the placebo effect kicks in anyway?

    Maureen’s idea comes closer, I think, but I’m not sure. Doesn’t testosterone treatment for libido tend to cause ‘obvious’ physical changes (facial hair, etc) as well? Less drastic, obviously, but I always thought that was one of the less desirable side effects. And then you’d have to control for women deciding (rightly or wrongly) that they’re on T or the placebo based on the changes they report in their sex drive.

  15. Maureen’s idea comes closer, I think, but I’m not sure. Doesn’t testosterone treatment for libido tend to cause ‘obvious’ physical changes (facial hair, etc) as well? Less drastic, obviously, but I always thought that was one of the less desirable side effects. And then you’d have to control for women deciding (rightly or wrongly) that they’re on T or the placebo based on the changes they report in their sex drive.

    Yup. And you’d have to control for baseline testosterone levels in these women, wouldn’t you?

    Plus, given that the idea of participating in a double-blind study where you might or might not be given yer hormones sent shivers down my spine, so there are some ethical issues over at the hypothetical lab.

  16. Yeah, I figured it might be easier (and more ethical) to do a double-blind study on cisgendered women who were told that they were testing small doses of testosterone to enhance libido than on transmen. I mean, they still need to do some more tests on how testosterone supplements affect libido in post-menopausal women, right? Just tack a few spatial tests on.

    As for the “Estrogen/Testosterone will change your motor skills/emotions/sex drive”–well, statistically there may be effects. But for any one individual? Who knows?

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