https://nitter.click/SwipeWright/status/2102028205183910006

🚨NEW: Our critique of a major "brain sex" study is now published.

@AdamRochussen, @NeuroSGS, and I evaluate a central premise of gender activism and medicine: that trans-identifying people have brains that are shifted away from their sex and toward their "gender identity."

The "brain sex" concept is so central because it purports to provide an empirical scientific basis for the notion that a child can be "born in the wrong body" and would therefore benefit from body-altering medical procedures to align their body with their mind/brain.

The problem is that this concept is pure pseudoscience and propped up by deeply flawed methods and badly misinterpreted data.

One of the most prominent studies is Kurth et al. (2022), published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, which claimed that the brains of transgender women are shifted away from their sex and toward their "gender identity." The paper became one of the journal’s most accessed articles and has been cited in major media outlets, scientific papers, legal arguments, and policy discussions involving pediatric gender medicine and sports.

We point out that the paper's headline conclusion rests on a series of serious methodological problems.

Each group contained only 24 participants. The authors used poorly justified parametric methods, one-tailed post hoc tests, made no correction for multiple comparisons, and omitted important robustness checks. Once accounted for, the main finding is no longer statistically significant.

An even more glaring failure of the study was that it failed to account for sexual orientation, despite its known association with neuroanatomical variation and despite the authors having the relevant participant data needed to examine it!

We each repeatedly requested the anonymized participant-level data from the paper's lead author so we could independently evaluate the findings.

We received no response.

The evidence simply does not justify the sweeping "brain sex" conclusion for which this study has become famous.

Our full critique in @Theory_Society is open access. Read it at the link below, and please cite it and share it whenever you encounter the false claim that trans people have brains that more closely resemble the sex they identify than their own sex.

🔗 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-026-09747-2

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-026-09747-2

Abstract

Kurth et al. (2022) concluded that the brain anatomy of transgender women is shifted away from their biological sex and toward their gender identity. We evaluate whether the study’s evidence supports this conclusion by focusing on its statistical methods and treatment of sexual orientation in its analyses. The principal finding relies on a very small sample, a weak justification for parametric analyses, one-tailed post hoc tests, no correction for multiple comparisons, and limited robustness testing. The study also did not properly account for sexual orientation as a potential neuroanatomical confound despite having the relevant participant data to do so. These methodological choices consistently bias the results toward smaller p-values and stronger apparent support for the authors’ stated hypothesis. The evidence presented therefore does not justify the study’s headline conclusion.

You may have seen the image from the critiqued study. The odd shape of the middle blob one of the issues identified.

Okay, so in the spirit of this community's claimed goal let's analyse this critically. Here we have a very politically active conservative and member of conservative think tank, someone who literally tried to sue Cornell for not hiring white people, opening with dogwhistles like "trans-identified person", claiming that another study is completely useless primarily because not enough people were involved, after admitting to having harassed the people running the original study in an attempt to gain the information on the people involved despite being actively hostile to the already marginalised group, and making no attempt or even plan to run a larger scale study to either confirm or refute the result. Also, even if the study was right, they claim it's too narrow scope because they didn't include their suggested follow up study in this one too, because dividing the groups even further would somehow make this result clearer.

It's also published in Theory and Society, which recently had a mass resignation of the entire editorial board now replaced by what has been criticised as "a right-wing board with an evolutionist agenda".

It doesn't take a whole lot of critical thinking to see this is baseless political point scoring rather than any real attempt at science.

Your comment is very much is in the spirit of this community, the point is exactly to add context like this.

It's good to identify biases like you've done. I think it's safe to say that the author of this critique is not sympathetic to the original paper. It's important to understand the scope of the critique though. It's part of this project

https://link.springer.com/journal/11186/updates/53047010

Theory and Society - Article Category Peer Review

Theory & Society is introducing a new article category, “Peer Review,” designed to serve as a structured form a post-publication peer review. This article category aspires to be what peer review was originally meant to be: public, openly engaged, peer analyses. The primary goal is to support the self-correcting nature of academic inquiry.

Purpose of the “Peer Review” Format

The Peer Review article format is intended to serve four main purposes:

1. To allow rigorous post-publication critique of scholarly work with major methodological, theoretical, logical, or evidentiary problems.

2. To restore viewpoint diversity, particularly in fields where conventional peer review may not expose the work to dissenting perspectives or where substantive critique is rare or structurally discouraged.

3. To encourage scholarly accountability, while maintaining clear standards of professionalism and good faith.

4. To encourage dialogue and model constructive disagreement, by giving authors of the original work a clear opportunity to respond.

The format is not meant to be polemical, but to improve the quality and reliability of the scholarly record.

So it's not meant to be an avenue for planning a larger scale study, it's limited to being just a critique of a published study. It's entirely possible the project could turn into political mudslinging, but this one seems valid. The central claim is "Once accounted for, the main finding is no longer statistically significant". That's a real, scientific claim. Is it true? If we simply dismiss it because of who wrote it, we end up falling victim to this

I'm surprised that asking for the study data could be considered harassment. What do you think they should have done instead?

Reading up on the lawsuit adds interesting context. He was given a notice of right to sue, and did so. Without commenting on whether he should have or not, I guess I'm unsurprised that he'd jump on that.

https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2026/01/conservative-biologist-sues-cornell-alleging-the-university-discriminated-against-white-faculty-candidates

Wright’s filing of the suit follows him receiving a Notice of Right to Sue — which is a letter from a state or federal administrative agency that approves a right to initiate a lawsuit — from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Jan. 23. According to the lawsuit, Wright submitted a formal EEOC discrimination charge against Cornell 180 days before Monday.

According to the suit, in an email obtained from an administrator in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology from December 2020, which is listed as confidential, the department allegedly sought to obtain a “diversity hire” for an open position and create an interview list of only “underrepresented minority scholars.”

Lastly, I don't really understand the "evolutionist agenda" angle. Is this a creationist complaint? I read this article

https://retractionwatch.com/2024/01/22/sociology-journals-entire-editorial-board-resigns-after-springer-nature-appointed-new-leadership/

It has a tweet that mentions that again

The coup at Theory & Society is complete. After the ed board resigned, the 2 editors handpicked by Springer installed a new board entirely comprised of cognitive scientists, social psychologists, org sociologists, sociobiologists, b school profs, & folks into evolutionary theory

The people that resigned make it sound much more mundane

For us, this is not only about Theory and Society, but more broadly, the precedent of for-profit owners of academic journals unilaterally installing their selected editors.