...or vice versa. For clarity, I will use the case of female to male transgendered people in the rest of this post, but I do not mean to suggest that this excludes male to female transgendered people.

The narrative I've observed has been that FtMs believe they have a male brain in a female body, hence their feelings of dysphoria.

However, recent neuroimaging studies do not support that. Instead, emerging studies suggest that FtMs have dysfunction in the parts of their brain that are responsible for body perception. So they do not have a "male" brain: they have a dysphoric brain.

Examples:

I think this is important because it shifts the medical treatment model away from prescribing hormones and surgery, and toward addressing the dysphoria as the source of dysfunction, as in body dysmorphic disorder(s) -- i.e., clinicians do not treat anorexia nervosa by encouraging patients to become skeletally thin, even if that would resolve their dysmorphic feelings. Similarly, this may mark a transition away from treating gender dysphoria by encouraging patients to change their gender.

Seriously low sample size in these studies, especially the last one. EIGHT???

This is super interesting. I don't know how to measure the validity of a study; for you researcher types, does this look pretty sound? I wonder how well it will be received or discredited. They've targeted people like Cordelia Fine and Dr. J Michael Bailey for their nonaffirmative research.

Ooh, interesting! Thanks for linking to those studies.