Abstract
This study undertakes an analysis of the conceptualization of gender identity in neuroscientific studies of (trans)gender identity that contrast the brains of cisgender and transgender participants. The analysis focuses on instances of epistemic injustice that combine scientific deficiencies and the exclusion of relevant bodies of knowledge. The results of a content analysis show how the ignoring of biosocial, developmental, mosaicist, contextualist, and depathologizing approaches leads to internal conceptual inconsistencies, hermeneutical deficiencies and the upholding of questionable paradigms in the research field. Interviews with researchers involved in these brain studies reveal targeted and diffuse forms of testimonial injustice against alternative approaches, promoted by the hierarchical arrangements of research teams in combination with the careerist and economic logic of research. The analysis points to the exclusion of critical epistemologies of science and the historical oppression of trans people as epistemic agents as the underlying hermeneutical deficiencies.
Highlights
The idea of the existence of neurological traits specific to trans people, is a culturally powerful narrative that has the potential to impact social perceptions, as well as legislative and medical regulations of trans people
Researcher C elaborated on the development of cis or transgender identities in a triad of “sexual maturation” and “interest in the other, usually in the opposite sex,” “reorientation with social changes from family to peers” and “thinking about yourself, who am I, in terms of boy or girl, and in terms of who am I in this world.”
This understanding of transgender identities, while still focused on the cis and trans distinction is much more complex than the definitions found in the BSGI and shows many possibilities for introducing contextual factors as constitutive of gender identity development
Summary
The idea of the existence of neurological traits specific to trans people, is a culturally powerful narrative that has the potential to impact social perceptions, as well as legislative and medical regulations of trans people. The epistemic situation of this study involves on the one hand the scholars advancing biosocial, developmental, mosaicist, contextualized and depathologizing approaches to brain research and sex/gender and trans identities. The BSGI do not include neuroimaging studies with trans participants looking into the effects of hormone replacement therapy on brain structure or function (see for example Burke et al, 2018), nor studies with trans participants with research objects that are not explicitly gender identity, such as ostracism (for example Mueller et al, 2018) or reaction to stimulation of body parts (see for example Case et al, 2017) These two sets of epistemic agents configure an epistemic situation in which they are all directly involved in seeking to understand gender identity and are accountable to scientific standards for empirical research, even if they deploy different methodologies. This is to be seen as a strategic restriction, since I would defend that epistemic agents have a responsibility to pay attention and engage with knowledge from epistemic systems other than their own
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