By Helen Thomson. Transition aligns identity and body. Information from studies that show this may one day help doctors better help children who identify as trans. Those who have surgery to change their anatomy overwhelmingly say they feel more like themselves afterwards. To see if the way the brain processes body image underlies feelings of body incongruity in trans individuals, Laura Case at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues recruited eight volunteers who were anatomically female but identified as male and strongly desired a male anatomy.

Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript. Many previous magnetic resonance imaging MRI studies have documented sex differences in brain morphology, but the patterns of sexual brain differences in transgender women — male sex assigned at birth — with a diagnosis of gender dysphoria TW have been rarely investigated to date. Differences in whole-brain and regional white matter volume and grey matter volume GMV were assessed using voxel-based morphometry.

I n recent years, US society has seen a sea change in the perception of transgender people, with celebrities such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox becoming the recognizable faces of a marginalized population. Transgender rights have also become a mainstream political issue, and the idea that people should be referred to by the names and pronouns they find most fitting—whether or not these designations match those on their birth certificates, or align with the categories of male and female—is gaining acceptance. Yet a biological understanding of the contrast between the natal sex and the gender identity of transgender people remains elusive.

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