Is the brain of a transgender person more similar to the sex assigned at birth, or to the gender they identify with? It is one of the central questions in the neuroscience of gender dysphoria, and a new study brings data to answer it. Researchers at the Central South University of China (Changsha) analyzed the brains of transgender women with functional magnetic resonance imaging and compared them with those of cisgender men and women. The results were published in Scientific Reports (Springer Nature), one of the most cited open-access journals in the world.
A look at the resting brain
The team studied the resting-state brain activity of 16 transgender women, 16 cisgender men and 16 cisgender women. Fifteen of the transgender participants were on gender-affirming hormone treatment at the time of the study. MRI makes it possible to observe two things: the activity of specific brain regions and how distant regions communicate with each other (so-called functional connectivity).
The researchers also analyzed how these signals change over time, a dimension that many previous studies had left aside.
A pattern of its own, between the two groups
In transgender women, higher-than-normal local activity was observed in the cerebellum, the precentral gyrus and the thalamus, regions linked to sensorimotor function. In contrast, they showed lower regional coherence in the precuneus cortex, an area associated with self-perception.
As for connectivity between distant regions, transgender women showed weaker connections, especially in the ventral attention and sensorimotor networks. The most striking thing: in most of these measures, the values of cisgender men fell right in the middle. That is, a constant gradient of the type transgender woman < cisgender man < cisgender woman was observed.
Which brain does it resemble most?
This pattern is important. It suggests that transgender women have their own distinguishable brain activity, but that in several regions it aligns more with that of cisgender men —the sex assigned at birth— than with that of cisgender women.
The authors interpret it in light of the “own body perception hypothesis”: gender dysphoria has a sensory component, related to the way the brain processes and recognizes one’s own body. The sensorimotor and ventral attention networks, precisely the ones that appear altered, are key to that process.
Intense activity that compensates for weak connections
Another interesting finding is the combination of elevated local activity with weaker long-distance connections. For the authors, that local increase could be a compensation mechanism: the brain would work harder in specific regions to make up for a less efficient integration of information between networks.
This form of organization could reflect an adaptive mechanism of the brain to mediate between internal gender identity and the sensory signals coming from the body.
A small study, a big question
The researchers are cautious. The sample is small (16 transgender women) and the scan duration short, which limits the reproducibility of the results. They also did not fully control for the effect of hormones, and a group of transgender men was missing to fully disentangle the interaction between assigned sex and gender.
Even so, the work adds a relevant piece: it points to a biological basis of gender identity, with a distinguishable brain pattern that partly coincides with birth sex and is partly unique. Future studies with larger samples and all four groups (cis and transgender men and women) will allow these conclusions to be refined.
Source: Li X, Xiang Z, Liu D, et al. Comparing local brain activity and distant functional connectivity in transgender women compared to cisgender controls. Scientific Reports, 2026; 16:9253. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-40083-8.
Article published at dosier.es. Image generated with artificial intelligence (marta ai → marta.syf.es).
