A research team led by psychiatrists and scientists at Taipei Veterans General Hospital and National Yang-Ming University’s Institute of Brain Science has found that people with gender identity disorder (GID) are characterized by structural and functional alterations in the brain.
People with GID are conflicted between their biological sex and their gender identity.
The research team found, by means of functional connectivity magnetic resonance imaging (fcMRI), that the neural connectivity between the part of the brain associated with GID and that with social brain network shown by transsexuals differs — by being more active — from how it is displayed in their non-transsexual counterparts.
Photo: Hung Su-ching, Taipei Times
GID in the brain is believed to contribute to the control of sexual behavior, and the social brain network is the neural structure that is responsible for social interactions such as interpersonal relations, conflict monitoring and punishment adjustment.
The study also found that “transsexuals identify, when viewing male-female couples in erotic or non-erotic [“neutral”] interactions, with the couple member of the desired gender in both situations,” while the non-transsexual controls only did so in the erotic situations.
“The increased connectivity between the area in the brain that is associated with biological sex, sexual characteristics and behavior, and the area associated with social functions such as emotional conflicts, has formed a neural network of ‘system memory’ that is absent in non-transsexuals,” said Hsieh Jen-chuen (謝仁俊), one of the authors of the report and a professor at the institute. “And the presence of the network reflects the conflicts they have experienced both psychologically and physically.”
The psychosocial maladaptation evidenced by the difference of neural connectivity patterns in transsexuals “suggests a brain signature of the psychosocial distress for the gender-sex incongruity of [transsexuals],” the researchers said.
Psychiatrist Lee Ying-chiao (李鶯喬), one of the authors, said that among the 517 GID patients she has seen in the past 18 years, half exhibited symptoms of depression.
Foreign tourists who purchase a seven-day Taiwan Pass are to get a second one free of charge as part of a government bid to boost tourism, the Tourism Administration said yesterday. A pair of Taiwan Passes is priced at NT$5,000 (US$156.44), an agency staff member said, adding that the passes can be used separately. The pass can be used in many of Taiwan’s major cities and to travel to several tourist resorts. It expires seven days after it is first used. The pass is a three-in-one package covering the high-speed rail system, mass rapid transport (MRT) services and the Taiwan Tourist Shuttle services,
Drinking a lot of water or milk would not help a person who has ingested terbufos, a toxic chemical that has been identified as the likely cause of three deaths, a health expert said yesterday. An 83-year-old woman surnamed Tseng (曾) and two others died this week after eating millet dumplings with snails that Tseng had made. Tseng died on Tuesday and others ate the leftovers when they went to her home to mourn her death that evening. Twelve people became ill after eating the dumplings following Tseng’s death. Their symptoms included vomiting and convulsions. Six were hospitalized, with two of them
DIVA-READY: The city’s deadline for the repairs is one day before pop star Jody Chiang is to perform at the Taipei Dome for the city’s Double Ten National Day celebrations The Taipei City Government has asked Farglory Group (遠雄集團) to repair serious water leaks in the Taipei Dome before Friday next week, Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said yesterday, following complaints that many areas at the stadium were leaking during two baseball games over the weekend. The dome on Saturday and Sunday hosted two games in tribute to CTBC Brothers’ star Chou Szu-chi (周思齊) ahead of his retirement from the CPBL. The games each attracted about 40,000 people, filling the stadium to capacity. However, amid heavy rain, many people reported water leaking on some seats, at the entrance and exit areas, and the
BIG collection: The herbarium holds more than 560,000 specimens, from the Japanese colonial period to the present, including the Wulai azalea, which is now extinct in the wild The largest collection of plant specimens in Taiwan, the Taipei Botanical Garden’s herbarium, is celebrating its 100th anniversary with an exhibition that opened on Friday. The herbarium provides critical historical documents for botanists and is the first of its kind in Taiwan, Taiwan Forestry Research Institute director Tseng Yen-hsueh (曾彥學) said. It is housed in a two-story red brick building, which opened during 1924. At the time, it stored 30,000 plant specimens from almost 6,000 species, including Taiwanese plant samples collected by Tomitaro Makino, the “father of Japanese botany,” Tseng said. The herbarium collection has grown in the century since its