I have a suspicion that this is exactly what’s going on here and may be why past studies found no differences. AI is much better at quickly synthesizing complex patterns into coherent categories than humans are.

Also, 90% is not that good all things considered. The brain is almost certainly a complex mix of features that defy black and white categorization.

Hopefully we will be wise enough to not require trans people to prove their trans-ness scientifically. People have a right to do what they wish with their bodies and express their gender in a way that feels right to them, and should not be required to match some artificial physical diagnosis of what it means to be trans. Even if it turns out that most trans people do share certain brain structures or patterns. There will always be exceptions and that doesn’t mean we get to label someone’s identity as inauthentic.

Someone else mentioned the iris test being more accurate but that it also includes the eye area around the iris, including eyelashes and eye shape. That would clearly bias the model.

I wonder if there’s anything else that’s might be giving clues to the machine or if it I limited to what they say it’s determining sex based on. As a trans-nonbinary person myself, I’m very skeptical and anxious about technologies like this leading to biases and prejudices being emboldened.

There are short men and tall women, so you shouldn’t rely on just that.

I don't think that's a fair comparison. Height is a single value. If you trained an AI on that, it would be guessing. A brain has many, many more parameters to take into consideration when going into an artificial neural network.

Just a guess but if they labeled training data either male or female then i believe its more likely that it detects biological sex..

But if i they would also label and train on lgbt brains then i bet machine learning can differentiate between all of those.

I bet you can do the same thing with neurodivergent people but you would need to make sure the training data is without error to make me trust it.

That's interesting. I and my father are both hyperlexic (as in, taught ourselves to read, in my case, before I could speak) but not trans or autistic.

I wonder how that mixes into the fold?

Assuming I'm understanding your point that would be a mis-categorization. I'm assuming you meant a straight non-trans male was scanned and the result predicted a female brain was scanned (a result matching neither the sex nor gender)? I was saying it would be less interesting if it scanned say a female-to-male trans person and returned a result of female (correctly guessing the sex but not the gender), than if it had returned a result of male (that is correctly guessing the gender but not the sex). It would also be interesting if it could detect trans people in general as their own unique group.