Experiencing the illusion of having an opposite-sex body in virtual reality can shift aspects of gender identity.

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Scientific papers are sometimes hard to read but this one is kinda interesting.

Fluidity of gender identity induced by illusory body-sex change

Gender identity is a collection of thoughts and feelings about one’s own gender, which may or may not correspond to the sex assigned at birth. How this sense is linked to the perception of one’s own masculine or feminine body remains unclear. Here, in a series of three behavioral experiments conducted on a large group of control volunteers (N = 140), we show that a perceptual illusion of having the opposite-sex body is associated with a shift toward a more balanced identification with both genders and less gender-stereotypical beliefs about own personality characteristics, as indicated by subjective reports and implicit behavioral measures. These findings demonstrate that the ongoing perception of one’s own body affects the sense of one’s own gender in a dynamic, robust, and automatic manner.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-71467-z

Comments

So the magic transformation stories were right after all!

laika's picture

The ones people always roll their eyes at, where a cis guy gets turned into a gal
+ sometimes mere hours later is totally acclimated to her new body + new life,
giddy with joy over her newfound femininity and horrified to the prospects
of ever returning to being an icky old boy... I KNEW it!!!!
~hugs, Veronica
.

(Yes I know that was a criminally simplistic + shallow and horribly skewed
interpretation of what the study said, but isn't that what the anti-trans
alarmists do with these "facts" and "studies" they come up with
and keep copying and pasting from each other, because
they know those who just plain want to believe them
will never check their sources?)

Science Obfuscated

Thank you for posting this Crash.
You will know from my story "AGD" that I like nothing better than a scientific paper and I was hopeful that this might spawn a story.
But this is the stuff that give scientists a bad name - completely undecipherable and with conclusions that were ... well, inconclusive.
And no less than 77 other papers referred to!!
I had a mind to write about a normal guy who volunteers for this study and finds himself forever changed, but working out why he would be seems to difficult.
Maryanne