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Fluidity of gender identity induced by illusory body-sex change

P. Tacikowski, J. Fust, H. H. Ehrsson
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.13.905315
P. Tacikowski
1Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Solnavägen 9, 17165, Stockholm, Sweden;
2Univeristy of California Los Angeles, Department of Neurosurgery, 300 Stein Plaza Drwy., 90024 Los Angeles, USA;
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  • For correspondence: pawel.tacikowski@ki.se
J. Fust
1Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Solnavägen 9, 17165, Stockholm, Sweden;
3Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Nobels väg 9, 17165, Solna, Sweden
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H. H. Ehrsson
1Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institute, Solnavägen 9, 17165, Stockholm, Sweden;
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Abstract

Gender identity is the inner sense of being male, female, both, or neither. 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 healthy volunteers (N=140), we show that a perceptual illusion of having the opposite-sex body was associated with a shift toward more balanced identification with both genders and less gender-stereotypical beliefs about one’s 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.

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Posted January 14, 2020.
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Fluidity of gender identity induced by illusory body-sex change
P. Tacikowski, J. Fust, H. H. Ehrsson
bioRxiv 2020.01.13.905315; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.13.905315
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Fluidity of gender identity induced by illusory body-sex change
P. Tacikowski, J. Fust, H. H. Ehrsson
bioRxiv 2020.01.13.905315; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.13.905315

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