No Smoking Gun, Part 1

Recently I had to tell a friend that I could no longer be around him. It seems that the more time goes by, the more conservative he gets and the more liberal I become. (I like to think of myself as a pinko commie leftist leaning liberal.) Every time we were together he always wanted to make the point that no matter how much my body changes I will always be XY chromosomes, therefore I must have a deep seated mental condition that makes me think that I am female when my body was born male. Then, just like that in his mind, I am invalidated and no amount of persuasion or logic can change his mind. The odd thing about that statement is that he is a gay man, and up until 1978 the DSM (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) still had homosexuality listed as a mental disorder.

With everything that happens in life, good and bad, the thing to remember is what can one gain out of it? With this situation, it made me research and become wiser on how to react and defend my beliefs about who I am on the inside. After all at the heart, I am a girl and a nerd. So here is what I have learned.

Just the facts

There are approximately 7.8 billion people in the world. [1] 0.6 % of the general population is Transgender. There are 25 million transgender people worldwide. 1.4 million reported living in the United States. That is approximately 1 in 333 people. [2]

1.7% of the general population is intersex. That’s 150 million intersex people worldwide. That is the same percentage number as genetic red heads. [3]

11% of MTF transgender people who have gender reassignment surgery say that they regret having done the surgery, while 4% of FTM regret surgery. [4] However, a 10 year study done in Sweden reported that the rate of regret decreased by 8% for every year after the last surgery was performed. Taking hormones alone without surgery did not have the same results. [5] Also, you must take into account that most of the feeling of regret is because of social rejection. When you factor in for that, the number of people who experience regret with transgender related surgery is actually really low. According to recent research in the Netherlands the actual rate is between 0.3 and 0.6 percent. [10]

39% of adult transgender people have reported having made a suicide attempt. That is compared to less than 5% of the general population. However, with supportive family, that number decreases to 37%.

Transgender teens with supportive families report only slightly higher rate of anxiety or depression than children who don’t identify as transgender. [6] About 1 in 134 teens identify as transgender. [7] 92% of transgender people that have attempted suicide said it was before the age of 25. [8]

Gender is not your body, it’s your soul

Jazz Jennings

How does a child at five years old know that they are not the sex assigned at birth? I look at young children like Jazz Jennings, Kai Shappley, Jacob Lemay, and many more I could name. Most of whom do not give their last names because of fear of reprisal. Where does this internal sense of gender come from? To answer this, let’s use the analogy of the soul. I am using the soul as that part of you that goes to your eternal dwellings after this life. Most people would agree that you have a soul. Which is interesting because you can’t see it on an X-ray. Exactly what part of your body does a soul reside? If you were forced to prove you had a soul you could not do it scientifically. Yet as transgender people we are constantly asked to prove what we know internality to be true.

Brain in a jar

If you were to ask a married man if his wife was different from him in the way she thinks or puts thoughts together, he would probably give you an answer such as men are from Mars and women are from Venus. If you were to ask the woman to explain that her brain was different, she could not do it. In fact the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, published an article called, Sex beyond the Genitalia: the human brain mosaic. They said this; “our study demonstrates that, although there are sex/gender differences in the brain, human brains do not belong to one of two distinct categories: male brain/female brain.”

If you give a scientist two brains in a jar, one male and one female and ask him to tell you which one is female. He could not give you a definitive answer. The best he could do is, in my opinion, this one appears to have the characteristics of a female brain.

Those pesky XY Chromosomes

They are actually Xs and Ys.

Hermann Henking was the first person to find the X chromosome in 1890. He gave it that name because he had no better name for it. He reasoned that someone would give it a better name at a later time. Nettie Stevens discovered the Y chromosome in 1905. Someone suggested that since we have this X chromosome why not just call this one Y? There you have it. The sex chromosomes. We have 23 pairs of chromosomes that make up our bodies. 22 of them are just simply known as 1-22, but somehow 23 has to have a name, the sex chromosomes. Those two chromosomes classify us. They declare that we are either a male or a female. You are either XX (female) or XY (male). There are 11 hundred genes on the X chromosome. Only 4 percent are actually assigned to sex. The rest are busy doing other things.

However, over the years the more that scientist look at these sex chromosomes they are finding that it is not as simple as XY equals male. As it turns out there are a multitude of combinations. You can be XXY, XYY, or even XXO. There was a study done at a Scottish prison [13] and it was discovered that several of the inmates had XYY chromosomes. Since Y means male and men are aggressive then these men must be super male. There was even talk for a short time of screening developing fetuses and aborting these super males. However this theory was quickly debunked after it came out that there were also several of the inmates who were XXY but no one was talking about a super female male.

Another example of the inefficiency of the sex classification regards a young female athlete. Maria José Martínez-Patiño (born 10 July 1961) Maria was born with a vagina. As she entered puberty she developed breasts. Maria is a former Spanish hurdler whose dismissal from the Spanish Olympic team in 1986 for failing the gender test is a notable moment in the history of sex verification in sports. Martínez-Patiño is a XY woman who has Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (AIS). Her body was producing testosterone but did not recognize it. She passed a gender test in 1983 at the IAAF World Championships, and received her “certificate of femininity”. However she failed the sex chromatin test in 1985, and thus was ruled ineligible to participate in women’s athletics. The test was taken during the 1985 World University Games in Kobe, Japan as a result of her having forgotten to bring the result from a test two years before, which she had passed. The sex chromatin test was, at the time, the first step in the gender verification process, and not intended to provide a definitive and final decision. Official’s from the International Olympic Committee and the International Association of Athletics Federations routinely advised athletes to fake an injury after such a test so they could withdraw from competition quietly and protect their privacy. This is what Martínez-Patiño was advised to do, and she complied. Two months later she received a letter that classified her as male, citing her karyotype, 46, XY, though any perceived advantage she could be said to have is negated by her AIS: “she was disqualified for an advantage she did not have.” Can anyone really tell this woman that she is not truly a woman? [11]

Then there is the story of Ms. Dutee Chand one of India’s fastest runners. Ms. Chand was preparing for the upcoming Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. This was to be her first big international event as an adult. However she was forced to undergo gender testing if she wanted to compete in the upcoming games. The tests were meant to identify competitors whose chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, reproductive organs or secondary sex characteristics don’t develop or align in the typical way. When Chand’s results came in a few days later, the doctor said her “male hormone” levels were too high, meaning she produced more androgens, mostly testosterone, than most women. After the tests were done, she was barred from competing and all her medals and records where erased. When she was first told she was being barred because of her testosterone level, she didn’t understand anything the officials were saying. “I said, ‘What have I done that is wrong?’?” Ms. Chand had done nothing wrong. She had been raised as female since birth. In fact as far as anyone could tell she was female. In the two years after the event, Chand was at the center of a legal case that contests not only her disqualification but also the international policy her lawyers say discriminates against athletes with atypical sex development. [12]

These are just two stories. I could actually site many more. The point I am trying to make here is this: while there is no smoking gun that one can point to and say ‘look here is proof that being transgender is not a choice or lifestyle’, in every study that has been done they have concluded that while the study in itself is not positive proof, still there is something going on we don’t understand. If you have 20 studies that say there are indications that a trans brain is more like the gender they identify as, then, at least give us a chance to have a life. This is not a choice that we have decide to do because it’s popular. It is who we are.

In the next installment of this series I will get more into the actual studies that have been done. Until then. . .

I am strong, I am beautiful and Trans proud.

Chrissy

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Bibliography

[1] (Bureau 2019)

[2] (UCLA Williams Institute 2011)

[3] (Wikipedia Intersex)

[4] (U.S. Transgender Survey 2015) [5] American Journal of Psychiatry 2015)

[6] Study in the journal, Pediatrics 2016

[7] (Pew Research Center 2017)

[8] (National Transgender Discrimination Survey 2015)

[9] (Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Sex beyond the Genitalia: the human brain mosaic.)

[10] (The Amsterdam Cohort of Gender Dysphoria Study (1972-2015): Trends in Prevalence, Treatment, and Regrets)

[11] (Wikipedia Maria José Martínez-Patiño)

[12] (Wikipedia Dutee Chand)

[13] (State Hospital, Carstairs, Scotland, a hospital for the treatment of patients with dangerous, violent, or criminal propensities in conditions of special security.)

Tags: featured, science, Transgender

Category: Transgender Body & Soul, Transgender History