![]() The general belief was that their upbringing - a triumph of nurture over nature - would make them truly female. Their parents were advised to raise them as girls and never to tell them about their condition at birth. Since it is easier for surgeons to make a vagina than a penis, most of these babies were made female. Doctors thought the humane solution, to spare such children from being ostracized, was to perform surgery to make them one sex or the other. ![]() Some of the most compelling evidence for the idea of gender identity being hard-wired into the brain comes from medical reports on people who were born in the 1950s and 1960s with birth defects involving their genitals. In other cases, some women with a condition that exposed them to high levels of testosterone before birth identify as male - but many more with the same condition do not. For instance, there are people with XY chromosomes - which makes them genetically male - who look, act and feel like women because their bodies cannot react to male hormones. But it’s quite likely that gender identity is something more complicated than simply having a specific genetic marker.Īpart from transgender issues, other conditions make it clear that defining male and female is not so simple. It’s possible that our relatively nascent ability to identify genes simply hasn’t advanced sufficiency. The findings are similar for twins who have Type 1 diabetes, which is known to have a strong genetic component. Identical twins are near matches, genetically fraternal ones are not. In studies of twins, if one is transgender, the other is far more likely to also be transgender if they are identical, rather than fraternal twins. As far as we in the mainstream biological-medical community understand it in 2018, it is hard-wired, it is biological, it is not entirely hormonal, and we do not have identified genes, so we cannot specifically say it is genetic.” “What we don’t know are all of the biological factors at play that explain gender identity. “We know that there is a significant, durable biological underpinning to gender identity,” Dr. Yet the transgender experience points to gender as something else entirely: how a person feels. While many of us understand intellectually that it’s not that simple, at a gut level we think of gender as some combination of visible traits and social expectations. Most of us instinctively think of gender as something outward. The last sentence of the above-quoted excerpt is the key to the controversy. He is also president of the United States Professional Association of Transgender Health.īut exactly what does determine gender identity - a person’s powerful, core knowledge of who they are - is not so clear. Safer, an endocrinologist and executive director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Mount Sinai Health System in New York. “The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s not true for decades,” said Dr. Researchers who have studied gender issues and provided health care to people who do not fit the typical M/F pigeonholes said that the Trump administration’s latest plan to define gender goes beyond the limits of scientific knowledge. ![]() New York Times (“ Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender, Experts Say“):ĭefining gender as a condition determined strictly by a person’s genitals is based on a notion that doctors and scientists abandoned long ago as oversimplified and often medically meaningless. The Trump administration’s move to define gender based on genitalia at birth is likely to be popular with a large swath of the country but it is decades out of touch with scientific understanding of the matter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |