Opinion | Transgender biology debates should focus on the brain, not the body - The Was... - 0 views
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trans neuroscience feeling biology debates body
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what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It’s about chromosomes, right?
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Well, not entirely. Because not every person with a Y chromosome is male, and not every person with a double X is female. The world is full of people with other combinations: XXY (or Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (or Trisomy X), XXXY, and so on. There’s even something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a condition that keeps the brains of people with a Y from absorbing the information in that chromosome. Most of these people develop as female, and may not even know about their condition until puberty — or even later.
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What the research has found is that the brains of trans people are unique: neither female nor male, exactly, but something distinct.
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It’s a fraught topic, because brains are a collection of characteristics, rather than a binary classification of either/or
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yet scientists continue to study the brain in hopes of understanding whether a sense of the gendered self can, at least in part, be the result of neurology
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The study found that adolescent boys and girls who described themselves as trans responded like the peers of their perceived gender.
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t there’s a problem with using neurology as an argument for trans acceptance — it suggests that, on some level, there is something wrong with transgender people, that we are who we are as a result of a sickness or a biological hiccup.
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trying to open people’s hearts by saying “Check out my brain!” can do more harm than good, because this line of argument delegitimizes the experiences of many trans folks. It suggests that there’s only one way to be trans — to feel trapped in the wrong body, to go through transition, and to wind up, when all is said and done, on the opposite-gender pole. It suggests that the quest trans people go on can only be considered successful if it ends with fitting into the very society that rejected us in the first place.
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All the science tells us, in the end, is that a biological male — or female — is not any one thing, but a collection of possibilities.
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No one who embarks upon a life as a trans person in this country is doing so out of caprice, or a whim, or a delusion. We are living these wondrous and perilous lives for one reason only — because our hearts demand it.
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what we need now is not new legislation to make things harder. What we need now is understanding, not cruelty. What we need now is not hatred, but love.
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the important thing is not that they feel like a woman, or a man, or something else. What matters most is the plaintive desire, to be free to feel the way I feel.