Understanding Transgender, for Cis Folks
By: Paul Thomas Zenki
Tags: Health, LGBTQ, Science, Culture, Neuroscience

This neurological view of mismatch aversion has had profound repercussions for our understanding of several other types of body dysphorias. Among these is the feeling that a person’s gender identity differs from their body gender, which is gender dysphoria. Quite literally, the person is born with a mind, a soul, whose gender fails to match that of the body in which it finds itself:

During fetal development, different aspects of sexuality are set in motion in parallel: sexual morphology (external anatomy), sexual identity (what you see yourself as), sexual orientation (what sex you are attracted to), and sexual body image (your brain’s internal representation of your body parts). [These typically] harmonize during physical and social development… but they can become uncoupled, leading to deviations that shift the individual toward one or the other end of the spectrum of normal distribution. (Ramachandran)

It’s important to understand that this isn’t a binary situation. Sex and gender exist as a broad spectrum of manifestations, both in the body and the soul. (I am using the term “soul” here to refer to a person’s conscious experience, the sentient mind, because at the end of the day that is what souls are.) Yes, there is a bell-curve to it, and some physical and mental manifestations of sex and gender are much more common than others. But the point is, the experience of “being” a person of a certain gender — wherever on the spectrum that may fall — while having the body of a different sort of gender is rooted in biological reality.

So it is simply not correct to say that a person who is trans-male was born “biologically female” or that a person who is trans-female was born “biologically male”. Our brains and our genitalia are all part of our biology. What is correct is that they were born transgender.

It’s not possible to fully imagine what being a transgender person actually feels like if you are not one, just as it’s not possible to fully imagine what it’s like being any different gender. But imagining how you might feel should at least open the door to compassion and understanding for folks who are going through something which you haven’t, and are dealing with it and living their lives the best way they see to do so, according to their choices.

But where we, as a society, have the most trouble figuring out how to approach the reality of transgendered people is in dealing with children who experience mismatch aversion involving their sexual identities. On the one hand, our laws generally hold that prepubescent children cannot understand sexual maturity and therefore cannot be in a position to reasonably consent to anything having to do with it. Therefore, some people reason, it is a form of child abuse to begin any sort of gender transition in young kids who express their experience of feeling that they “are” a different sex than their genitalia would indicate. What if it’s just a phase? Or rebellion? What if they don’t understand the profound consequences of the process, that it’s not the same thing as playing dress-up?

On the other hand, we would do well to consider the very real terror of a gender-mismatched child with a boy’s body map, but a little girl’s body, facing the prospect of developing breasts and a uterus capable of bearing children. Or a gender-mismatched child with a girl’s body map, but a little boy’s body, anticipating the inevitable development of an enlarged penis and testicles, a deep voice, and a beard. If you are cis-gendered, imagine being told at that age that your own body was soon to grow into the adult form of the opposite gender, and knowing that the metamorphosis drew nearer with each passing day.

As long as outdated notions persist of gender mismatch as a social or psychological problem, rather than an innate issue of biology and neurology, of genuine and innate identity, we are passively dooming these kids to what is now at least a partially avoidable fate. And we are dooming ourselves to using inappropriate instruments to assess the situation and determine the best course of action in each individual case. This does not mean that we start prescribing hormone therapy to every tomboy who says “I hate being a girl” or to any little boy who says he’d rather join the Brownies than the Cub Scouts. It does mean that when children start indicating that they identify as a gender other than the one on their birth certificate, they are assured that they are not crazy, and we begin exploring the possibility that gender mismatch might be the issue.

And as cis-gendered adults, by understanding that gender mismatch is biologically real, we can start treating folks who gender-identify in different ways from ourselves with the respect and dignity they deserve as fellow humans. We can stop demeaning others and insisting that they’re seeking attention or in need of counseling to set them right. We can stop assuming that our own body-mind alignment is “correct” rather than merely common. And stop labeling a neurological configuration as a “sickness” or “perversion”.

The truth, it is said, shall set you free. And God knows we can all use a little more freedom from alienation and bigotry right about now.