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Over the past seventy years, one of the basic understandings of our culture –gender—has lost its clarity. In most cultures, in most eras, sex and gender were viewed as binary. One was either male or female and it was easy to tell the difference. The word gender was mostly reserved for linguistic studies. Thus, the French word “la tête” was feminine, while “le visage” was masculine. Today gender is no longer binary, no longer synonymous with physiology, and freighted with political, social, cultural and religious controversy.
In the twenty-first century, there are three main ways to look at gender:
Anatomical Gender: The traditional way of assigning gender is based on physiology, on genitalia. However, some people have a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. These people are called intersex and they make up 2% of the population according to Blackless et. al. Some intersex people have surgery or other treatment for both medical and psychological reasons, often to eliminate expressions of ambiguous genders. Not surprisingly, the whole issue of these treatments, especially on children too young to consent has been controversial.
Gender Identity: Gender identity is defined as a personal conception of oneself as male or female (or rarely, both or neither). As we’ll see below the questions of where gender identity comes from, its stability and its importance in law and social norms is fraught.
Gender Expression: Gender expression typically reflects a person’s gender identity (their internal sense of their own gender). Gender expression is separate and independent both from sexual orientation and gender assigned at birth. A type of gender expression that is considered atypical for a person’s externally perceived gender may be described as gender non-conforming.
All of these are separate from gender attraction as expressed as either homosexual or heterosexual. Thus a person who is anatomically a male but identifies as a female, may be attracted to either males or females.
Origins of Gender Identity. The clearest discussion I could find of this murky topic was in this blog from Harvard University (If you are interested in this topic, you should take a look at the Harvard site which includes over 600 comments that raise all kinds of scientific, sociological, religious and political points of view). “Those persons who identify as transgender (the “T” in many queer community acronyms) are those who identify with a gender that differs from their assigned sex, as opposed to those who identify with their assigned gender (cisgender). The subset of transgender individuals who choose to undergo sexual reassignment surgery are often denoted as transsexual. Finally, there is gender dysphoria or a conflict between a person’s physical or assigned gender and the gender with which he/she/they identify.
According to a 2011 study, there are nearly 700,000 transgender individuals in the U.S., or 0.3% of the adult population. Of those who identify as transgender, a majority have taken some steps to transition from one gender to another.
So where does gender identity come from? Like all human traits gender identity derives from a mixture of nature and nurture, of biology and the environment. The evidence for some biological contribution derives first from studies of twins. Several studies have shown that identical twins are more often both transgender than fraternal twins, indicating that there is indeed a genetic influence for this identity. In addition, brain studies found that male-to-female transgender women had a BSTc (special region of the brain) more closely resembling that of cisgender women than men in both size and cell density, and that female-to-male transgender men had BSTcs resembling cisgender men. There is some evidence that brain development is affected by an insensitivity of the fetus to estrogen.
On the other hand, psychological studies that have attempted to unravel the causes of transsexuality have largely failed to gain traction in modern times. For many years, psychologists characterized transgender identity as a psychological disorder. Some, for instance, believed it was a coping mechanism to “rectify” latent feelings of homosexuality, or the result of environmental trauma or “poor” parenting. No studies have been able to demonstrate this, however, and these “findings” are considered outdated and have been highly criticized for their discriminatory implications. Other psychologists have attempted to differentiate groups of transsexuals based on factors such as IQ and ethnicity; these theories have been overwhelmingly rejected due to poor study design and issues with ethics.
Conclusions
There are a small number of men and women whose physiology differs from their gender identity. These people call themselves transsexuals. There is scientific evidence that the divergence of sexual identity from physiological markers is caused by brain development; people who are have anatomies that mark them as one gender or the other, sometimes have brains that look more like people of the opposite gender. These individuals identify themselves as the gender that reflects their brain development rather than their physical genitalia. There is no evidence that this dysphoria is caused by sociological or environmental factors. Our next post will discuss the proposition of sociological drivers of gender identity as another case of agnostology.