Can somebody please help me understand transgenders

Yeah you could've googled this and maybe worded your post a bit better, but I digress. Let me make something clear: genitalia does not define gender. Genitalia only indicates sex aka whether someone is biologically male or female. Gender identity is who a person feels they are. Cis gender people have a gender that matches their biological sex while with transgender people there is a mismatch between the two. The brains of transgender people have been shown to resemble considerably more the sex that matches their gender identity. It is believed that being transgender is a congenital condition which, to the best of my knowledge, refers to a condition that occurs before birth in the developmental stages of a fetus.

 

Transgender people typically have what's called gender dysphoria, which is discomfort or discontent with their biological sex, which leads to lots of distress and negative feelings about their bodies and stuff like pronouns. No one has found the exact cause of it yet, but there is scientific evidence showing that it has a biological basis. For me at least, it's not about wanting to be the other gender, it's about knowing that I am a guy, and I was just born wrong. It's sort of an innate feeling. They've found that certain parts of the brain of trans people match the brains of the gender they identify as, rather than their biological sex. So it's sort of like the brain and the body developed differently. It's hard to explain, sorry if I did a bad job of it.

 

Jacko, in the example you mentioned, that "man" doesn't know "he's" a woman despite "his" genitals; a woman feels that an intrinsic aspect of her identity is mismatched with her physical body. Even if that person only comes to feel that aspect of their identity later in life, it's still not a situation of a man wanting to be a woman. That language really must be removed from everyone's mindset when we talk about gender identity.

The incongruity of body and identity means that we have to consider the concepts of gender and sex as different things - it's also why many intersex people do not automatically identify as belonging to a "neuter" class of people, but rather as a particular gender according to the way their mind works. Someone can feel a distinct sense of physical and mental dissonance that's actually accentuated by their genitalia and physical shape in many cases. It's not a shallow feeling or a decision.

 

It's good that you're trying to understand. Even if you don't really get trans people, making an attempt shows a lot of acceptance and I appreciate that.

As for your questions, it's a little harder for someone to figure out their gender identity than their sexuality. It's difficult to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it, but basically people who are trans are a gender that's incongruent with their sex. Sometimes they realize simply because they feel like they're the gender they identify as, and a lot of the time they feel discomfort, aversion or disassociation with their bodies, especially once puberty starts. A lot of trans people want to change their sex, but throughout that process their gender remains the same.

Whilst we're talking about gender and sex, it seems like you're trying to be considerate so you might want to work on your phrasing. Using the word "sex" instead of gender is kinda misrepresentative when it comes to trans people. We're aware of what our sex is, but our gender doesn't match up with it. Also, try to avoid saying things like "he knows he's a woman" as it's pretty invalidating.

You are right that it's a lot different to what gays go through, but there are a lot of similarities as well. Coming out, discrimination and self discovery are things that everyone in the LGBT+ community has to deal with.

Hope I helped clear things up a bit!

 

It would certainly seem to be something completely biological, and at the same time highly complex. It is proven that there are different brain types and these are not exclusive to either physical gender.whilst they for historical reasons s are still labeled male and female brains, the fact is this is a scale, where the average biological female has brains tending to one side and the average biological male to the other side but this is certainly not exclusive. If it were the case then autism and asbergism would be exclusively a male condition, and this just isn't the case. This however is not enough to explain transgender.

It is however certainly not a choice made any more than you get to choose your sexuality, the Human brain still holds a lot of mystery. A man with a female sided brain will be a lot more empathic, probably more emotionally expressive for instance (I speak here of males just because as a man, I can contrast easier to the way I am scoring pretty High on the male side). This will not in and of itself make the person transgender and to be honest I haven't heard any results that would insist that a transgender born male shows any particular characteristics towards this scale. I would imagine though that it holds a relationship to how that person feels around others of the same biological gender.

My opinion is that there are going to be some quite deep seated things in the brain probably dating far back in evolutionary history that trigger gender identity upon which our human conscious intelligence has developed. An huge quantity of our emotional aspects for instance lie in what is termed the reptile brain. The bottom line is we have less conscious control over our identity etc than we would often like think.

 

Anecdotally, I can provide some other little clues here

1) you actually from a young age can typically just know there is a difference between boys and girls. You don't need to see the difference in genetalia to know this. There are just certain things which you subconsciously identify with. I would suggest you don't even need to see yourself in the mirror for this to be the case.

2) gor the male gender at least, regardless of sexuality, the same comment from a man or a woman can come across very differently and this is as true as a child as a adult, your response and the depth of potential hurt changes and is not consistent but the base reaction does not. The point being that regardless of the words used, the comment just doesn't hold precisely the same meaning. There is no good conscious reason for this to be the case. As a bisexual I can also state that this has nothing to do with sexuality. I could completely fancy a bloke and it still won't effect me in the same way.

3) there are deep seated differences in social organisation and the ways in which pecking order etc is established. This doesn't depend upon culture, it's not dependent upon the above mentioned brain type. It's just the way things are. With this in light it's hardly surprising that someone who us transgender will always feel wrong, and confused. It's not something taught, it's something you know. You may not like it, as a teenage you may rebel against it but it's just there.

 

I'm not going to pretend that I personally understand what it is like to feel to be transgender, but I will say that I hope you will be a little more empathetic with your choice of phrasing in future.

You are a male. Why don't you like women? How could you like men when there are perfectly good women out there? It doesn't make sense. Is it because you want to be gay instead of being straight?

Does the above sound rude? Yes it certainly does. But it's also very similar to how your post was structured.

I'm not trying to make you feel bad, I just hope you'll be a little more sensitive with your questions in future. After all, these are some very personal questions that you are asking.

Anyway, a very nice user named Yaeli on this forum posted her story which gave me a lot of good insight and you might find it helpful too. You can find that post here

 

Jacko, it's actually quite common not to understand this type of situation. The reality is that we are raised in a culture that has certain pre-conceptions about what it means to be a man or a woman. Therefore, we are raised to assume that male = penis and female = vulva. In other words, gender is something that is easy to understand, just look at the genitalia. However, are our cultural assumptions correct? Did you know that there are numerous other cultures around the world that have more than two genders, for example? The fact that gender is limited to male and female is a cultural assumption made by Western Culture.

So, let's talk about how things are understood within our community. This is based off of research and the numerous experiences of people within our community. What's important to understand is that you're confusing two different concepts: biological sex and gender.

Let's start with the concept of biological sex. On the face of it, this seems relatively easy to understand. Like I said previously, male = penis and female = vulva. Aside from that, I am sure that you know male's will typically have XY chromosomes and females will have XX chromosomes. However, it's actually more complicated than that, as some people eventually find out. First of all, it's important to understand that all human fetuses start off as female. As we develop in the womb our sex hormones kick in and nudge us down the correct path of development for our biological sex. This is why, as a male, you have nipples, which are just fancy ornaments on your chest. Nipples appear early on in fetal development, before the sex hormones kick in. Have you ever noticed a line going down the middle of your scrotum? Well, that's called the raphe line. In early fetal development, we all start out with a genital opening. In biological females, this is going to become the labia and vagina. However, when your sex hormones kicked in it caused that opening to fuse together, and this line or seam you see is the scar that resulted from that fusion. This line actually runs all the way from your asshole, and upwards through the posterior midline aspect of the penis. These are known as the perineal raphe, scrotal raphe, and penile raphe. It may be a little harder to see in an adult male because scars can fade over time (though I assure you, it is there), but it is very easy to see in a male infant. Also, it should be noted, that your penis started out as the same genital bud that becomes a female's clitoris. The way I like to think about it, I picture genitalia like belly buttons. Some people have innies and some people have outties, but they all started off the same.

So, why is all this important to know? Because there is a biological sex group that exists somewhere between female and male. These people are known as intersex. These individuals may be born with ambiguous genitalia, where you can't tell their biological sex simply by looking. Sometimes, they may have easily identifiable genitalia, but may not have XX or XY chromosomes. For example, they may have chromosomes like XXY. The differences may not be readily visible in other ways, for example, they may have internal testes instead of ovaries. There is a whole range of things that could make someone intersex, but in short they are biologically neither completely male nor completely female.

Okay, now that we've established the existence of intersex people, what does this mean for gender? Obviously, you've probably never met someone who identifies as intersex as their gender. The truth of the matter is someone who is intersex can identify as male, female, both, or neither--just like everyone else.

It's important to understand that there is a difference between biological sex and gender. For most of us our biological sex and gender are the same. We call this cisgender. Cis is a latin prefix meaning "on this side of". Individuals whose gender identity does not match their biological sex we refer to as transgender. Trans is the latin prefix meaning "on the other side of". Thus, cisgender literally means "on this side of gender" and transgender literally means "on the other side of gender".

Gender is also something biological. It's not something you can be taught. It's an internal feeling or sense of who you are and how you identify. You have a gender identity, and that gender identity happens to match your biological sex which is male. We'll discuss this in more detail in a moment, but I want to discuss with you how we came to understand the two as being separate.

In the past, we understood, because of intersex individuals, that there had to be a distinction between biological sex and gender. However, it was believed that gender was something that was largely socialized. In other words, if you were raised as a girl you'd think of yourself as a girl, regardless of the genitalia you possessed. Unfortunately, parents who gave birth to intersex children were distraught. Culturally, they had not been raised to understand how biological sex and gender work, and as a result when their child who was born intersex--mostly with ambiguous genitalia--it caused them a lot of emotional distress. This led to the rise of performing sex reassignment surgery on intersex children. The overwhelming majority of these children were surgically made female. They were surgically given female genitals, because, and I'll be blunt and crude about it, because it is easier surgically to dig a hole than to build a pole.

Now, it is important to understand that this wasn't just done to intersex children. Males who had their penises badly damaged during circumcision were also frequently surgically reassigned to females. A Doctor by the name of John Money was a major proponent of the theory that gender was something that was learned, and he had a huge influence over the field of biological sex and gender. His most famous case was that of David Reimer, who was known in medical circles as the "John/Joan" case. You can read about David Riemer in full here. This case and situation are too long to go into depth. The short story is this: David and his twin brother were unnecessarily diagnosed with phimosis as infant children, and were recommended to be circumcised. David's circumcision was botched, and he lost his penis. They elected not to perform the circumcision on his twin brother, who shortly after had his issue with phimosis clear up all on its own. David's parents were obviously distraught. That is when they encountered Dr. Money, who encouraged the parents to have David undergo sex reassignment surgery to become female based on his theories, and they agreed. David then became known as Brenda. However, David--now Brenda--was then raised as a female. However, David never fully identified as female, and eventually became convinced that he was a male. At 15 years old he began identifying as male, despite being raised female. David was essentially made transgender.

Unfortunately, Dr. Money was an evil bastard. He lied to the medical community about David's case, concealing evidence, and he continued to promote the sexual reassignment of children. Fortunately, another Doctor by the name of Milton Diamond uncovered the truth and exposed Dr. Money. It soon became apparent that David wasn't the only patient that Dr. Money had lied about, and it was the beginning of the end of his theory regarding gender. Sadly, by this time Dr. Money's philosophy had become deeply entrenched in the medical community, and many, many, many children had been forced to undergo sex reassignment surgery.

Gender is now understood to be separate from biological sex. However, gender identity is also somehow innate and biological. We do not yet fully understand it. Similarly, we do not fully understand sexual orientation. Our best science tells us that these things, like with many intersex children, have to do with developments in the womb during pregnancy.

Now, let's talk about gender identity some more. Gender as I said previously is a feeling, a sort of internalized expression, in the same way your sexual orientation is a feeling or internalized expression. People who are transgender may experience a condition known as gender dysphoria, which may influence how they feel about certain parts of their (or their entire) bodies. However, the degree that someone experiences dysphoria varies, and some people who are transgender do not experience dysphoria at all. Transgender people who experience dysphoria will frequently seek to surgically modify their bodies in such a way as to combat that dysphoria, and bring their bodies into alignment with how they feel about them. The degree that someone who is transgender decides to do this varies, and some may not opt for any surgeries at all. Some transgender people may take hormones and others may not. Some transgender people may elect to have sex reassignment surgery, while others may not. All of these physical modifications are personal choices, and do not influence their gender identity. This means that someone who may appear to you as a stereotypical biological male, may identify as female.

So, how do you handle these situations? Well, sometimes you accidentally mistake someone's gender identity. This happens, and it's okay. Ideally, they will correct you, and the proper response to this is to accept their explanation without question. It is considered rude to question someone on their gender identity or gender presentation (more on that in a moment). As a result, if you encounter someone who may appear male to you, and they wish to be referred to as a female with female pronouns, then it is considered highly offensive to refuse to do that. Thus, you would refer to her as she, and you would think of her as a female. This can be difficult, if you are not used to it, especially since we were not raised to think this way. However, over time it becomes easier.

You may also encounter someone whose gender identity you are unsure about. If this happens, it is usually polite to ask how they identify. It is important to do this as tactfully as possible, and with respect to the individual--strive not to cause them shame or embarrassment. Once you know how they identify, refer to them appropriately.

You may also sometimes encounter someone who does not wish male or female pronouns being used. If they wish a different pronoun used to refer to them, it is considered rude and offensive not to use it. Yes, even if it sounds weird like zir instead of her. Some people prefer gender neutral pronouns.

Sometimes, especially if you feel uncomfortable asking someone about their gender identity, or you simply wish to avoid causing them public embarrassment, you may wish to use some traditional gender neutral pronouns. Two easily used pronouns are "their" and "they". "They went to the bathroom." Rather than, "She/he went to the bathroom." "Their stuff was placed on the table." Rather than, "His/her stuff was placed on the table." This allows you to show respect by remaining gender neutral, while avoiding accidentally misgendering someone.

You should also never use the word "it" as a pronoun for a person. "It" is used for objects and not people. Calling someone "it" is more or less a slur in our community. Never, ever do that. Calling someone "it" is no different than someone calling you a faggot. That is how offensive it is to label someone an object--it is dehumanizing, whether intentional or not.

Now, there is something else that is essential we need to discuss. This is gender expression. Gender expression is similar to gender identity but it is also very different. You are likely familiar with feminine gay men, or very masculine lesbian women. This is a form of gender expression. This does not necessarily mean that they are transgender. Gender expression is exactly what it sounds like--the way someone expresses themselves. Everyone has a gender expression. Some of us may be stereotypical and express ourselves in conformity with the social expectations of our gender while others may not. This is accepted and normal within our community. Like people's gender identity, individuals gender expression is to be respected.

Finally, I want to discuss the gender binary. As we are raised within the heterosexual community, we are encouraged to believe that there are two genders: male and female. However, this is entirely cultural. There are other cultures that have more than two genders. The same is true for our community. Transgender is an umbrella term, not only including trans men (biological females who identify as males) and trans women (biological males who identify as females), but a whole range of other gender identities. Someone may identify, for example, as bigender, feeling that they have both male and female aspects of their gender. Another person may identify as genderqueer, feeling that they don't quite fit neatly into any binary gender mold. Another person may identify as null or agender, feeling that they don't have a specific gender identity at all. There are others as well.

It is not necessary that you actually "know what it feels like" so to speak to hold these gender identities, because the truth of the matter is you can't know what it feels like. What is important is that you seek to try and understand what someone means by the labels they use for their gender identity and that you respect it. You don't necessarily have to understand it, but you do have to respect it.

Respect for an individuals identity is one of the cornerstone values of our community. Just as you want people to respect your identity as a gay male, it is important that you show that same degree of respect to others, even when you may not necessarily be able to understand. Thus, when someone says to you, 'this is what I am experiencing, this is what I am feeling' you respect and accept it. After all, only they can know what they are experiencing and feeling on the inside. When you show this respect to others, they will return this respect back to you.

I hope this helps you have a better understanding of biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression. I also hope it helps you navigate any sticky situations that you may encounter. However, if you remember nothing else from this simply remember: respect is essential. If you have any questions, I or someone else will try an answer them to the best of our ability.

 

I'm only going to speak for myself because I'm not sure how others feel or if they could relate to my experience or not. So, here it goes.

I had always felt out of place, I wasn't interested in wearing over the top feminine clothing, it was always a tie or gender neutral clothes like a giraffe shirt or jeans. I started cutting my hair short, I would look at other guys in my classes and take notes on what they did, how they acted and what they wore. The older I got, the more I thought about being male and wanting to appear male. Though I must admit that it was hard for me to mentally and even physically transition due to the fact that I had such a hard time after coming out as Bisexual.

I think the best way to describe it, is that it's a feeling. If you can imagine the moment you realized that you started liking the same sex, and possibly had that "Oh.. I like men but I think I have for awhile.." moment.. that's what it feels like. I've tried many times to push it away and tried to convince myself that I should just settle with what I had but the feeling hasn't gone away and I don't think it ever will.

 

This.


It's a deeply rooted biological abnormality; the brain and the body says different things; and when this clashes with our society, sh*t gets real and life starts to suck.

 

Thank you that has cleared up several little questions for me As well which I hadn't worked out how to ask politely

---------- Post added 5th Aug 2015 at 07:45 AM ----------

One final question I will ask is this. I know you answered that one can use 'their' as a neutral pronoun. Is this the appropriate pronoun with which to use in respect to gender binary people etc unless otherwise indicated by the person?

 

Of course. Most people will likely not notice that you dropped the gender specific pronouns if you do it properly. English has long used "they" and "their" as singular non-gender specific pronouns, though some argue that they should only be used as a plural pronoun and not singular. Here is the backstory on "they" and "their" as pronouns in a video from Merriam-Webster (and why it is appropriate to use as a singular):

[YOUTUBE]d7k-20y5WKU[/YOUTUBE]

Here is what the non-binary wiki has to say on it.

The fact of the matter is we use these pronouns in their singular form all the time. Thus, they sound relatively normal to our ears, and do not require as much adjustment as inventing an entirely new word such as hir or ze. You can use them in common speech everyday, and it likely won't even attract attention. That's one of the advantages of using these pronouns when you are unsure of someones gender, as it avoids having to embarrass them by asking.

As a general rule, though, if you know someones gender identity you should use the gender specific pronoun of their preference. However, using they, their, and them as non-gender specific pronouns is not generally considered offensive, as far as I am aware, though of course it can vary from individual to individual--barring a situation where someone has requested a specific gendered pronoun, of course. Once again, if someone has specifically given you their gender identity and requested a gender specific pronoun, that is what should be used.

 

Can you imagine how would you feel if you wake up tomorrow and your body was a girl's?

Well, that's all you need to know to understand transgenders.

 

I would like to point out that not all transgender people experience body disphoria or want to transition.