Looking for science behind Non-Binary genders- Help!

I stopped one person from dissing nb people before by pointing out about cultures not adhering to the binary - such as the Native American two-spirit people, the hijras of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and the fa'afafine of Polynesia. Pointing out that America wasn't the whole world seemed to stump that guy.

 

There hasn't been a lot of studies made on the subject, actually. However, if you ask psychiatrists that specialize on gender and are educated on the subject, they'll usually tell you that non-binary genders are real, in their experience as professionals dealing with people that claim it.

 

Well, according to my biogenetics professor at the University of Colorado, it's simply a variation on the same cause as binary transgender.

During the fifth week of pregnancy a fetus' body organizes physical sex characteristics, and during the eleventh week of pregnancy the brain organizes into brain wiring gender.

So, what causes the body and brain to organize one way or another? Hormones. During each of these weeks in an XY fetus there is supposed to be a testosterone wash, where a gene on the tip of the Y chromosome flushes the whole body with testosterone. The strength of this wash determines the degree to which the body is masculinized. Therefore you get a range of degrees of masculine traits in a male. In some cases the strength of the wash is genetic and you get whole families where everyone is a Greek god, or another family where they're more effeminate physical types.

In rare cases an XY (male) fetus will get zero testosterone and be entirely, completely female in physical form, but sterile. In an XX (female) fetus testosterone levels should be low to non-existent, but the mother produces some natural testosterone, and if hers is a little bit high, it can give the XX fetus physically masculine traits. But this has nothing to do with transgender. This is how we get more and less masculine men, more and less masculine women. It all depends on how much testosterone there was, both during that crucial time period in the fifth week of pregnancy, then later again during puberty.

The testosterone wash is repeated in the 11th week of pregnancy when the brain is organizing into either a female pattern or a male pattern (yes, men and women have distinctly different brains). Again, testosterone causes masculine patterns while a the default, without testosterone, the brain forms in a female pattern. Male brains and female brains are physically different. There are a number of places you can go online to find the difference, but it has to do with what parts of the brain are larger or more dominant, and the number of connections between different parts of the brain.

Again, sometimes this testosterone wash is either very weak or sporadic. Depending on how weak it is, the brain may organize into a mostly female pattern. So, you get a mostly or partially feminized brain in a male body. Some parts of the brain may be feminized, others masculinized, especially in a sporadic wash. So you get different degrees of transness - those who are have fully or almost fully feminized brains are the more extreme male to female types, while those with weak or sporadic testosterone may be non-binary - and the degrees between.

In an XX female fetuses, the same works in reverse. There should be low to no testosterone in the fetus' system during development. If for some reason sometimes there is testosterone present, and no one quite knows why, the XX fetus brain becomes masculinized. Occasionally an XX fetus will produce testosterone for unknown reasons. It is known that if the mother has hormonal issues it can affect the fetus in this way, but it's rare to track a pregnant woman's hormones.

So, that's the bare basics of it, as science currently understands the causes of transgender.

---------- Post added 22nd Apr 2017 at 01:51 PM ----------

The fa'afafine and fa'atama are not non-binary. They're trans Mtf and FtM, mostly. I'm sure some are non-binary, though, since the Samoans don't have a category in the middle between them