The Science and the Religion of Being a Transsexual
When deciding how to go about setting up the main issues in this gender article I came ot the conclusion that MOSTLY the people who have a problem with the idea of transsexuals are Religious people, usually the ones who are the least educated among them. In fact, while not all Religious people would like to see me and people like me dead, the only people who would kill me for being a transsexual ARE Religious people. (Don’t start writing yet READ. You might learn something. The comment box will still be there at the end of the article. I promise)
As for Religious folks, religion and science have never truly been at odds, but religious people have often denied science. The most glaring example of this has been the near excommunication of Galileo for coming up with the preposterous notion that the earth travels around the sun, rather than the other way around. (What a godless heretic!)
For most of the course of western culture, we have been content to consider that gender is found in between the legs, rather than in between the ears. Penis= boy. Vagina= girl. I say “western culture” because eastern culture has always recognized more than two genders. Thailand’s Kattooey and India’s Hijra are not 20th century phenomenon. The native American cultures all have reference and give credence to the idea of “two spirited” people, that being people who are both genders. Over the past 50 years however, science has struggled to make sense of abnormalities of gender and they have so far found and named over 400 biologically driven gender disorders. Some involve XXY or XYY chromosomes rather than the normal XY or XX. MOST, however do not. Most biologically recognized gender disorders are found in typically XX or XY people.
Throughout history one in 70,000 live births has resulted in what doctors call “ambiguous” genitalia. That is, that it is impossible from looking, to make a determination. For years, they made those people girls. In some cases it worked out. In others it went horribly wrong. Common practice now in those situations is to let the children develop ambiguously until they choose a preferred gender, and then to do the operations necessary to give the child the appropriate gender. There have been case where everything looked normalâÂ?¦where a child hit puberty and got very ill because the child that was considered a boy was starting to ovulate, but with no fallopian tubes or other way of releasing the blood in a pseudo uterine wall. It has been rumored since her birth, and never proven or disproved that Actress Jamie Lee Curtis (who adopted her children) was born with XXY chromosomes, and ambiguous genitalia. In any case, medical case history abounds with biological chromosomal and genital abnormalities that seem to defy the notion that gender is a two-sided issue. Indeed, genital abnormalities seem so common as to suggest that gender exists on a continuum.
Interestingly though, research among male to female transsexuals has turned up some other very startling information about other areas of the body effected by gender, other than genitalia. For example, there is a gland in the brain known as the hypothalamus. It’s about the size of a pea, but is considered the brain’s master gland. It runs the body’s entire endocrine system. It’s the hypothalamus that tells the pituitary gland whether to hook a body up with a pair of ovaries or a pair of testes. As seen above, sometimes that gland gets confused and makes ambiguous genitalia, often with one testicle and one ovary. This is important, because the introduction of testosterone into the body versus estrogen, determines a large number of things about the bone structure, skin, hair follicles, voice box, muscle and fat distribution, size, etc.. Typically a man has a larger hypothalamus than a woman. It has been determined in post mortem autopsy that the hypothalamus of transsexuals is typically the size of their PREFERRED gender rather than their so called “birth gender”. This is true of both those who have transitioned and those who have not.
It doesn’t stop at the hypothalamus though. For example. MOST transsexual women (though not all) have the elbows of a woman. What I mean by that is this: if you are a woman and you stick your arms straight out in front of you, palms up, you will see that at your elbows, the natural angle of your arms points out away from your body, flaring out. (as if designed to fit neatly on wider hips.) Men’s arms will continue straight forward. If you don’t see what I am saying, compare arms with someone of the opposite sex. You will see what I mean. You will not find a woman with straight arms. You will also not find a man with the flared out arms of a girl who does not identify as transsexual. The problem with using this medium to determine who is and is not transsexual is that while there are no non-male to female transsexuals with arms like that, there ARE male to female transsexuals who have the arms of a normal man. It’s sort of a “all zots are zips, but not all zips are zots” sort of thing.
There are other things too though. For example, if you take a girl and a guy of the same height and measure their thighs, the man will typically have longer thighs. A Male to female Transsexual will typically, though once again, not always have a thigh length that is somewhere in between the averages. Another example is digit ratio of the hands, while digit ratios between men and women are a little more all over the board, typically a transsexual’s digit ratio is more in line with the greater majority of those in their preferred gender than those in their “birth gender”. (look up digit ratio. I’m not gonna do ALL the work for you). Male to female transsexuals will usually have a problem buying jeans as we TEND to be wider in the hips and thighs than our non-trans males counterparts.
I hesitate to take the physical thing too far, because of the exceptions to the guidelines. That exist. We are however dealing with a continuum of results rather than clear cut evidence. I am speaking of tendenciesâÂ?¦ NOT absolutes. With enough tendencies though I think the case becomes more and more clear that gender exists on a continuum, rather than on opposite sides of a fence. Further evidence of this idea is found in hormone levels. Typically a male to female transsexual will have either a significantly higher or a significantly lower level of testosterone than the average male, and the female to male transsexual will have a significantly higher or lower level of estrogen than the average female. Another interesting proof to me of the continuum on which gender exists is how the body is affected by artificially introduced hormones. A female to male transsexual whose estrogen levels are blocked and who are given testosterone will begin to have deeper voices, facial hair, male pattern baldness, fat redistribution in line with a man’s, including a significant loss in breast size, an increase in body hair, and their skin will lose the soft layer of fat that make’s women’s skin so soft and tender. A Male to female transsexual, on the other hand, whose testosterone is blocked and who has estrogen introduced to the body will find that male pattern baldness stops where it left off, body hair will diminish to be like that of a woman, breasts will develop, fat and muscle will re-distribute to be more like that of a woman, and the skin will grow that extra layer of fat than makes a woman’s skin so soft. The younger a person is when these hormones are introduced, the more successful the person is in completely blending into their preferred gender. Once bones are grown, that’s it. They aren’t changing. Once male pattern baldness starts, it can be stopped, but it cannot be reversed. Deeper voices mean longer vocal chords, so once the vocal chords grow they do not shrink. (By the way.. in case ou wonderedâÂ?¦ testosterone makes a person less emotional, and a person going on estrogen had better be prepared to cry a lot more)
In any case, though, the significant effects on the human body of testosterone or estrogen, suggest that the chemicals estrogen and testosterone are more responsible for the effects of gender than anything else. Those two hormones are mainly secreted by the ovaries and testes, but also are produced in the other endocrine glands as well. Which is produced, goes back to that hypothalamus that we talked about already (incidentally, no one has done a study yet, but I find it very interesting that ADHD in boys is also thought to be a hypothalamus abnormality cause by a shrunken or partially atrophied hypothalamus)
So that established, it appears to me that the SCIENCE of gender is fairly well clear that gender is not as cut and dry as looking between the legs for the answer.
Now let’s look at what the BIBLE has to say:
The ONLY reference to anything CLOSE to gender abnormalities in the Bible is one verse in Deuteronomy 22, where is makes it pretty clear that a man wearing a woman’s clothes and a woman wearing a man’s clothes is an abomination. There are some who believe that the Hebrew version of this verse deals with the ceremonial religious clothing that one would wear to worship God in the temple, but I will choose not to go there. In part, I choose not to go there because the other sundry laws in that chapter make that entire chapter of the bible null and void, and I can’t see that anyone else would want to be the first to step to the plate to defend this chapter wherein the bible makes is clear that if a man rapes a single woman, he can pay her father for her and marry her, but never divorce her. Instead, I will simply say, that the science of gender that we just discussed seems to suggest to me that gender is more involved than genitalia and that having a penis or a vagina isn’t what makes a person male or female. Therefore, if that verse were taken as God’s inarguable opinion on cross-dressing, it could be suitably argued that someone like myself is actually sinning when I put on the clothes of a man. The science of gender seems to be clear that I could be a woman with the wrong genitalia rather than a man with the wrong brain or morality structure. Still though, I feel that Deuteronomy 22 is likely a Jewish behavior code, designed to set a new nation apart from it’s Egyptian counterpart and not a verse regarding transsexuals.
Christians tend to enjoy the new testament better than the old, and I can only find ONE verse that deals with anything remotely close to that which transsexuals deal with on a daily basis. Jesus makes it very clear that “If your eye causes you to stumble”, you should pluck it out, and that if your arm causes you to stumble, you should cut it off. A transsexual person’s internal conflict of gender leaves them unable to function. The suicide rate among transsexual people is ASTRONOMICAL, and were there more of us, it would be considered an epidemic of suicide. We find ourselves alone in a world that does not see who we truly are and with a god with whom most of us who suffer from this, find ourselves angry. How dare he allow us suffer a biological abnormality that results in being ostracized by so many! I have made my peace with God, but many do not. In any case, it seems clear to me that the words of Jesus are not limited to eyes and arms, and that he was graphic for a reasonâÂ?¦. To demonstrate how important it is that we cut off every piece of us that keeps ups from walking in step with our God.
I have heard Christians talk about my lifestyle as if the wearing of a dress or makeup makes me a sexual deviant (despite the fact that I am celibate). I have heard people who have suggested that I just be gayâÂ?¦ though 90% of male to female transsexuals that end up in a relationship find themselves in lesbian relationships. My lifestyle is really like all of yours. I am not out gallivanting like a hedonist. I am not a slut. This is not about who I want to have sex with. In my case, I believe I truly am TWO spiritedâÂ?¦. Both male AND female. I have to give credence however to the fact that as long as I am in this “male” body, I must live as only half of me. As a person who could pass as fully female however, my interest and ability in things that are typically very male is far more societal acceptable than being “male” and engaging myself in those interests and abilities that are typically female.
I have heard the argument that God made me this way for a reason and I should just stay that way. I think that Siamese twins, people born with a cleft palate or tumors, or extra limbs might take as much issue with you on that as I do. God made us in his image. One of the things that we can do is transform� better ourselves� cut off the impediments to the abundant life that Jesus claimed we could have. Someone who is not gender dysphoric is easily confused by men who dress as women for sexual gratification or for entertainment. I understand that confusion, but the issue of gender dysphoria is very real, and many people every year die as a result of an inability to cope with the horrific nature of being trapped in a societal protocol that does not fit who we are.
In the end, it’s not the job of a religious person to agree OR disagree with me. If I am living in sin, that is up to the creator, and ONLY the creator to deal with. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t effect you one way or another how I choose to live my life as it relates to the gender role I take on. However, maybe a bit of an education on the matter will prove helpful.
