We don’t normally hype any particular source of material during our blogs. However, this is a special case, because we intend to reprint selected parts of this source material to help clarify The Truth relating to its implications surrounding TRANSPHOBIA. Lest you think this reading is just one person’s opinion of The Truth, we want to point out that at the close of this book there is a bibliography listing the sources used to bring this true-life story to the written page. There are 38 references listed! In addition, the author states: “Much of the material for this book was drawn from hundreds of hours of interview with the . . . family, doctors, lawyers, . . . school counselor, and others. The research also included extensive personal papers, journals, medical records, court depositions, photographs and videos, and an unpublished memoir . . ., all courtesy of the . . . family. Some of the events in this book also were witnessed firsthand by the author.” The author “ . . . spent almost 4 years reporting this immersive account . . . “. In addition, the author lists 28 resources, including suicide prevention, equality advocates, legal help, and youth and family organizations. The author also lists 16 definitions in the glossary to better inform the uneducated in the trans arena. So, why do we rely so heavily on this one publication? We think the answer is quite clear. At FREEDOMGOFORTH.COM, we spend an inordinate amount of time researching each and every blog we post. While your 7 minutes spent reading one of our typical blogs of 1400 to 2000 words, we will spend on average two to four hours in research for each minute you read. In the case of TRANSPHOBIA, since this area of discussion is so broad in its implications, and vast in the amount of available source material, it was extremely beneficial to provide to you this short read, what it took one author 4 years to write. Only a full read of this book can bring the story of Nicole and her family into proper focus, and we encourage all to spend the time to do so, as this is one powerful way, among many, to stop the spread of TRANSPHOBIA and bring The Truth to enlighten the uninformed. We trust the selected excerpts from this book, the “CliffsNotes” if you will, will be most valuable in this pursuit.
“When Oprah asked Boylan (Jennifer Finney Boylan, an English professor at Colby college in Maine, and a transgendered woman) about the origin of her condition, she said, ‘No one really knows. I think there has to be a medical component. It’s something you have from the age of two or three. Some people think that it has to do with the secretion of hormones in the mother’s womb around the sixth week of pregnancy’.”
“If there is no one place in the brain that provides a sense of self, then perhaps there’s no one place in the brain that provides us with a picture of that sense of self. After all, the feeling we have of being a body arises from several disparate places in the brain. There are a hundred million cells in the eye responsible for picking up visual information from the world, but they are connected to just a million neurons, the cells responsible for signaling the brain about what is being seen. In other words, the brain discards more visual information than it lets in. Which means the message from perception is constantly being massaged. There is no simple act of perception. What there is, is expectation. Coins appear larger to poor children than to those who are well off. Food-related words are clearer and appear brighter on the page to people who are hungry. Everything in our environment influences who we are and how we see ourselves – even our own bodies. Scientists have conducted experiments that show that people who deliberately take on classic poses of dominance and stand, for instance, with their legs apart and hands on their hips, even for just a few minutes, substantially increase their self-confidence. Ask someone to hunch over or curl up, and they will lose that confidence. What is the mirror image seen by children who believe themselves to be the other gender? The body tells a story, but the story can change what a body sees, and a body can change a person’s mind.”
“In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the national debate on transgender rights was still mostly sotto voce, and advocacy centered on legal documents.” “No one really knew how many people in the United States identified as transgender. Research was plentiful on lesbian, gay and bisexual people, but not on those identifying as transgender. In fact, getting someone to admit to being transgender, even anonymously, was extremely difficult, which made research nearly impossible.”
In the next paragraph the author gets somewhat technical. We ask the reader to consider this section carefully, as seeking out The Truth requires exploration in areas unfamiliar and often challenging.
“The Xs and Ys of Sex. Humans have long thought they could control the sex of a newborn or, at the very least, influence whether a baby would be born male or female. Ancient Romans believed if a pregnant woman carried the egg of a chicken close to her breast, she would give birth to a boy. Aristotle contended that conception on the day of a strong north wind would result in a male child, on the day of a strong south wind, a female. In the first century, Pliny the Elder listed a host of recipes to increase the odds of a woman bearing a male child: Either the man or the woman should drink three cups of water containing lakeweed seeds before the evening meal for forty consecutive nights prior to conception, or drink the juice from the male part of the parthenon plant mixed with raisin wine. Last, but certainly not least, the one sure method of giving birth to a boy: eating a rooster’s testicles. Not to be outdone, Greek physician Galen, in the second century, offered up the following suggestions: A woman could ensure the birth of a male child if, before sexual intercourse, she bound her right foot with a child’s white ribbon. A man could ensure the same if he engaged in intercourse while lying on his right side. Even a prank could influence the sex of a child if, unbeknownst to the pregnant woman, someone placed parsley on her head. Her baby’s sex would then be determined by the sex of whomever she next addressed. Hippocrates’s solution, perhaps was simplest, if also the most painful: binding of the right testicle for the birth of a girl; binding of the left testicle for a boy. There is no shortage of only slightly more sophisticated theories today. For example, because X-chromosome-carrying sperm, which will produce a girl, swim slower and live longer than Y-carrying sperm, the odds of having a daughter are thought to increase if intercourse takes place several days before ovulation, giving male sperm more time to die off. What we know for sure is that we all begin life essentially genderless, at least in terms of sexual anatomy. The last of our twenty-three pairs of chromosomes makes us either genetic males (XY) or genetic females (XX), but there are at least fifty genes that play a part in sexual identity development and are expressed at different levels early on. Sexual anatomy, however, is determined in large part by hormones. All of us begin, in utero, with an opening next to the anus and a kind of genital “bud.” The addition of testosterone drives the fetus in the male direction, with the “bud” developing into a penis and the tissue around the hole fusing and forming the scrotum. (This accounts for the “seam” over the scrotum and up the penis.) An inhibiting hormone prevents males from developing internal female reproductive organs. Without testosterone, the embryo develops in the female direction: the opening becomes the vagina and the labia, the bud the clitoris. Sexual differentiation of the genitals happens at about six weeks, but the sexual differentiation of the brain, including gender identity and the setting of our gender behavior, is, at least partly, a distinct process. Again, hormones play the crucial role, with surges of testosterone indirectly “masculinizing” the brains of some fetuses, causing subtle but distinct differences in brain structure and functional activity. For instance, the straight gyrus, a narrow strip that runs along the midline on the undersurface of the frontal lobe, is about 10 percent larger in women than men. The straight gyrus, scientists have found, is highly correlated with social cognition – that is, interpersonal awareness. These same scientists, however, caution that differences in biological sex are not necessarily hardwired or absolute. In adults, they found that regardless of biological sex, the larger the straight gyrus the more “feminine” the behavior. For most males, the action of male hormones on the brain is crucial to the development of male gender identity. A mutation of an androgen receptor on the X chromosome can cause androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which virilization of the brain fails, and when it does, a baby will be born chromosomally male (XY) and have testes rather than ovaries, but also a short vagina, and the child’s outward appearance will be female. Its gender identity is nearly always female as well. In other words, our genitals and our gender identity are not the same. Sexual anatomy and gender identity are the products of two different processes, occurring at distinctly different times and along different neural pathways before we are even born. Both are functions of genes as well as hormones, and while sexual anatomy and gender identity usually match, there are dozens of biological events that can affect the outcome of the latter and cause an incongruence between the two. In some ways, the brain and the body are two very different aspects of what it means to be human, especially when it comes to sex and gender. Who we are, male or female, is a brain process, but what we look like at birth, what we develop into at puberty, who we are attracted to and how we act – male, female, or something in between – are all embedded in different groups of brain cells with different patterns of growth and activity. Ultimately gender identity is the result of biological processes and is a function of the interplay between sex hormones and the developing brain, and because it is a process that takes place over time, in utero, it can be influenced by any number of environmental effects. Studying gender identity in the laboratory with animal models is virtually impossible. There is no way to know whether a male monkey feels like a male monkey. There is no experimental model of the transgender person; there is no lab protocol; no double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trials. There are just human beings, each of us understanding, often without thinking about it, who we are, male, female, or something in between. The permutations are myriad. Some individuals have the chromosomes of one gender but the sex organs of the opposite gender. Others are born with male genitals and testes, but internally have a womb and fallopian tubes. Still others have male genitals, small testes, and ovaries. Then there are cases like the pregnant woman in Australia who in 2021 discovered that though she was about to give birth to her third child, a large number of cells in her body identified her as chromosomally male. How could that be? The woman was herself likely the result of twin embryos – a boy and a girl – that merged in her mother’s womb. She was female according to her sex organs, but genetically she was female and male, a condition called chimerism. Some people have atypical chromosomal configurations, such as XXX or XXY or XYY, and still others may have different chromosomal arrangements in different tissues, a condition called mosaicism. Beyond chromosomes, any kind of mutation, or change, in the balance of hormones will tip the sexual development of the fetus toward one side or the other independently of what the chromosomes ‘say.’ Scientists have identified more than twenty-five genes that are involved in creating differences in sexual development. With the advancements in DNA sequencing, they are uncovering an enormous range of variation in these genes as well. For more than forty years, researchers were aware of widespread microchimerism, in which stem cells from a male fetus cross the placenta into the mother’s body and maternal stem cells cross over into the male fetus. But only recently have scientists discovered that those crossover cells can last a lifetime. No one thing determines sex; rather, it’s a system, and as with any system, small changes or interruptions can lead to nonbinary results, neither wholly male nor wholly female. As many as one in one hundred infants are born with sexual anatomy that differs in some way from standard male and female anatomy, according to Brown University gender researcher Anne Fausto-Sterling. In the past, those born with this condition were called hermaphrodites. Today, scientists estimate that about one in every two thousand infants is born with genitalia so noticeable atypical that an expert in sex differentiation is consulted. Historically, how doctors decided at birth which sex to assign to intersex infants was based less on biology than on cultural expectations and stereotypes. The most common instances of ambiguous genitalia are an enlarged clitoris for female babies and a microphallus for male babies. At some hospitals in the 1970s, the medical standard for assigning male gender was based chiefly on the length of the penis. A baby born with a penis smaller than 2.5 centimeters, the size generally required for a male to urinate standing up, was assigned female. Medical professionals, in these cases, felt uncomfortable about leaving an infant with ambiguous genitalia. Most therefore urged parents to decide on a sex for these babies immediately after birth, then hand the infants over to the surgeons to ‘correct’ the confusion.”
We are going to take a break from this week’s blog as there will be much more to review next week concerning the important information that can be gleaned from this book as we complete our review. We encourage the reader to continue to be faithful in the pursuit of FREEDOM and LIBERTY, and that requires all of us to seek The Truth, even if it sometimes challenges our pre-established beliefs.