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It’s biological – not a mental health issue
By Byrgen Finkelman on August 7, 2013 at 10:05 PM
We have been reaching out to various organizations and agencies and asking to meet with them to talk about what transgender means and the issues faced by transgender people.
Injustice at Every Turn
We start our brief presentation by stating our goals for the meeting.
Our top goal is always to have the people we are speaking with understand that being transgender is a biological condition not a mental health issue.
So why haven’t we done a blog post about it? I don’t know, but this post will remedy that oversight.
There are numerous scholarly articles about why some people are born with their gender (what their brain tells them) and their sex (their genitals) misaligned.
My go-to article is in Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology. The article explains that, in utero, the body develops genitals before gender develops in the brain. Because these two do not happen concurrently, the interaction of testosterone with proteins, enzymes, and whatnot can cause the brain to develop a gender that does not match the sex. I say “whatnot” because I cannot begin to understand all the technical graphs and charts and pictures, but I certainly understand the plain language of the text!
A person whose gender is misaligned with their sex is transgender. Whether that person transitions and lives in their gender depends of many factors, not the least of which is the fear that people have about coming out to family, friends and employers as transgender. We should all feel bad that anyone lives their lives in a gender that isn’t really true – because people do this to avoid loss and stigmatization.
Transgender people do many things in an effort to avoid loss and stigmatization.For example, transgender people serve in the military at double the rate of cisgender people. This is likely because people whose sex is male but whose gender is female join the military and not vice versa.
Why would they do this? Remember the commercials – “Join the Marines, we’ll make a man out of you.”
Many try to become the men their genitals say that they are; many leave the military quickly, and many have successful careers as male military personnel. Both groups of “men” often come out as transgender after leaving the service.
It is very difficult to live in the gender that your brain disavows. This is why a staggering 41% of transgender people have attempted suicide.
Of course, if society accepted transgender individuals as simply being biologically different from cisgender people but still normal – which they are – this rate would drop precipitously.
Unfortunately, even though the term Gender Identity Disorder has been removed from the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), transgender individuals – in order to receive medical help with their transition to their correct gender – must still be diagnosed by a mental health provider with “Gender Dysphoria.”
I look forward to the day when Gender Dysphoria goes the way of homosexuality as far as the DSM is concerned, i.e., it isn’t in the DMS at all because it is not a mental disorder!
The introduction to my go-to article has this fascinating bit of info which gives us insight into the growing number of young people coming out as transgender.
“From the first days after birth sex differences are already ex- pressed in human behavior. For example, on their first day of life, female neonates prefer looking at human faces while male infants look more at mechanical mobiles … From the age of 3–8 months, girls were found to choose dolls over the toy-cars and balls that boys prefer … The toy-preference behavior cannot be explained by social pressure, because when dolls, toy-cars and balls were offered to green vervet monkeys, the females consistently chose the dolls … while the males preferred the toy-cars and balls.”
So when you wonder how a child can possibly, “Know they are not the gender people say they are based on their genitals,” my answer is, “Gender differences exist. Of course a kid will figure out where they belong gender-wise.“ And if people are telling a child they are one gender, and they feels like the opposite gender, children speak up.
They always have, but perhaps in more subtle ways in the past, because they didn’t have the language to ask, “When does my penis turn into a vagina?” or “Can the doctor fix me and give me a penis?”
And transgender children do ask these types of questions now; because our society is much more open about bodies and body parts, they have the language.
And because people are now aware of transgender people, parents listen rather than saying, “No, you’re a girl; you have to behave like one,” or “Boys don’t wear dresses.”
The takeaway from the article, is that transgender people are not mentally ill, they simply have a biological misalignment of their gender and their sex.
If understood in this context, I hope many more people will begin asking, “So, what’s the big deal?” and speak out against discrimination against transgender people.
Byrgen Finkelman
It’s biological – not a mental health issue - Transgender Talk
He as every bit a right to a wrong opinion as the next guy
