Is being transgender a choice?
“Research continues to show that it’s not as simple as ‘I’m a female, I’m a male,’ ” said J. Wesley Thompson, a physician assistant, medical director of Ballantyne Family Medicine and member of the Charlotte Transgender Healthcare Group.
“It’s far more complicated than ‘This is a choice.’ That might be true for a very small minority, but for the vast majority, no one would put themselves through this kind of pain by choice,” Thompson said. “Studies have shown that a transitioning patient loses 90 percent of their family and friends’ support network. That’s one of the reasons that substance abuse and depression and suicide attempts are so high.”
Is being transgender a mental illness?
The American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the DSM, stated that “gender nonconformity is not in itself a mental disorder. The critical element of gender dysphoria is the presence of clinically significant distress associated with the condition.” Experts say much of the distress is associated with societal attitudes rather than gender identity.
Are people female or male at birth?
Not always. Duke’s Adkins is one of 20 pediatric endocrinologists who wrote a letter to McCrory objecting to HB2, in part, because “there are babies born in whom chromosomes suggesting one sex do not match the appearance of the genitalia.”
The letter said: “This can be due to multiple biological causes such as chromosome abnormalities, abnormalities in anatomic development, environmental exposures during pregnancy, genetic mutations in the synthesis and actions of adrenal and gonadal hormones, and tumors that make sex hormones. For these children, gender assignment at birth is challenging and takes substantial time, sometimes requiring re-evaluation over months to years.”
How does gender develop?
“All human embryos are equipped with the starter kits for both male and female sexual anatomy,” according to a BloombergView article by Faye Flam. “Every part on the male body has an analogous part on the female body.”
Typically, females have two X chromosomes, and males have one X and one Y. “But these are just the starting switches for a complicated process in which genes on various chromosomes become activated and trigger precisely timed releases of hormones,” Flam wrote.
Depending on which switches are flipped and when, there are lots of possible outcomes. “Not everyone comes into the world with a clear-cut sex,” Flam wrote.
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What does research show?
Male and female brains are slightly different in structure. In 2013, Spanish researchers examined MRI scans of the brains of 42 transgender men and women. Even before treatment with hormones, the scans showed that specific structures in their brains were more similar to those in the gender they identified with than of those in the gender they were born with.
Also, researchers in Amsterdam examined adolescent boys and girls with gender dysphoria and how they responded to a pheromone-like substance that is known to cause different responses in the brains of men and women. The study, published in 2014, found that boys with gender dysphoria responded like typical females, and girls responded like typical boys.
“The interesting thing about that study,” said Thompson, of the Charlotte Transgender Healthcare Group, “is that (responses to pheromones) cannot be influenced by training or environment. The response to odors is from our primal brain.…Research continues to show that there is a discernible difference genetically and on an anatomical basis for the transgender identity.”
Author Nutt, who summarized the research in her book, noted that female and male brains are not that different overall.
Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/living/health-family/article76580862.html#storylink=cpy
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