It is not what is on the person that makes him or her a "him" or a "her." It comes from within. One of the 20 most common questions asked a transsexual person is "when did you first decide you were woman [or a man]?" Well, when did YOU first decide you were a woman [or a man]? You were born with a vagina [or penis], I see. Therefore you MUST be what you appear to be, right?
Allow me to let you in on a little secret. Most people know from biology that the difference between males and females in humans is the 23rd chromosome pair, the "sex" chromosome. This is XX for females, XY for males. Well, the "difference" between this second X and the Y chromosome is one, single, gene--or the order of four base pairs in DNA. If it is one way, then it will trigger androgens around the 8th week of pregnancy in the mother that will descend the gonads into their male constituents. If it is the other, then the body will automatically develop into female. After this point, hormones produced by the gonads do all the rest.
Experiments have shown that a genetically male person, who has androgen blockers introduced into the womb during the pregnancy, will be born a girl, with female organs, and naturally grow into a woman. This is true vice-versa as well. Some people born male have had a slip-up during circumcision, in which all or most of the penis was amputated, and were surgically reassigned female at that point. For them and male to female transsexuals who begin hormonal therapy before or early in puberty, the experiences of the deepening of the voice, the enlarged hands, feet, and general bone structure, the hair growing on the face and body, or any other changes that males undergo will never occur. Society determines EVERYTHING else.
I often look at people and think of what they would be like if that little gene had been flipped the other way. I strongly believe that our persona is entirely separate and independent from our bodies. We simply are socialized one way or the other, and most of us feel that that is who we must be. A big macho guy, if he had an "accident" and been surgically reassigned at birth, would never assume the role he now plays, and may have developed into a delicate, petite woman. How different his life experience would have been. Likewise, a mild and timid woman could have had male hormones injected into her during fetal development, and been born with a penis and testicles. Would she have then developed into a brash, womanizing man?
In our present day Western society the idea of changing gender, to many people, is wrong, sick, or strange. However, this is not the case elsewhere in the world, nor in the past. The following is an exerpt from Jan Morris' book, Conundrum, which tells of her own transition.
It was, I think, the eighteenth century which first imposed upon Western civilization rigid conceptions of maleness and femaleness, and made the idea of sexual fluidity in some way horrific. Perhaps it developed out of Protestantism, whose devotion to the patriarchal principle even forbade the cult of the Virgin Mary. Certainly earlier centuries did not require the male to be unyieldingly virile, or the female unremittingly demure, as Shakespeare's comedies happily demonstrate. There was more give and take in those days, it seems, the sexes mingled freely and easily, and the word "manly" had not acquired that intolerant connotation, that hint of cold bath and smoking-room caucus, which the Victorians were to give it (in older forms they made obsolete, it meant simply "human," or even "humane").
Other cultures too, ancient and contemporary, have freely recognized a no-man's land between male and female, and have allowed people to inhabit it without ignominy. The Phrygians of Anatolia, for example, castrated men who felt themselves to be female, allowing them henceforth to live in the female role, and Juvenal, surveying some of his own fellow citizens, thought the same plan might be adopted in Rome--Why are they waiting? Isn't it time for them to try the Phrygian fashion, and make the job complete--take the knife and lop off that superfluous piece of meat? Hippocrates reported the existence of "unmen" among the Scythians: they bore themselves as women, did women's work, and were generally believed to have been feminized by divine intervention. In ancient Alexandria we read of men "not ashamed to employ every device to change artificially their male nature into female"--even to amputation of their male parts.
Among more primitive peoples, so Sir James Frazer record in The Golden Bough, "there is a custom widely spread ... in accordance with which some men dress as women and act as women throughout their lives. Often they are dedicated and trained to their vocation from childhood." The Sarombavy of Madagascar, for example, altogether forgot their original sex, and regarded themselves as entirely female. The "soft-men" of the Chukchee Eskimo were ordered into their assumed sex by the elders at childhood, married husbands, and lived as women for the rest of their lives. We hear of Andean sorcerers obliged by tribal custom to change their sexual roles, of Mohave Indian boys publicly initiated into girlhood, of young Tahitians encouraged in infancy to think of themselves as members of the opposite sex. If to modern Westerners the idea of changing sex has seemed, at least until recently, monstrous, absurd, or ungoldly, among simpler peoples it has more often been regarded as a process of divine omniscience, a mark of specialness. To stand astride the sexes was not a disgrace but a privilege, and it went often with supernatural powers and priestly functions.
Conundrum, Jan Morris, The New American Library, New York, New York, 1974. p. 45-47.
So you see, it is only what we are brought up to believe that establishes what is strange or ordinary, what is to be looked down upon or to be worshipped, and what is right or wrong. I hope these two pages have expanded your knowledge a little on a subject that you may have been prejudiced about, but now hopefully are less.
This page was last updated on: November 25th, 1996. You are the
To read the first part of this essay, go here.
[Back To My Homepage]
[About Me]
[Great Links]
[To The Mountains]
[Skydive USA!]
[Send Me A Letter]
marmot to visit.