Transgenderism Insight and Answers to Frequently Asked Questions (a straightforward third person objective point of view)

What is a Transgender Person?

… a person who’s fetal brain develops as Male but who’s fetal body development progresses as Female, or a person who’s fetal brain develops as Female and fetal body development progresses as Male. It is estimated that one out of every 5000 babies are born Transgender to some degree.

Why does this happen to Transgender People?

It would not be correct to consider the Transgender condition a brain abnormality when in reality a Transgender person’s brain develops no differently than that of anyone else.  Contrary to early unscientific and unsubstantiated medical theorist ideas Transgenderism itself has never been a brain development issue or a mental disorder. The reasoning why many survivors of Transgenderism may eventually be diagnosed as troubled or emotionally challenged relates directly to the severe lack of acceptance and the relentless persecution experienced by these misunderstood people throughout their lives … by a society and by a world they must live within.

Not withstanding the lack of a scientific basis for brain based Transgenderism; in general, brain development differences are not uncommon within nature. Colour Blindness, Dyslexia, Autism, Schizophrenia, and Down syndrome, are five more widespread examples most people know about.  Higher or lower intellects are also well understood as common brain development differences.  The key point is a person’s brain develops in very specific ways with or without a more common or less common outcome … a result or an effect, which is never the personal choice of the individual. This ultimate development result can not be denied, adjusted or reset to any significant extent by the individual’s own willpower or more to the point by psychiatric practices and/or by society or the tyranny of others. Innate brain conditions, Transgender or not, are immutable natural phenomena.

To better-understand how Transgenderism actually does occur within nature it is important to note everyone’s Gender Identity is established within an individual’s hypothalamus or core brain, which also directs the bodies autonomic nervous system, startle reflex and fight or flight responses.  Contrary to past misinformed theorist conjecture, Gender Identity does not reside within a person’s cerebral intellectual or cognitive brain. Equally important but not contested or controversial is the fact that fetal core brain development occurs significantly before the fetus’s internal and external female/male body characteristics begin to form.

Although much is still unknown about the precise transgender medical causality/methodology, the more popular understanding today is …  slight differences occur within the fetal hormonal environment. Arrival timing, concentration levels, and/or availability duration differences with certain hormones can advance or retard more typical fetal development processes. Independent of earlier established core brain development, an imbalanced …  rich or starved … fetal hormone environment can give rise to an incongruent male or female body formation, as compared to what may have otherwise occurred within a more typical or balanced fetal hormonal mix.

The result is the emergence of a fetal core brain and a Gender Identity that may not be the best match for the fetus’s eventual internal and subsequent external body development structure.  Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (CAIS) or Intersexualism is a type of physical and ultimately evident very sad example of Transgenderism. With a CAIS child, their female body development seems to well match their Gender Identity until puberty, when their body’s internal undeveloped male testicles begin to mature … horribly unbalancing and undermining the child’s up to that point seemingly normal young female development.  Imagine a young woman coming of age and learning she was actually male internally with XY chromosomes … never being able to bear children?

Why Do Some People Fear/Dislike those that are Transgender? 

An incongruent brain/body match has no clearly discernable or physical characteristics and a transgender nature is immensely difficult to define or understand.  For the unaffected, transgenderism is all but impossible to appreciate or verify.  Human nature also assumes the worst about things that are not well understood leading the majority of people without the knowledge to imagine Transgender people are at best mentally disturbed and at worst criminally dangerous.

Why Does the Idea of Transgenderism Seem So New to People?

 Until the advent and pervasive nature of the internet became commonplace, those with a Transgender condition felt themselves to be unique individuals, completely different, isolated and alone from everyone else within the world.  The rarity of their trans-condition combined with the world’s historic disdain and disapproval for cross-gender behavior made transgender person to transgender person contact almost unheard of.   Before the internet, little was known and almost nothing had been studied or written about Transgenderism. What was assumed first was mostly early-unsubstantiated guesswork without scientific basis. Transgenderism was originally thought to be a mental illness or a criminal perversion linked to, or as a subset of, the Lesbian Gay or Bi (LGB) sexual orientation condition. This was/is just not the case! New and ongoing research and the expansion of scientific understanding indicate Transgenderism is a separate birth development reality.

In the past and even today public misunderstanding and long-standing society-bias has for the most part kept the Transgender issue hidden away out of general view.

What are Transgender People Like?

In every way imaginable Transgender people are the same as those within the rest of society.  They come from all walks of life. They have the same interests, dislikes, strengths and weakness experienced by other people. They are present throughout all races and cultures. They occupy the complete socioeconomic spectrum, rich, average, poor. They are well or under educated. They are doctors, lawyers, teachers, clerks, service people, military, police, government, and office workers. They are successful, healthy, disabled, and homeless. They are like yourself and your family!

What is Transgender Sexual Attraction? 

A Transgender person’s sexual attraction is much the same as that experienced by everyone. Transgender people are no more or less attracted to sexual interests than the general-public. Their only difference being who the public might assume they would or should be sexually attracted to, based upon their presentation or appearance. Transgender individuals have straight, lesbian, gay, bi, or asexual orientations and interests in similar proportion to the general population, but little study or consensus yet exists regarding the proportions of Transgender LGB directional interest. Transgender orientation statistics are not yet available. Estimates indicate 10% of all people have some LGB orientation or motivation, but without any link between sexual orientation and gender identity, Transgender orientation becomes an even more complex and difficult issue to grasp or categorize.

What is Transgender Gender Identity?

The explanation of Gender Identity is far from simple to understand for those not afflicted with Transgenderism!

The meaning of Gender Identity Itself

Gender Identity is who any person knows themselves to be as … a Female or a Male … and it has NO connection to who or what gender each person may be sexually attracted to … NONE WHAT-SO-EVER!

The essence of Gender Identity is so basic, so intrinsic and so ever-present that those without a Transgender condition do not even realize that Gender Identity exists. When forced to the majority of people attempt to explain gender identity as just feeling like … you … and they find it difficult to attribute any value to something that is just there with them and has always been with them … forever.

Therefore, with Gender Identity almost completely unknown to just about everyone within the world, any useful explanation must rely on more familiar example feelings and perceptions. As a starting point … try to define some characteristics that clearly distinguish YOU as a Female or a Male … and you may not refer to your body or any of its functions or characteristics. Then ask yourself how easy did you find this task?  Next example … for a moment consider that you have suffered a horrendous calamity and you have permanently lost the use of your eyesight, sense of touch and ability to feel, including all body and skin sensation.  After significant time has passed like this, could you ever imagine yourself forgetting or not caring if you were a woman or a man within your heart or soul?

Let us expand the example conditions even further.  How would you feel if, from this point on, everyone you meet every minute of every day considers and deals with you as member of the opposite gender from the one you know yourself to be? What then … if you dare to correct others about your real and true gender and you experience their disapproval, aggression or hate directed at you, or they act as if you were insane? Then imagine one last, so very very sad, example!  See yourself as a child  … the youngest you can remember … and imagine attempting to grow up within such a warped and hostile world of dismay. This is the transgender person’s life!

With these examples in mind, ask yourself if you might have a better understanding of the Transgender situation.

Gender Identity could be described best as an innate state of mind … something we are all born with and not an acquired understanding, belief or choice.  It is what it is … would you not agree?

Gender Identity is the deepest feeling of belonging and association that humans are born with.  It is what new babies sense and bond with from their caregivers. It manifests itself within life through instant recognition constant reinforcement and never-ending confirmation, acceptance and inclusion shown to you by others for … THE GENDER YOU ARE.  It is experienced through every human contact encountered every day of your life.  It is the deep knowing, unspoken understanding and validation passing between, within the tilt of a head, voice inflection, or smile/smirk/wink that we might enjoy from others such as ourselves … as females from other females or as males from other males.  It is the “been there & done that” self-evident common thread of awareness that links like species and like genders.  It is an accepting awareness within others like ourselves who know exactly how being a woman or a man feels because they are cut from the very same cloth that we are! It is the all consuming and all encompassing correctness and familiarity with oneself as a given gender, combined with the unsolicited camaraderie, acceptance and membership offered to us by others of like gender.

We all aspire for the stability and welcoming comfort of this preeminent state of mind, but most never notice the active exchange and internalizing that supports it.   “It is what it is” … right … until it is gone?  It is the missing element people locked within isolation suffer, and the reason why many go insane when human contact is denied.  Lost … it is the cornerstone of loneliness, and a catalyst for depression and ill health.  It can seem like nothing but can still be everything when it vanishes or … it NEVER WAS as lived by the Transgender person.

The meaning of Gender Identity for the Transgender Person

 To the Transgender person, with a lifetime of … NEVER WAS … it is EVERYTHING, and it always has been EVERYTHING!  The … NEVER WAS … imposes a lifetime of all consuming and all encompassing confusion, incorrectness, unfamiliarity, isolation, and loneliness.

Imagine a life like this … one equally filled with all those same types of glances, inflections, winks, grins, undertones, attitudes, constantly in their face and washing over them from every human contact they meet every day of their lives … BUT … with the transgender person IT IS manifestly WRONG! It does not fit! It is agonizing! It is endless! It is surreal! It is a lie! It is backwards, sideways, inside out and anyway but true!

A Transgender person feels out-of-sync, unbalanced, exposed, confused, fearful, and very unhappy. Their peers do not recognize, validate, reinforce, accept or include them as insiders within their inherent gender realm, and the opposite gender’s misimpressions mistaken recognition and inclusion within the foreign unsuitable gender domain threatens and warps daily encounters and experience. These people are the true square peg within the round hole!

This problem cannot subside appreciably over time with familiarity because the “WRONG” remains front center and hurtful, as well as constantly reinforced through every contact they experience throughout every day of their lives.  It is no wonder that so many of these people individually discard their lives, or have their life ended prematurely by their fellow man’s uninhibited hatred and intolerance of their efforts to live more authentic lives.

All a Transgender person can do safely is fake it.  They can strive to conceal and exist within the false life that is forced upon them … to play act their way forward … while suffering the impostor’s role devoid of genuine feelings comfort and truth. Informed study would clearly confirm a transgender person’s life to be a living hell.

In summation, in any way imaginable and identical to every other human, a Transgender person’s gender identity is a hardwired condition.  It is something everyone is born with and not something learned … not an acquired understanding belief or a choice made at some point within a person’s life. Gender identity cannot be denied, forgotten, altered, adjusted or switched regardless of how long or how hard a person may strive personally. Society attitude and pressure, as well as the misinformed psychiatric communities machinations and curative efforts, have always been misguided and destructive at best and very cruel at worst. Gender Identity is what it is … as it always has been and always will be … identical to that experienced within everyone’s life!

The development of a Transgender person’s body does not track or match the gender foundation of a their mind! Rare condition or not, this is an immutable fact and a part of the reality of normal human diversity. However, after the Transgender person’s birth, society misunderstanding, lack of acceptance, backlash hostility, often accompanied by parental angst and remorse, the Transgender child often becomes a pariah to others as well as to themselves.  Early archaic (world is flat … sailing out too far will mean your demise) unscientific conjecture traditionally labeled the Transgender person an enigma, and historically assumed they were seriously and possibly dangerously mentally disordered.

The truth was sadly and significantly otherwise but very little was known at the time and almost no interconnection was available to support Transgender individual-to-individual discussion. This, combined with an inability to understand or accept themselves or their own incongruence, very often created hopelessness depression despair and suicidal thoughts for a great many Transgender people.

However, with today’s internet and better-informed media, truth has begun to force its way through past misinformation and into the light.  Reality is beginning to surface and more accurate information has now become available, if the average person wishes to look. Today there is no dispute! Nature and pre-birth developments account for the essence and core make up of the human mind … including the mind of the Transgender individual.  Transgender people know their own mind as well as do members of the general population!  Past puritanical prejudicial and unscientific propaganda can no longer completely override and bias today’s common everyday perception. The truth about Transgender people and Gender Identity is becoming clearly visible and available for the curious or interested to review. The groundswell of current public domain attention to Transgender people and their suffering across the globe makes it impossible for detractors and the ill-informed to be successful continuing to deny or resist the undeniable and unshakable Transgender reality.

A person’s fundamental nature and gender identity is as basic and natural as life itself!

The above is the well-researched, well-considered, well-established, and non-professional opinion of:

Michelle Everatt
President Transgender Niagara Organization
December, 2011