I have some insight that may be helpful to you.

Transgendered people often say that they never - not even as a child - thought of themselves as the gender their anatomy suggests. They don't say to themselves "I wish I were a boy/girl." They say, "I AM a boy/girl and want my body to reflect that reality."

This sounds crazy until you understand that when a fetus is developing in utero, the brain pathways that will power the body-parts-to-come develop before those body parts. In other words, at about the third month of pregnancy, the brain is being built to power a male or female reproductive system, depending on chromosomes. The actual sex characteristics develop later in utero.

Some research suggests that in transgendered people, the brain is somehow wired to expect a different set of body parts than what eventually develops. The transwoman's brain is built to operate a female body, and the male body parts that s/he actually has always feel wrong, even from birth. There is some research going on into environmental toxins, concentrations of testosterone in utero, the effects of certain food additives - whatever may affect the flood of in-utero hormones that wires the brain at that stage.

So when transgendered people say that the ARE a different gender than their genitals suggest, they may be correct. Their brains may in fact be built from pre-birth for a body of the opposite gender.

Nobody knows what causes this, but some research into other medical conditions, such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia in women, have verified that changes in the concentration of in-utero hormones affect the structure of the brain. It is not a stretch to hypothesize that gender identity may be affected as well.

Does this help?

I have not been on the board for a few days. I was looking back through some missed posts and found this one.

Yes, it helps.

It is hard to uderstand completely without being the one going through it. I doubt anyone can fully understand without first hand experience.

The best I can do is be supportive, understanding and non-judgmental.

Thanks for the info.

If a woman has always been a "tomboy" and has maculine traits, and simply identifies as a person more than as either a man or woman...is this a lesser degree on the spectrum of being transgender, or is it simply a reaction against the gender roles of a patriarchal society? Is gender mainly a social construct, or is it biologically based in our brains?

What if a woman decides to pass as a man for purely social reasons? I recently read about a woman in the Middle East who was widowed and had children to feed. She dressed in mens' clothes and acted like a man, so that she could work at a man's job doing manual labor without being harassed. In her society, she was accepted as a man...so does that make her transgender?

1) That person could identify as genderfluid, non-binary, genderqu**r, "two-spirit", androgynous, or a number of other things. They could even identify as agendered or neutrois.

2) If the parent doesn't identify as a man, then they aren't transgender. But I can't speak for that person, so who knows what's really going on.

Even though I'm transgender, I don't claim to know all the issues. I also find that my situation is a bit different from other trans people. It's been great to learn from other trans people, & hopefully they've learned something new or different from me.

(Edited for typos & more info)



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/09/2015 09:11PM by Tristan.

It's tough enough just to be a female in a man's world, so I imagine it must be a hundred times worse to be a transgender individual.

Jesus when confronted by this dilemma by the Pharisee's said, " 12 For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."--Matt 19:12

So God, Jesus said some are sex changed by nature, by man or by choice... Let them receive "marriage" and all of it's commitments, benefits and liabilities.

I don't know why you're bringing religion into this. Religion is the reason why I denied & suppressed who I was for most of my life, despite the fact that I knew I was a boy & different as a small child.