Gender Assignment

[peter]

The recent broughaha caused by JK Rowling's comment in respect of trans-women (or something like) has got me to thinking - and I realize that I'm slightly confused by what is going on here.

When I was young things were simple: you were a girl or you were a boy - end off. Now not only did this seem relatively simple from a layman's point of view, it was also simple scientifically. If you had a XX chromosomal configuration in the nucleus of your cells you were a woman; an XY designated you as a male. Certainly there were the occasional hiccups in this; XY individuals with androgen receptor defects could develop as outwardly normal females (maleness being a thing that is imposed upon an embryo that would otherwise, by default, develop as a female) but with a blind ending vagina and no uterus or ovaries. Such individuals often only discovered that they were chromosomal males upon failing to begin menstruating.

But then things began to change; the fact of ones being a man or a woman became less fixed on the basis of chromosomes and genetics, and on the assumption of a single 'god-given' gender that was immutable - and the idea that one could be psychologically male or psychologically female, but in defiance of the chromosomal content of ones cells became the order of the day.

Now - and it is a long time since I studied any genetics so forgive me if these ideas are now out of date - in biology it was always deemed to be the case that what any individual exhibited was a product of the combined effects of two things - they used to be referred to as 'nature and nurture'. Put simply and taking say your adult height as an example, this meant that genetically you were programmed (for want of a better word) to reach a certain given height. Whether you actually reached this height - or indeed perhaps even exceeded it - would be dependent upon the circumstances in terms of nutrition, physical environment etc etc that pertained in your life as you developed. So a combination of the genetic (the nature) and the environmental (the nurture) factors that influence height would determine the actual height you achieved. And this nature/nurture dynamic was responsible for every aspect of where you finished up - including your psychological makeup.

So applying this to gender assignment, we have an individual born with a given set of external genetalia, who is then raised within a particular set of cultural parameters and the nature/nurture dynamic will result in this individual developing the particular psychological acceptance that they are the gender which their genitals, their development and their societal/cultural upbringing has assigned them.

Now, dear God, I have no problem with anyone designating themselves whatever gender - male, female or anything else - they choose, but I am interested in where it takes you in the light of the above if you drive a wedge between a person's chromosomal makeup, their cultural upbringing and their psychological gender. If at the age of fifteen, twenty or whatever, Jimmy a chromosomal male raised as a boy suddenly says he is a woman - he feels like a woman - and we then accept that he is indeed a psychological woman and a suitable candidate for gender reassignment, then surely it begs the question of where his psychological gender originated from. We can no longer say that it came from his nature his genetics and chromosomal make up are that of a male; his nurture has ostensibly been that of a male - he has been raised as a boy, treated as a boy, regarded as a boy - yet somehow he has developed into a psychological female despite all of this.

How can this be accounted for? It could be I suppose, that in reality there is no such thing as being a 'psychological' male or female; that in truth we are just what we are as individuals - and that Jimmy is perhaps making a mistake in his assessment of himself as a in fact being a woman - overlaying this, if you like, over some other psychological problem or problems with which he is suffering.

Or perhaps the whole idea of gender is adrift; that in reality where we land psychologically in terms of our internal feeling of what we are is in fact much too fluid to be kept in by these artificial psychological boundaries (but in which case why do so many people feel themselves to be of that different gender - surely we should have as many psychological cats and tigers and horses as men and women).

And it still begs the question of where it all comes from. If nature and nurture is out of the window in terms of our internal psychological feeling in respect of our gender, then what is to replace it. Jimmy can designate himself as the flying spaghetti monster from the planet Zog and I'll buy it - in my opinion gender is no more than a useful identification box on a passport and it's significance stops there - but if we are going to ditch one of the central dogmas of our understanding of how we and everything else develops then we have to have something better to replace it with: we can't make an exception of the nature/nurture explanation just because it is expedient on the grounds of one particular case.

As I said at the beginning, I'm confused by all of this - I struggle to fit it into the science that I was taught - but make no mistake, I will defend Jimmy and his right to designate him/herself as whatever she/he chooses to the end of days.

[peter]

Further thought on this paradox after I posted yesterday had me deciding that an individual's internal gender assignment (ie what one 'feels' oneself to be) must be an effect of nurture rather than nature - only in this way could it be explained that an individual with a male karyotype and no obvious androgen receptor defect could develop a psychological femaleness. But then I remembered that this was a position that was thought to pertain as a result of the work of a particular man whose name I forget, but who published in scientific journals that we are born a 'tabula rasa' in terms of our sexual identity, and that it was purely cultural conditioning that made us develop one identify or the other, male or female.

The program I saw on this went on to tell how the idea was responsible for the decision made, when following an awful botched circumcision operation in which a baby boy's penis was burned beyond saving, to simply do gender reassignment surgery on him and bring him up as a girl. This was done and as the 'girl' began to grow up a little 'she' started to become difficult. Interviews with the man, who had been reassigned to his 'proper' gender by this point, had him telling that even though he was being raised as a girl, with no suggestion that anything otherwise might be the case by his parents, he said he had known that he was a boy. Ultimately his parents had explained the situation to him/her, and after consultations and assessment with his doctors, it was decided that he should be returned to the gender of his chromosomal makeup, and the problems he was having subsequently resolved themselves. At the time of filming he had married and was happily going on with his wife into the life he deserved.

Now while it is going to be difficult to generalise from one case, and there are plenty of places where complexity arises in the conclusions that may be drawn from this tale, it would seem to be on the face of it a damning blow to the idea that chromosomal makeup/genetic composition have no influence on our self-assessment of our gender, our psychological gender if you like. So this brings us back to square one; our psychological gender has to in part stem from our chromosomal makeup as well as our cultural/familial conditioning. In respect of how one turns ones own gaze inward on this subject, it has to be subjective: it can be no other. One can only say how oneself feels, impossible as it is to get into the mind of another to the extent that one can experience that which they do. If Jimmy says he feels like "a woman trapped in a mans body" (sorry Jimmy; I don't mean to be trite) I can only accept his word. I can have no objective understanding of his feeling in this respect because I simply don't feel it myself and cannot imagine what it could be like to do so. Maybe I'm the strange one here, but I don't actually feel like I'm any particular gender at all. I've been designated as a male since day one of my life; in the mirror I've got the tackle that would seem to confirm this and I don't feel any kind of disconnect between what society says I am and how I feel or look - but how could I? I don't feel anything! I don't know what it is to "feel like a man" - I simply know what it is to feel like me. And when those who must know about these things designated me " male" and my family brought me up that way, there was no point at which I saw my sister and the way she was raised, what society said she was, as opposed to what I was, and said "hey - that's me - I should have been that and not this". Is this how it goes? Not feeling gender specific inside my own head I can't really guess.

But as always I reiterate; that some people go through these traumas and go to such lengths to sort it out is a cause for massive respect for their courage on my part. I am so poorly qualified to think about this that I cannot but accept that whatever it takes to come through a thing like this and emerge the other side is and should be okay by all of us.