Why Transgender Women are Women and Trans Men are Men

My lovely sister bought me an early Christmas present—a box set of the first three illustrated Harry Potter books, which arrived yesterday, which I promptly opened to begin reading before bed. Though I have seen the movies I had never read the books. When I saw the first movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, back in 2001 when I was twenty-one I didn’t like it one bit. I thought it was childish, silly, melodramatic, and frankly just not very good world-building. In spite of this view I ended up seeing it three times—first because my friends wanted to see it, second because I went on a date who took me again, and third because my family finally went. When the second film came out it was the same story—saw it twice with friends and date. After seeing a Harry Potter film for the fifth time it slowly dawned on me that it was fun, and that I had actually enjoyed it, and that I had been wrong about the first two films which I then enjoyed with unabashed enthusiasm. My initial bias was probably exacerbated by being a new young man and newly out as well to my friends and family, misguidedly trying to make them accept me by pretending I was more masculine and not given to silly fancies like Harry Potter. For every other film release I was excited and looked forward to seeing them with anticipation. When my sister told me about reading the books to her little kids and their first experiences learning about the stories of Harry Potter I expressed remorse at having never read them. Which is why she got them for me, so I could join their little book club and be a part of the adventure too.

Then this morning I wake up to J.K. Rowling expressing bigotry openly on twitter. What a nightmare. What horrible timing. What a sad way to tarnish such a legacy. If you’re not in the loop, Mrs. Rowling expressed that she believes transgender women are not really women, that they are men who just choose to dress and associate as one, with such conviction and veracity as to betray her deeply troubled preoccupation with and projection of her own gender and sexual identity problems onto people who are different than her. The other argument in her position is that people should not be fired for such views, referring to a case in the U.K. where a woman expressed elaborate opposition to transgender people and belittled gay and transgender people and was subsequently let go from her job at a think tank and then tried shamefully to characterize her firing as an attack on women’s rights, when in reality the woman was trashing gay and transgender people, not standing up for women, though I suppose some people think they are one in the same, and both the woman in question and J.K. Rowling tried to spin it as such.

Naturally, as someone who is far more educated about why different gendered people exist as well as being one myself I was heartbroken to find my exciting new Christmas present tainted with the sourness of bigotry, ignorance, and prejudice. But as gay men and women and people of color have won more rights, freedoms, and protections we have begun to lose our self-interested motivation for supporting other minorities who share the same plight. In 2008 Barack Obama’s celebratory victory as the first black man to be elected to the office of President was marred for us by the passage of Proposition 8 in California where I lived, which barred gay and lesbian men and women from marrying, passing in part through a significant margin of support among people of color who had turned out in large numbers to support Obama but the majority of whom voted against us. Here I had been ignorantly believing that repressed minorities looked out for one another. Add the racism so casually espoused by no small amount of gay men and I was brought rudely to the realization that all humans are generally self-serving opportunists just as prejudiced and bigoted as those in the majority, and that our only common trait was being a minority. Even more horrific has been the abandonment of transgender men and women by a large population of gay men as if transgender people have not been right by our side winning battles for us for which we should be grateful and pass on to others. Some transgender activists have not helped themselves, it’s true, being antagonistic even to allies who wish to help—for instance the backlash against Scarlett Johansson for trying to play a transgender role. Tom Hanks is not a gay man and yet his advocacy for us by playing a gay man in the movie Philadelphia forced legions of his straight contemporaries to learn empathy for gay men and especially those who were battling the AIDS epidemic, and in so doing significantly lightened the amount of bias and bigotry we experienced in our daily lives in this country. If transgender advocates and allies had not expressed such vitriol toward Mrs. Johansson, a staunch advocate for transgender people, whom we later learned also has a transgender child, there would right now be a major Hollywood movie about a transgender person staring an A-list actor which might have done for transgender people what Philadelphia did for gay men. But can you really blame them either? The way they are marginalized, murdered, harassed, used as a political football? That’s why this issue is so egregious, and why that woman was fired, because it’s not just an opinion—it informs how you function professionally and how your role, empowered by an institution, can affect the lives of other people. A person who holds those beliefs and works in the medical field will not be an effective caretaker for those who are transgender, and may even harm them. A person in government will not be an effective public servant for those citizens who are transgender. A teacher will misinform and fail both their cis and transgender students.

Ironically, people like Ms. Rowling are making the argument that women should be defined by their bodies, which is exactly where misogyny and the exploitation of women originates. She and the woman who was fired, and ignorant gay men and women and other people who are bigoted and prejudiced toward transgender people, who have no authority to even make such proclamations about things which are not matters of opinion, believe that a person’s sex is immutable and unchangeable, even if you dress, act, and think like the gender of your choice, and therefore not of the sex with which you identify. Therein is the first problem which Mrs. Rowling fails to understand, who apparently thinks that being transgender is about what clothes you choose to wear or who you have sex with is that being transgender is no more a choice than being gay, straight, or cis male or female, which is also why the term is “transgender” and not “transgendered,” which people erroneously think is the term since they observe a transgender person appearing differently before they transition than after, if they even chose to transition.

It is not the act of transition that makes a transgender person transgender.

Transgender is not an adopted identity. It is not a process. It is not an assumed persona due to life experiences or personal preference, and it is certainly not a commentary on gender, especially not your gender. Being transgender is the result of the same complicated interplay of gestational development within the womb which determines sex and gender in all of us, and a transgender person is transgender from birth, regardless of what they look like to you.

Yes, being transgender is not the same as being a cis woman, but that does not mean that transgender women are still male, nor that they are not women, and the same is true of transgender men. Sex and gender are not determined by DNA or genetics in the way that lay persons without any scientific training scream “biology” or “science” in refutation of other’s experiences and promotion of inequality. Sex and gender are entirely decided in the womb during gestation, with all humans having the foundational parts and mechanisms to develop anywhere along the spectrum of masculine to feminine. That is why men have fucking mammary glands and women grow facial hair you total ignoramus, because each of us has both male and female parts and characteristics which are simply dimorphic variations of the very same organs. The penis is really just an enlarged clitoris. The labia are the same tissue which makes up the scrotum. The prostate in men is the Skene's glands in women. We both have nipples, and yes men can and do lactate because nearly every single human body regardless of sex possesses the biology to produce mammalian milk from the breasts, or did you think that God just though nipples looked good on Adam so he decided to also give them to Eve?

We have been taught that men have an XY chromosome and that women have XX chromosomes, and this too is thrown around as fodder by prejudiced and bigoted people as an excuse for their indifference and antagonism, pretending they are as wise as God and as perfect in their judgment of the natural world. The most ironic are anti-transgender feminists who fail to recognize that the establishment of this very idea of the XY and XX chromosome with sexuality and gender was created by an entirely white-male dominated patriarchy system which already oppressed women, the same era of science which used science and biology to sterilize citizens without their knowledge, to conduct heinous experiments on the disenfranchised, who developed disciplines of gynecology not for the benefit of the woman but so a husband had a vessel for his children, who threw the mentally unwell into dark prisons and subjected them to horrifying and unproven experimental tortures, or forced people like the Father of Computers, Allan Touring, to chemically castrate himself for being homosexual. For most of modern medical history women have been treated as if their only value is in their ability to produce children, and nearly all medical tradition is oriented toward this purpose, which is why there is such an emphasis on reproductive health and regular visits to the doctor for women which men do not also participate. It is not because they care about your health. It’s because they want you to be fertile. Otherwise men would also have the equivalent of a gynecologist, which we do not.

For decades a falsified study also suggested that “male” sperm were faster than “female” sperm, and it was this and other misogynist ideas about reproduction which continue to wrongly influence ideas about how gender is created. Though later proven to be fraudulent, the same tenor of binary, patriarchal gender determination continues to be accepted as science even though this concept has constantly been proven to be inaccurate. The acceptance of the XY and XX chromosome definition of being male and female is also used to this very day as an excuse to carve up and disfigure the genitals of intersex babies, even if it destroys their working functions, to forcibly and surgically assign the gender desired by someone else based on specious ideological reasoning with certainly no idea what gender that baby might grow up to actually be or concern for their health.

A false and insidious term called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is also being used to invalidate those who are transgender and excuse their abuse and harassment, as if psychological illnesses are worthy of such treatment in the first place. While the term Gender Dysphoria is a somewhat legitimate way to describe the stress experienced by someone who is transgender, if used in proper context, the addition of Rapid Onset was established by a single, unscrupulous researcher who claimed that some children’s first communication about their gender identity was “sudden.” My parents thought my coming out was “sudden” even though I played with barbies and had a lisp until the 4th grade. This term has been exploited by those whom are bigoted and opportunistic and used as an excuse to attack everyone who is transgender, as if all of them have this supposed “rapid onset” which is then an excuse to engage in abhorrent behavior, including Ms. Rowling, even though this study was flawed, opportunistic and, like many studies, doesn’t actually mean shit. When it comes to gender and sex it is the brain, not the genitals or chromosomes as people like J.K. Rowling and that misguided woman so trenchantly exclaim which is the true regulator and determinate of gender, and is exactly why trans women are women and trans men are men, because the brain and the mind is what determines gender, not the body, which is so plainly recognizable and should be something that least of all other gay men understand and why their betrayal of our transgender brothers and sisters is so egregious and painful. A transgender woman is a woman who was born with male sex characteristics, but nonetheless a woman, and a transgender man is a man born with female sex characteristics, but nonetheless a man, not simply through identity and in spite of the physical body, the organs, and chromosomes. Insisting that the sex of a person is that of the sex organs or chromosomes of the gender opposite that which they identify is like saying a person who is half black is not black, that someone who is half Jewish is not Jewish. It’s really an ignorant point of view which can be made but is typically done by those engaging in bigotry, exclusivity, and prejudice, without regard for all the facts or any real understanding of how our biology works, nor that the mind is as much a part and function of the physical body as any other aspect of our physical being, arguments which are entirely self-serving and without consideration for the victims of their dogma nor the effect of their words nor our position as mortal beings who have absolutely no say in the workings of creation. The brain doesn’t care what the shape of your chromosomes are, and the shape of the chromosomes is not what determines gender nor sex because they are also a result of gestation in the womb and not a determinator of sex, which is determined instead by the environment of the womb in which you were conceived, which is entirely separate from and unrelated to your genitals or the shape of your chromosomes. Choosing to identify a person’s sex based on these definitions is at best arbitrary, at worst akin to eugenics and scientific racism. This is all even more absurd considering that people can change the very physiology of their bodies by taking hormones, which, if it weren’t possible to change your sex would then not occur from taking hormones. But it does! Literally in refute of their position. Further exploring the line of reasoning of these bigoted viewpoints how does one determine the sex of a woman or a man, then? If a woman has too large a clitoris is she not a woman? If a man’s penis is too small is he therefore a woman? If the breasts of a transgender woman do not make her a woman does that mean that the breasts of a cis gendered woman do not make her a woman? Then that would mean it’s her XX chromosomes which do? But if a woman has XY chromosomes though she’s born with fully natural vagina and breasts is she then a man? If a man has XX chromosomes but a fully natural penis and no female genitals is he still a man? And yes, these combinations do exist, you just don’t know about them because you don’t care to know, because your motivation for even getting into this debate, since it likely has absolutely nothing to really do with you, is to sustain your worldview rather than learn about life, nature, or others. You yourself may even have the opposite chromosomes than what you’d assume but you wouldn’t know because you’ve never had the occasion to test them!

People who hold fervently to the idea of gender and sex are those who are themselves unsure of their own self-worth and identity as a person, and find the possibility of undefined roles a threat which aggravates their own insecurities too much, and thus lash out at others who remind them of the changeableness and impermanence of life. For what other interest do these people have in whether or not transgender people are the sex with which they identify? It has no bearing on them in the least, except that which they take upon themselves voluntarily and unsolicited. I follow a particularly amazing man on Instagram, Jaimie Wilson, who openly shares his experience of being transgender, and I have seen how people attack him for who he is as if it has any actual bearing on their own lives. One person (who was a gay man) wrote an unsolicited proclamation on a post of Jaimie’s that he was not really a man, despite the fact that Jaimie has an amazingly muscular body, thick beard, and fantastic voice, and is decidedly more stereotypically masculine than the man who posted it, who in turn was an obviously insecure, out of shape, less attractive male. Clearly this antagonist was probably jealous and insecure about himself, probably exacerbated by his own negative experiences of rejection, but decided to take his anger and frustration out on someone who was vulnerable rather than deal with his own feelings and insecurities. A lot of straight women who attack transgender women probably find too much of their own identity in being female, and the thought of someone else coming to join them in turn adds a few cracks to their own identity. The reality of the entire situation is that only transgender people know the truth about what it is to be transgender, and while the world can learn, investigate, and study our biology it cannot pass judgment on that biology, nor assign us to roles, identities, or categories without harming many, many people, including those who believe they aren’t affected, as the tens of thousands of angry and narrow-minded people who came to side with Mrs. Rowling who adhere to a shaky and questionable idea of who they are and what it means to be human. Never mind the problems in medicine based on erroneous ideas of sex and gender, based on exactly these same prejudices, which cause debilitating harm to both men and women such as the carcinogenic effect of combined hormonal contraceptives and menopausal treatment, risk of thrombosis from said treatments, suicide risk from so-called male pattern baldness hair loss treatments, mistaking androgens as the cause of prostate cancer for the last few decades which in turn caused more prostate cancer deaths, all caused by misunderstanding of human sex and gender, never mind the obvious examples of how medical and biological science does not even really understand genetics, and those are just the few I impatiently looked up in the space of writing this article. Proclaiming rules about other people’s biology also puts you in the role of Creator, and there is no human I know who can yet will life into existence by a wave of their hand.

Just as I didn’t like the Harry Potter world the first four times I saw it but then realized that my own biases had gotten in the way of something which was actually really great, if you are someone who has a hard time accepting transgender people (or anyone who is different) you should first look at why you have such feelings in the first place, because it has a lot more to do with you and your own life experience and ideas of self worth than it does those who are the object of your contempt. If you are then a person who wants to be respected, listened to, regarded, and protected by society, then you should extend this courtesy to everyone else, including but certainly not limited to those who are transgender. But even if you aren’t, I’m still going to fight for your rights, just as I fight for theirs, because I learned from being the target of prejudice and bigotry that nobody should have to endure it. And besides—it’s the right thing to do.

My article on Feminism explains issues which may be relevant to those concerned with Transgender rights and protections, or find some help with relationship issues discussed in my article Recrimination in Relationships and How To Salvage Them, the Inanity of Anti Abortion Politicians is an interesting look into the hormonal origins of fanatical politics. Transgender men and women often also suffer from depression, and there are many articles on this blog and an entire chapter in my book on the topic, and you can read Why You Are So Goddamned Depressed Right Now.