The Daily Kos has a remarkable post up outlining the various ways in which human embryos, which begin life largely undifferentiated, acquire gender-related characteristics under the influence of hormones, etc.
The thing that impressed me most about the article is that it starts from the assumption that trans women are women, and trans men are men, they just have a rather more extreme case of developmental skewness than you find in intersex people. This is completely opposite to the usual media and medical (and common Feminist) view that trans women are “really” men and trans men are “really” women who can be surgically altered to look like the “other sex”. As the article makes plain, all human beings start out the same, and any medical treatment for trans people is adjusting what the body has done to itself.
The other important point that the article makes is that the natural variation in human development is far more significant than most people assume, and people with “abnormal” sexual characteristics are much more common than trans people. Furthermore, post-surgery, trans people fit well within the natural range of variation for their gender.
It is the most refreshing and complete article on trans biology I have read in a long time.
Warning: contains biology text book drawings.
Thank you; that’s an excellent article.
Interesting (though kinda technical for me).
the usual media and medical (and common Feminist) view that trans women are “really†men and trans men are “really†men who can be surgically altered to look like the “other sexâ€.
I believe the last “men” above should be “women,” if I parse you correctly.
Yes, thanks. *sigh* Fixed now.
Tangentially, this touches on something which I’ve been thinking about lately. Occam’s famous Razor says not to multiply entities beyond necessity, but many of the edges of our knowledge are places where “it’s not that simple after all. We need _more_ categories/distinctions.” (Perhaps my own longest-standing example — how many distinct traits/situations are clumped into the social construct “homosexual”? *)
((*no, I’m not saying that homosexuality is some sort of social construct; there is a categorization which IS a social construct, though, illustrated, for example, by the differences in the boundaries in different cultures))
Also, if some unusual condition occurs, say, once in a thousand or once in ten thousand people, then in a pre-industrial culture where most people only meet 500 other people in their entire lives, it will be semi-mythic. I live in a city of seven million, so there will be hundreds or even a couple thousand such individuals just in my city.
Embryology has always intrigued me.