Read Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy for Free Online Page B
Authors: Melvin Konner
trying on clothes of the opposite sex. Few, however, express the persistent wish to be the opposite sex. These children go to sleep praying that they will awaken and be miraculously transformed.” The response of the environment is typically harsh. “Few things are as devastating to parents as learning that their child is a transsexual. The narcissistic injury in having a child who wants to change genders is beyond description. Parents can accept a child who is acriminal more easily than a child who is transgendered. Our society reinforces this intolerance.” Neither the many cases Ettner and others describe nor the transsexuals’ own accounts in autobiographies and interviews give credence to the idea that some kind of aberrant child-rearing experience is the key to understanding what makes a person want this.
But what does make sense, as a hypothesis, is that some personal biological history—genetic, neural, hormonal, or pharmacological—made these people wish to be different from what, in their bodies, they had always appeared to be. It’s a hypothesis we can test in the future when we can look in enough detail at brain images of people who want to change sex. A 2011 study by Alicia Garcia-Falgueras, Lisette Ligtenberg, and others found that male-to-female transsexuals who came to autopsy and had their brains examined fell between women and men in the cellular and chemical structure of a part of the hypothalamus involved in sex and reproduction. This needs further study, but such evidence may become part of the case people make for changing gender; objective brain differences could support what they so strongly feel. This should never be a requirement—that would merely be more medical arrogance—but it could very well help them and us to understand. We should have, I strongly believe, the freedom to choose what we want, but that doesn’t mean we have freely chosen to want it, or that we can wish it away because others want us to fit society’s mold.
Finally, consider the wonderfully interesting people who start out as XY but are born with the fairly unambiguous claim “It’s a girl.” Many cluster in a handful of villages in the highlands of the Dominican Republic. They come from inbred families and share a recessive mutation that changes a very simple enzyme. It’s called 5-alpha reductase, and their syndrome is named for that deficiency. There are also cases in New Guinea, Turkey, and elsewhere, but the best studies have been in the DR.
Julianne Imperato-McGinley, an endocrinologist at the Cornell Medical Center in New York, studied eighteen of these remarkable people, publishing the results in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1979 and following up for many years after. She found out that they were called machihembra (man-woman) or guevedoce (testicles-at-twelve), because of what was known about them in retrospect. These children were almost all recognized at birth as girls, assigned to female roles throughout development, and not viewed as special until they should have started to go through female puberty. First, they didn’t develop breasts; then their clitorises enlarged and became small penises; finally, they developed broad, muscular shoulders instead of laying down body fat over curved, broadening hips.
In other words, these girls became men. But surely more than a decade of being raised as girls could not allow them a successful transition to masculinity? That guess would be wrong. Of the eighteen machihembras closely studied, seventeen made an effective psychological transition.
How is this possible?
First, no known cultural-determinist theory of gender development can explain it. Every strongly cultural theory predicts that these people should have confused identities for life. They do have some difficulties making the transition, but almost all of them succeed. They get married. With a little help from a fertility clinic, most of them have children. They become men of their
But what does make sense, as a hypothesis, is that some personal biological history—genetic, neural, hormonal, or pharmacological—made these people wish to be different from what, in their bodies, they had always appeared to be. It’s a hypothesis we can test in the future when we can look in enough detail at brain images of people who want to change sex. A 2011 study by Alicia Garcia-Falgueras, Lisette Ligtenberg, and others found that male-to-female transsexuals who came to autopsy and had their brains examined fell between women and men in the cellular and chemical structure of a part of the hypothalamus involved in sex and reproduction. This needs further study, but such evidence may become part of the case people make for changing gender; objective brain differences could support what they so strongly feel. This should never be a requirement—that would merely be more medical arrogance—but it could very well help them and us to understand. We should have, I strongly believe, the freedom to choose what we want, but that doesn’t mean we have freely chosen to want it, or that we can wish it away because others want us to fit society’s mold.
Finally, consider the wonderfully interesting people who start out as XY but are born with the fairly unambiguous claim “It’s a girl.” Many cluster in a handful of villages in the highlands of the Dominican Republic. They come from inbred families and share a recessive mutation that changes a very simple enzyme. It’s called 5-alpha reductase, and their syndrome is named for that deficiency. There are also cases in New Guinea, Turkey, and elsewhere, but the best studies have been in the DR.
Julianne Imperato-McGinley, an endocrinologist at the Cornell Medical Center in New York, studied eighteen of these remarkable people, publishing the results in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1979 and following up for many years after. She found out that they were called machihembra (man-woman) or guevedoce (testicles-at-twelve), because of what was known about them in retrospect. These children were almost all recognized at birth as girls, assigned to female roles throughout development, and not viewed as special until they should have started to go through female puberty. First, they didn’t develop breasts; then their clitorises enlarged and became small penises; finally, they developed broad, muscular shoulders instead of laying down body fat over curved, broadening hips.
In other words, these girls became men. But surely more than a decade of being raised as girls could not allow them a successful transition to masculinity? That guess would be wrong. Of the eighteen machihembras closely studied, seventeen made an effective psychological transition.
How is this possible?
First, no known cultural-determinist theory of gender development can explain it. Every strongly cultural theory predicts that these people should have confused identities for life. They do have some difficulties making the transition, but almost all of them succeed. They get married. With a little help from a fertility clinic, most of them have children. They become men of their