The most difficult part of the transgender experience is arguably getting other people to understand how it could be that someone born with a male reproductive system could insist she's a woman, or someone born with a female reproductive system insisting he's a man. After all, if you have a penis then you ARE a man, or, if you have a vagina you ARE a woman. Most people treat this as such an obvious thing that it needs no explaining or questioning: Well, Duh! I liken this to the time of Copernicus, when most people believed the world was flat and the sun, moon, and stars circled around it—the Earth was the center of the Universe. It was such an obvious thing that it didn't need any questioning, and it would be crazy to suggest otherwise. You can look up in the sky and watch the sun move across from east to west throughout the day. You can watch the moon and stars move across the night sky. All the while, you can't feel the Earth moving under your feet. It is so obvious that everything circles around the world! Well, Duh!
We all know how that story ends.
Einstein taught us that the things you observe and understand in the world around you are dependent on your frame of reference. Relativity. How you interpret everything in the world is completely a result of the point-of-view from which you look at it. If you change your frame of reference, then what you are looking at becomes something different, and you need to take yourself out of your normal frame of reference in order to observe the truest nature of what you see in your everyday world. Following that, Einstein's lifetime quest was to find an elegantly simple and clear explanation for everything that occurs in the Universe. He ultimately offered a mathematical equation he believed got very close to that understanding: E=mc².
At this point I must say, if you are reading on in anticipation of learning what the "m" and "c" stand for in relation to the "T" in the title, then I'm going to disappoint you—they don't mean anything. They are merely a metaphor for a quest for answers (but the "T" obviously means "transgenderness"). My own personal life journey through a transgender experience brought with it the big questions that kept gnawing at my consciousness: Why am I like this? Why are so many other people like this? Why isn't everyone like this? Why is it so hard for people who aren't like this to understand it?
Following is the understanding I arrived at through years of soul searching and questioning, put through the frame of reference of evolutionary biology, sociobiology, and community ecology. Needing to remove myself from my own frame of reference, I turned to this one because it is one I have a good understanding of, and many other people use it to understand why life is the way it is.
Evolution and Genetics
Whenever evolution come up in a topic like this, it is often oversimplified to catch-phrases like "survival of the fittest" and "natural selection." Which quickly gets translated into "heterosexuals who find life partners and multiply are the only good people." But anyone who really understands evolutionary biology knows that it does a lot of hedging it's bets to increase the chances of survival—not of the individual but of the community (the gene pool). "Diversity leads to stability" is a much higher truth in biology than "survival of the fittest." If a critter that lives in tall grass survives by eating flowers at the top of stalks of grass, then the tallest ones who can reach the most flowers will out-compete the shorter ones for food, and the shorter ones will starve and disappear leaving only tall ones. Right? But what if there comes a large predator who likes to eat this critter? The tallest ones are the easiest to find in the grass so they will be eaten first, leaving only short ones. Who then ultimately survives as "the fittest"? The taller ones that can reach the food better, or the shorter ones that can't be seen by the predator as well? Chances are that they both coexist and even adapt cooperative strategies to help each other survive—just in case the environment they live in changes: more predators or less short grass. All of life on this planet functions on a principle of keeping the members of the community diverse so that when a change in the environment occurs there is the greatest chance that some members will be better adapted to the newer reality and will help ensure the survival of the community.
Another big thing we are realizing more and more with studies of genetics is that all animals are more closely related than we ever previously imagined. There is a reason both mice and humans have two arm, two legs, two eyes, one spine, one heart, two lungs, one tongue, etc. Biology has a few general templates that all creatures in the same class are built from (a common ancestor)—with differences to help each species fill a niche in the greater community of life in order to keep the whole system working. We now know that humans and mice have more than 90% identical genes. Many species have unique adaptations that enable them to respond to changes in their environment, but due to the generalized nature of evolutionary biology, many other species still carry the genes and some of the characteristics for those particular adaptations without an obvious current need for them or way to use them. As such, people born with male reproductive systems still have breast nipples and produce prolactin, but usually never produce breast milk despite having all the "ingredients" to do it.
There are many examples of animals, particularly fish, that are known to spontaneously change their reproductive sex when stresses in their environment trigger a severe shortage of healthy individuals with full reproductive capacity. Under those extreme conditions, there are certain individuals in a population who go through a metamorphosis where their physical bodies transform from one reproductive sex to the other, and then they begin copulating and reproducing as the other sex. In biology, these individuals are often called sequential hermaphrodites. Recently, advanced studies in genetics and sexual reproduction has revealed a particular gene, named FOXL2, that is responsible for maintaining the reproductive sex characteristics in humans and other mamals throughout life. As long as this gene is "switched off" the individual keeps it's current reproductive sex, but if this one gene is suddenly switched on, the individual's body goes through a metamorphosis to physically change reproductive sex. The ovaries or testes reverse the balance of estrogen and testosterone they produce and other chemical changes occur that trigger sexual organs to reshape both form and function to become the opposite sex. The big question that follows with this knowledge is, what in nature triggers the FOXL2 gene (plus other genes we have yet to discover) into action?
Gender vs Sex
One of the big realizations for me a few years ago was that while most people tend to use the words "gender" and "sex" interchangeably as if they mean the same thing, they actually are two separate and unique things.
Sex is the easy one: the reproductive anatomy of your body. Male = provide sperm and a means of getting it close enough to an egg, female = provide egg and womb, and a means of accepting sperm. It's important to note that sex as an act specifically to reproduce is a very brief and fleeting moment in anyone's life. It can obviously happen several times in a lifetime, but it is still a tiny part of the lifetime. Pregnancy then follows, where you go through all kinds of physical and emotional experiences as the fetus develops, but compared to your entire lifetime, it's still short. All other intimate feelings are a much larger part of anyone's life and serve a very different purpose: nurturing, companionship, emotional bonding, and community strengthening. Erotic behavior is at least as much a means of encouraging companionship and community bonding as it is an act to reproduce. Reproduction is neither essential nor always beneficial to companionship and bonding in a community.
Gender is more complicated to talk about, mostly because it has been so poorly understood. The best way I've found to describe it to myself is that gender is a root emotion that helps build the foundation of your psyche. Humans, like all animals, are emotional creatures. The limbic system is the portion of your brain where emotion originates, and as such is the likely source of gender. We experience love, fear, excstacy, desire, sadness, pain, friendship, and many other complex emotions as an adaptation to create a sense of community and bonds between us that result in individuals acting together to strengthen the cohesion of a community to increase the chances of survival. While we reproduce sexually, the mere presence of sexual anatomy offers no guarantee or motivation to actually have sex. There must be an emotional component that steers each of us towards others in our community to make sure that the sexual reproduction actually happens. That is what gender is—a foundational emotion that draws us towards each other and makes us want to find companionship to increase the chances that the community successfully reproduces. It guides our behavior to increase the chances that we actively seek out and find a companion—often to reproduce with. The raw sensory experience of an orgasm isn't enough to keep the cohesion of a community strong. A "female" gender can feel an emotional need to seek out a "male" gender, and develop behavior patterns to draw male-gendered individuals toward her, and vice-versa. At this point it sounds like I've made a case against transgenderness (and against homosexuality too), but it's now time to re-visit the points I made earlier about nature hedging its bets and adaptive strategies to cope with environmental stress.
Transgender
Let's take a closer look at general templates and sequential hermaphrodites. One thing science already understands about species where individuals can change reproductive sex is that it's not any member of the population that will do this—there are certain individuals within the community that are most inclined to do it when it is necessary.
It may very well be true that at some primitive time in human history we were exposed to environmental stressors severe enough to trigger sex metamorphosis in individuals whose gender programming steered it that way, but as human culture advanced, such severe stress no longer occured. Disease, food shortages, or natural catastrophies probably decimated human populations the way they do other animal species, and humans also had individuals that changed sex in response to ensure there were enough reproductive pairs to keep the community intact. Modern humans no longer experience that kind of stress, but subsets of the population are still psychologically "at the ready" to change if it were ever needed. But it may also simply be one of those carry-over traits in the general template that manifests as a gender different from reproductive sex, but that is not tapped-into with modern humans. These individuals must have a gender that is programmed for behavior, emotion, and sexual desire associated with the reproductive sex they currently don't have, and, the emotions associated with this gender must be whole enough and strong enough that the individual wants and needs very intensely to have the reproductive sex associated with it's gender so if the call arises to change they will readily make the change.
When an environmental stress becomes so severe that it triggers such a metamorphosis, it is not some mysterious force, or chemical in the air or water that seeps in throught the skin directly to the reproductive organs to cause them to begin the process of change. With even a small amount of serious consideration such a notion borders on the absurd. A sharp die-off and population decline would obviously create severe emotional stress among the members, and it is well-understood now in brain science that psychological stress changes the chemistry of the brain.
The psychological need of a transgender individual to transform sex must be strong enough and complete enough that, when coupled with the emotional stress of severe population decline, it creates the right chemical cocktail in the brain that can turn on the FOXL2 gene and any other associated genes, triggering the chemical cascade from within that would cause a physical transformation of sex.
Transgenderness is biology's strategy to respond to a catastrophic population decline. It's not something that can magically appear after the fact of such a decline, it has to be there in the community all the time, at the ready to transform members of the population so that the community can survive. Unfortunately for those people who have been naturally selected for this role, its an excruciatingly difficult emotional experience to endure, especially in a social environment where they are rejected, without justification, as sick, disturbed outcasts.
As I've already eluded to, homosexuality fits into this very neatly also—as the adaptive strategy to respond to population explosions, but that is a topic for another day. For now, it's clear that transgenderness and homosexuality are independent but complementary strategies of population dynamics, and great balancing forces in nature.
In Summary
1. The way we perceive and understand things in our everyday world is completely dependent on the point-of-view from which we look at it. We must remove ourselves from our normal point-of-view in order to get a better understanding of what we are observing and experiencing.
2. Nature depends on, and thrives most, when the community is very diverse rather than uniform.
3. "Gender" and "sex" are separate things. "Sex" is the reproductive anatomy of the body, "gender" is the emotional programming that makes us want to find companionship in others, to increase the chances that the community reproduces successfully. A "female" gender is one that generally desires to reproduce through female anatomy, a "male" gender desires to reproduce through male anatomy.
4. Biology is generalized and template-driven: genomes are far more similar than they are different, and most species carry genes and characteristics that are relics of an evolutionary kinship to other species or adaptive traits, but may also be tapped-into if environmental stresses demand it for community survival.
5. Many species have adaptations for some community members to physically change reproductive sex when environmental stresses force a sharp decline in available sex partners. This is not triggered by a mysterious chemical "in the water" that is ingested or permeates the skin and directly metamorphosises reproductive anatomy, rather some individuals in the community have emotional programming to predispose them to "wanting" to transform to the other sex, so when the environmental stress is there, their brains readily release the chemistry that triggers the metamorphosis. By design, their emotional foundation includes the need to jump at the opportunity to change sex. In simpler terms, they have to seriously want it. They are transgender.
9. Transgenderness and homosexuality are the necessary stabilizing force in a sexually-reporducing community. If the community were made up only of individuals who are statically opposite-sex-companion driven, then the sense of larger community cohesion would collaps, mating pairs would only be in competition with each other for resources, finding companions would be much more difficult and have a lower success rate, and offspring survival rates would be much lower since there is no community to help protect and nuture them. In short, the species would perish.
10. Transgenderness is nature's great balancing force for underpopulation, homosexuality is nature's great balancing force for overpopulation. But by necessity they always exist in every population. The two are independent of each other, and therefore can both occur within someone.
~Satya's Mind, 4 June 2010
End note on terminology:
My use of the word transgender in this essay, doesn't exactly jibe with how I define it in the definitions page. I only did that for simplicity in reading here, since, based on my own definition of transgender, there isn't yet a word for what I describe above. Transgender is still commonly understood to carry the meaning as I've used it here, so it was a natural choice. That may change in the future.
We all know how that story ends.
Einstein taught us that the things you observe and understand in the world around you are dependent on your frame of reference. Relativity. How you interpret everything in the world is completely a result of the point-of-view from which you look at it. If you change your frame of reference, then what you are looking at becomes something different, and you need to take yourself out of your normal frame of reference in order to observe the truest nature of what you see in your everyday world. Following that, Einstein's lifetime quest was to find an elegantly simple and clear explanation for everything that occurs in the Universe. He ultimately offered a mathematical equation he believed got very close to that understanding: E=mc².
At this point I must say, if you are reading on in anticipation of learning what the "m" and "c" stand for in relation to the "T" in the title, then I'm going to disappoint you—they don't mean anything. They are merely a metaphor for a quest for answers (but the "T" obviously means "transgenderness"). My own personal life journey through a transgender experience brought with it the big questions that kept gnawing at my consciousness: Why am I like this? Why are so many other people like this? Why isn't everyone like this? Why is it so hard for people who aren't like this to understand it?
Following is the understanding I arrived at through years of soul searching and questioning, put through the frame of reference of evolutionary biology, sociobiology, and community ecology. Needing to remove myself from my own frame of reference, I turned to this one because it is one I have a good understanding of, and many other people use it to understand why life is the way it is.
Evolution and Genetics
Whenever evolution come up in a topic like this, it is often oversimplified to catch-phrases like "survival of the fittest" and "natural selection." Which quickly gets translated into "heterosexuals who find life partners and multiply are the only good people." But anyone who really understands evolutionary biology knows that it does a lot of hedging it's bets to increase the chances of survival—not of the individual but of the community (the gene pool). "Diversity leads to stability" is a much higher truth in biology than "survival of the fittest." If a critter that lives in tall grass survives by eating flowers at the top of stalks of grass, then the tallest ones who can reach the most flowers will out-compete the shorter ones for food, and the shorter ones will starve and disappear leaving only tall ones. Right? But what if there comes a large predator who likes to eat this critter? The tallest ones are the easiest to find in the grass so they will be eaten first, leaving only short ones. Who then ultimately survives as "the fittest"? The taller ones that can reach the food better, or the shorter ones that can't be seen by the predator as well? Chances are that they both coexist and even adapt cooperative strategies to help each other survive—just in case the environment they live in changes: more predators or less short grass. All of life on this planet functions on a principle of keeping the members of the community diverse so that when a change in the environment occurs there is the greatest chance that some members will be better adapted to the newer reality and will help ensure the survival of the community.
Another big thing we are realizing more and more with studies of genetics is that all animals are more closely related than we ever previously imagined. There is a reason both mice and humans have two arm, two legs, two eyes, one spine, one heart, two lungs, one tongue, etc. Biology has a few general templates that all creatures in the same class are built from (a common ancestor)—with differences to help each species fill a niche in the greater community of life in order to keep the whole system working. We now know that humans and mice have more than 90% identical genes. Many species have unique adaptations that enable them to respond to changes in their environment, but due to the generalized nature of evolutionary biology, many other species still carry the genes and some of the characteristics for those particular adaptations without an obvious current need for them or way to use them. As such, people born with male reproductive systems still have breast nipples and produce prolactin, but usually never produce breast milk despite having all the "ingredients" to do it.
There are many examples of animals, particularly fish, that are known to spontaneously change their reproductive sex when stresses in their environment trigger a severe shortage of healthy individuals with full reproductive capacity. Under those extreme conditions, there are certain individuals in a population who go through a metamorphosis where their physical bodies transform from one reproductive sex to the other, and then they begin copulating and reproducing as the other sex. In biology, these individuals are often called sequential hermaphrodites. Recently, advanced studies in genetics and sexual reproduction has revealed a particular gene, named FOXL2, that is responsible for maintaining the reproductive sex characteristics in humans and other mamals throughout life. As long as this gene is "switched off" the individual keeps it's current reproductive sex, but if this one gene is suddenly switched on, the individual's body goes through a metamorphosis to physically change reproductive sex. The ovaries or testes reverse the balance of estrogen and testosterone they produce and other chemical changes occur that trigger sexual organs to reshape both form and function to become the opposite sex. The big question that follows with this knowledge is, what in nature triggers the FOXL2 gene (plus other genes we have yet to discover) into action?
Gender vs Sex
One of the big realizations for me a few years ago was that while most people tend to use the words "gender" and "sex" interchangeably as if they mean the same thing, they actually are two separate and unique things.
Sex is the easy one: the reproductive anatomy of your body. Male = provide sperm and a means of getting it close enough to an egg, female = provide egg and womb, and a means of accepting sperm. It's important to note that sex as an act specifically to reproduce is a very brief and fleeting moment in anyone's life. It can obviously happen several times in a lifetime, but it is still a tiny part of the lifetime. Pregnancy then follows, where you go through all kinds of physical and emotional experiences as the fetus develops, but compared to your entire lifetime, it's still short. All other intimate feelings are a much larger part of anyone's life and serve a very different purpose: nurturing, companionship, emotional bonding, and community strengthening. Erotic behavior is at least as much a means of encouraging companionship and community bonding as it is an act to reproduce. Reproduction is neither essential nor always beneficial to companionship and bonding in a community.
Gender is more complicated to talk about, mostly because it has been so poorly understood. The best way I've found to describe it to myself is that gender is a root emotion that helps build the foundation of your psyche. Humans, like all animals, are emotional creatures. The limbic system is the portion of your brain where emotion originates, and as such is the likely source of gender. We experience love, fear, excstacy, desire, sadness, pain, friendship, and many other complex emotions as an adaptation to create a sense of community and bonds between us that result in individuals acting together to strengthen the cohesion of a community to increase the chances of survival. While we reproduce sexually, the mere presence of sexual anatomy offers no guarantee or motivation to actually have sex. There must be an emotional component that steers each of us towards others in our community to make sure that the sexual reproduction actually happens. That is what gender is—a foundational emotion that draws us towards each other and makes us want to find companionship to increase the chances that the community successfully reproduces. It guides our behavior to increase the chances that we actively seek out and find a companion—often to reproduce with. The raw sensory experience of an orgasm isn't enough to keep the cohesion of a community strong. A "female" gender can feel an emotional need to seek out a "male" gender, and develop behavior patterns to draw male-gendered individuals toward her, and vice-versa. At this point it sounds like I've made a case against transgenderness (and against homosexuality too), but it's now time to re-visit the points I made earlier about nature hedging its bets and adaptive strategies to cope with environmental stress.
Transgender
Let's take a closer look at general templates and sequential hermaphrodites. One thing science already understands about species where individuals can change reproductive sex is that it's not any member of the population that will do this—there are certain individuals within the community that are most inclined to do it when it is necessary.
It may very well be true that at some primitive time in human history we were exposed to environmental stressors severe enough to trigger sex metamorphosis in individuals whose gender programming steered it that way, but as human culture advanced, such severe stress no longer occured. Disease, food shortages, or natural catastrophies probably decimated human populations the way they do other animal species, and humans also had individuals that changed sex in response to ensure there were enough reproductive pairs to keep the community intact. Modern humans no longer experience that kind of stress, but subsets of the population are still psychologically "at the ready" to change if it were ever needed. But it may also simply be one of those carry-over traits in the general template that manifests as a gender different from reproductive sex, but that is not tapped-into with modern humans. These individuals must have a gender that is programmed for behavior, emotion, and sexual desire associated with the reproductive sex they currently don't have, and, the emotions associated with this gender must be whole enough and strong enough that the individual wants and needs very intensely to have the reproductive sex associated with it's gender so if the call arises to change they will readily make the change.
When an environmental stress becomes so severe that it triggers such a metamorphosis, it is not some mysterious force, or chemical in the air or water that seeps in throught the skin directly to the reproductive organs to cause them to begin the process of change. With even a small amount of serious consideration such a notion borders on the absurd. A sharp die-off and population decline would obviously create severe emotional stress among the members, and it is well-understood now in brain science that psychological stress changes the chemistry of the brain.
The psychological need of a transgender individual to transform sex must be strong enough and complete enough that, when coupled with the emotional stress of severe population decline, it creates the right chemical cocktail in the brain that can turn on the FOXL2 gene and any other associated genes, triggering the chemical cascade from within that would cause a physical transformation of sex.
Transgenderness is biology's strategy to respond to a catastrophic population decline. It's not something that can magically appear after the fact of such a decline, it has to be there in the community all the time, at the ready to transform members of the population so that the community can survive. Unfortunately for those people who have been naturally selected for this role, its an excruciatingly difficult emotional experience to endure, especially in a social environment where they are rejected, without justification, as sick, disturbed outcasts.
As I've already eluded to, homosexuality fits into this very neatly also—as the adaptive strategy to respond to population explosions, but that is a topic for another day. For now, it's clear that transgenderness and homosexuality are independent but complementary strategies of population dynamics, and great balancing forces in nature.
In Summary
1. The way we perceive and understand things in our everyday world is completely dependent on the point-of-view from which we look at it. We must remove ourselves from our normal point-of-view in order to get a better understanding of what we are observing and experiencing.
2. Nature depends on, and thrives most, when the community is very diverse rather than uniform.
3. "Gender" and "sex" are separate things. "Sex" is the reproductive anatomy of the body, "gender" is the emotional programming that makes us want to find companionship in others, to increase the chances that the community reproduces successfully. A "female" gender is one that generally desires to reproduce through female anatomy, a "male" gender desires to reproduce through male anatomy.
4. Biology is generalized and template-driven: genomes are far more similar than they are different, and most species carry genes and characteristics that are relics of an evolutionary kinship to other species or adaptive traits, but may also be tapped-into if environmental stresses demand it for community survival.
5. Many species have adaptations for some community members to physically change reproductive sex when environmental stresses force a sharp decline in available sex partners. This is not triggered by a mysterious chemical "in the water" that is ingested or permeates the skin and directly metamorphosises reproductive anatomy, rather some individuals in the community have emotional programming to predispose them to "wanting" to transform to the other sex, so when the environmental stress is there, their brains readily release the chemistry that triggers the metamorphosis. By design, their emotional foundation includes the need to jump at the opportunity to change sex. In simpler terms, they have to seriously want it. They are transgender.
9. Transgenderness and homosexuality are the necessary stabilizing force in a sexually-reporducing community. If the community were made up only of individuals who are statically opposite-sex-companion driven, then the sense of larger community cohesion would collaps, mating pairs would only be in competition with each other for resources, finding companions would be much more difficult and have a lower success rate, and offspring survival rates would be much lower since there is no community to help protect and nuture them. In short, the species would perish.
10. Transgenderness is nature's great balancing force for underpopulation, homosexuality is nature's great balancing force for overpopulation. But by necessity they always exist in every population. The two are independent of each other, and therefore can both occur within someone.
~Satya's Mind, 4 June 2010
End note on terminology:
My use of the word transgender in this essay, doesn't exactly jibe with how I define it in the definitions page. I only did that for simplicity in reading here, since, based on my own definition of transgender, there isn't yet a word for what I describe above. Transgender is still commonly understood to carry the meaning as I've used it here, so it was a natural choice. That may change in the future.
