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Transgendered: People who have or want to change their sexual identity. Don’t understand it, but OTOH, I haven’t really read up on it much. Perhaps someone could provide a brief summary of the condition? For instance, is it totaly different from hermaphroditism (sp?)? IOW, are their bodies perfectly in order with their sex and is the desire strictly mental? If so, what does the American Psychiatric Association say about the condition? Is it preferable to treat as a mental disorder or better to guide them towards a full sex-change surgery?
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Hopefully kimera will stop by; she seems to know a considerable amount about the subject. I don’t know as much so I’m mostly relating things I’ve read elsewhere but don’t remember the details of.
Transgenderism is basically usually defined as someone having a physical gender out of sync with their gender identity.
As you’ve noted, there are lots of cases where there is some degree of ambiguity regarding an infant’s genitalia (a surprisingly large number, depending on the exact criteria used, which isn’t surprising because most medical conditions occur in degrees.) The current word for people with that condition is usually “intersexed”.
There’s increasing evidence that a lot of people who would formerly be classified as simply transgendered - i.e. gender identity and physical body don’t match - are actually intersexed in some degree. They have more or less subtle physical and genetic conditions that make their physical sex less clear. For an anecdotal example, a pre-op transgendered MTF friend of mine was identified as male at birth but grew small breasts at puberty (lasting longer than the occasional cases in which pubescent boys exhibit minor breast development.) That sort of thing is, according to some researchers, not terribly uncommon. (kimera actually mentioned once in a thread that some doctors have proposed that height above 5’8’’ be treated as evidence against transgenderism for MTFs, because typically they tend to have smaller, more feminine builds. My limited personal experience knowing some transgendered people aligns with that.)
Differences in brain structure have been alluded to above as well - just as subtle differences in brain structure may exist between gay and straight people.
Of course, none of these things are really diagnostic. But one thing I’ve always been struck by in talking to the few transgendered people I know is that they’ve all known from a very early age, and most of them were scolded as children for behaving more like their mental gender rather than their physical gender. The stories of transgendered people I’ve known (as well as ones I’ve read) always struck me as pretty similar to what it was like to realize I was gay. At first, it seemed perfectly natural - certainly well before puberty, I realized that men were attractive to me and women weren’t (even if there were no sexual urges related to that fealing.) It seemed natural right up until I started realizing that it wasn’t normal. Transgendered people seem to report the same sorts of things - for instance, wanting to dress as their preferred gender rather than the one their parents thought they were, and only later starting to understand that their behavior was not considered normal.
Fundamentally, homosexuality and transgenderism are really both facets of the same thing, and I think that’s where the political identification of gay rights and trans rights movements came from. After all, we’re all a crowd of people who aren’t acting the way our gender is supposed to, and we tend to suffer the same sort of shit for it.
That’s why I have a good deal of sympathy for transgendered people; no, it really cannot (yet, at least) be conclusively proven that transgenderism exists in the same way we can prove that gravity exists (though I think the same could be said for lots of things in the human experience.) At the same time, people still argue that homosexuality isn’t real, that it doesn’t actually exist and arises out of rebelliousness or confusion and that it can be cured rather than permitting us to live our sinful, deviant lifestyles.
I can understand exactly why that’s not true: I’m gay, it’s how I am, it’s very clear, and it’s not something that can be changed. When it comes down to it, that’s the only real evidence there is that homosexuality exists - some people claim to be homosexual; we claim not to be able to change even if we wanted to; we claim that it feels right and natural for us. There’s no other way to determine that homosexuality exists except by trusting that people are probably the best experts into their own experience until you can prove otherwise. By the same token, then, wouldn’t it be extremely arrogant of me to claim that transgendered people are all wrong when they describe how they feel? Since I demand that people take my word for it that I really am gay (or at least would, if anyone doubted it), how in the world can I justify not trusting someone else’s word that their physical and mental gender don’t match? The fact that bits and pieces of medical evidence keep accumulating to confirm both of those things should come as no surprise, but it’s certainly even stronger reason to believe.
And I do take it personally when people claim that transgenderism isn’t real. From a broader, more abstract perspective, transgenderism is a lot like homosexuality. We’re both groups of people that have suffered a lot because we don’t fit in with what is common and expected of our genders. So when someone questions someone else’s gender identity, it’s not a big leap from there to questioning my sexual orientation. As has been said in this thread more than once, both questions can be raised with exactly the same reasoning to support them. You might as well be telling me I’m not really gay if you think only what’s most common and what’s traditionally accepted is really genuine. And, of course, a lot of the same people think the same thing about transgendered people and gay people.
