Trans Research Masterdoc

This document is a collaboration between @SkyMochi64 and @Nominal.Naomi based on the original Nominal.Naomi Research Masterdoc. This is an open source project, and collaborations are welcome. See contributing if you'd like to contribute. The GitHub for this project can be found here.

Content Warnings

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Many studies (even those included), due to age or biases, often times use ableist and/or transphobic language. Many studies discuss cisgender, neurotypical, and able-bodied individuals as "normal" or "typical" while referring to the contrary as "abnormal", "atypical", "not normal", etc. This can be incredibly dehumanizing and exhausting to read these studies in depth. Please be cautious when doing so, and make sure to keep your mental health as your first priority. Articles that are especially egregious should be labeled with an asterisk. Articles with a bias towards eugenics should be excluded.

Table of Contents

1. Resources
2. Definitions
3. Acronyms
4. Biological Sex is Mostly Mutable
5. "The Exception That Proves The Rule"
6. Brain Sex
7. Modern Eugenics & Conversion Therapy Efforts
8. Sex, Gender, and Religion
9. Gender Transition Helps People
10. Trans Youth
11. Detransition and Regret
12. Debate & Rhetoric

Resources

Definitions

Sex: A collection of dimorphic biological characteristics associated with maleness and femaleness, including chromosomes, reproduction, hormones, anatomy, and brain structures. These characteristics are bimodally distributed along a spectrum.

Gender: The roles and expectations assigned socially to individuals based on their perceived maleness, femaleness, masculinity, femininity, and/or stated identity.

Gender Identity: An individual’s innate sense of being a man, a woman, and/or neither. This can differ from one’s gender assigned at birth, and through the process of social transition (which is often accompanied with medical transition), transgender people can make their gender align with their gender identity.

Woman: An individual who is assigned feminine roles and expectations by society based on their perceived femininity, femaleness, and/or stated identity.

Acronyms

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GAHT Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy

HRT Hormone Replacement Therapy

SRS (outdated) Sex Re-assignment Surgery

Biological Sex is Mostly Mutable

Many aspects of biological sex can be changed through medical transition, though it is not a requirement to transgender identities.

For trans women on hormone replacement therapy (consisting of bioidentical estrogen and progesterone), they obtain a female hormonal profile, altering the sexually dimorphic gene expressions of their cells. Everyone’s cells have the potential to express both male and female traits which are encoded in their DNA, and these traits are turned on and off by your current hormone profile. Feminizing hormone therapy causes their genes to express female traits, causing the development of breasts anatomically identical to cis females. They are also capable of lactating within healthy and normal ranges for nutrient as is the case with examples such as Nominal.Naomi.

Further, hormone therapy helps trans women develop female skin texture, female body odor, female body fat distribution, female hair patterns in both body hair and head hair, female muscle mass, female bone density, and even female bone structure if they start early enough.

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Hormones Changing Bone Structure Studies:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18835591/

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33507568/

Bottom surgery reconstructs existing genitals into fully functional genitals of the opposite sex (functional genitals, not reproductive organs… although this is actively being researched!).

Medical transition can make trans people infertile, fertility banking should be encouraged for individuals seeking hormone therapy.

Hence, trans people can change their hormonal sex, the sex expression of their genes, their anatomical sex, and they can at least move over to the infertile category of reproductive sex.

But What About the Chromosomes?

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X and Y chromosomal combinations are neither binary, nor a defining characteristic of one’s biological sex characteristics (Griffiths 2018) as evidenced by many examples:

• XX Males exist - De La Chapelle Syndrome
• XY Females exist - Swyer Syndrome, Complete Androgen Insensitivity
• X0, XXX, XXY, XYY, XXYY all exist as well!

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Estimates for the prevalence of non-expected chromosomal combinations range between roughly 0.5% (Wellesley et al. 2012) (Lubs et al. 1970) to upwards of 2% (Paththinige et al. 2019) depending on time period and location.

0.5% of individuals have abnormal sex chromosomes, which accounts for millions of Americans alone and is about as common as being trans!

But What About the Gametes?

"The Exception That Proves The Rule"

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Biological sex is varied. This is a fact. However, many brush off this fact with the following argument:

“This is just the exception that proves the rule: e.g. we still say that humans have ten fingers even though there are some that don’t.”

From a general perspective

Whenever a generalized rule is constructed, exceptions will always exist; however, general rules are not the same thing a defining characteristic. Humans generally have ten fingers, but someone is still a human even if they have an exceptional number of fingers. Similarly, an intersex female with exceptional XY chromosomes is still female and an infertile female is still female. Because all the other similar characteristics they share with other females, they are female. The same thing applies to trans females, who have hormonal levels, anatomical characteristics, and brain matter distributions in line with other females, not males.

From a scientific perspective

The goal of scientists is to build the most accurate and complete models of understanding. Any model of human biology that fails to account for intersex people, who make up almost 2% of all humans, is an incomplete and inaccurate model. Incomplete and accurate models should be discarded if a better model can be constructed. Simple and incomplete models are good at introducing people, like children, to scientific topics. As cognitively developed adults that care about the truth, we should recognize that the simple model is simply the most intuitive and understandable, not the most complete and accurate. Modern day biologists account for intersex people by recognizing that biological sex exists bimodally distributed along a spectrum. This is just fact.

Figure: An example of a more accurate and complete visualization made by Amanda Montañez and Pitch Interactive for Scientific American detailing the bimodal distribution of sex from "typical biological female" to "typical biological male" including chromosomes, genes, hormones, internal/external sex organs, and secondary sex characteristics.

Brain Sex

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The human brain is an incredibly complex organ, with countless different structures specializing in different functions, but also adaptable (neuroplasticity).

Brain Sex as a Mosaic

For decades we considered the brain to either be male or female (as strictly sexually dimorphic), however, recent research has revealed different frameworks for interpreting the sex of a brain. This has complex and nuanced implications for transgender individuals.

Daphne Joel and Cordelia Fine, experts on the subjects of neuroscience and philosophy of science respectively, argue that 17th and 18th century European society constructed the notion that gender (& sex) ar