Anatomy Does Not Determine Gender, Experts Say
The New York Times follows up on Trump’s attacks on transgender people.
Defining gender as a condition determined strictly by a person’s genitals is based on a notion that doctors and scientists abandoned long ago as oversimplified and often medically meaningless.
Researchers who have studied gender issues and provided health care to people who do not fit the typical M/F pigeonholes said that the Trump administration’s latest plan to define gender goes beyond the limits of scientific knowledge.
“The idea that a person’s sex is determined by their anatomy at birth is not true, and we’ve known that it’s not true for decades,” said Dr. Joshua D. Safer, an endocrinologist and executive director of the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery at Mount Sinai Health System in New York. He is also president of the United States Professional Association of Transgender Health.
As the article points out, scientists have not come up with a complete narrative of what makes people transgender, but most of them agree on two things:
1. You do not chose to be transgender and your identity is real. Your gender identity is found between your ears, not between your legs.
2. There is some kind of biological component to the formation of gender identities, although other factors will play a role as well.