Is It All In Our Head?

There is a short article in the Rolling Stones this month about the causes of gender dysphoria.

The Science of Transgender
Understanding the causes of being transgender
By Sabrina Rubin Erdely
July 30, 2014

What causes people to be transgender in the first place? The prevailing theories used to be psychosocial: That early traumas like dysfunctional family dynamics or childhood sexual abuse were responsible. "That is absolutely not true at all," says Dr. Johanna Olson, medical director of the Transgender Clinic at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. "But I still get people in my clinic who are trying to unravel what the traumatic incident was, that caused their kid to be trans."

Rather, a growing body of research is pointing to biological origins. The 2008 discovery by Australian researchers of a genetic variation in transgender women—their receptor gene for the sex hormone testosterone was longer, making it less efficient at communicating signals—set off speculation that insufficient uptake of male hormones in utero contributed to a "more feminised brain." And the brains of trans people do look different. Recent Spanish imaging studies have shown that the white matter of untreated trans men look much like those of biological males, and that the patterns of trans women's white matter fell about halfway between those of biological male and female control groups. But it's premature to draw conclusions from those studies, warns Olson, since "those parts of the brain are shaped by performance and experience," and so may be a product of nurture, not nature…

I am always leery of finding a biological cause for either gender dysphoria or sexual orientation because nature is so diverse that I don’t think that there is one cause, but many factors may contribute to us being trans* or gay or lesbian or all of the shades in between.

There is a 2005 article in the New York Times where they interview Dr. William G. Reiner a doctor who has studied intersex children and I think he has the best answer to the question how do you determine the gender of a person…

Q. What conclusions do you draw from your study?

A. That sexual identity is individual, unique and intuitive and that the only person who really knows what it is is the person themselves. If we as physicians or scientists want to know about a person's sexual identity, we have to ask them.