Fascinating Newsweek feature: The Mystery of Gender

[Maddy McCall]

I've been gone for several weeks, so I don't know if y'all discussed this yet or not. (Purse was stolen over the weekend, so I'm waiting on my new credit card to arrive, so I can donate to DU again and have search access. :grr: )

A close family member of mine is gender dysphoric (in conservative Mississippi, just like the former JT Hayes), so I'm really glad to see this topic receiving feature position in Newsweek. I hope the day will be soon when people who deal with gender identity problems won't have to feel shame or embarrassment for wishing to express externally who they are internally.



(Rethinking) Gender

A growing number of Americans are taking their private struggles with their identities into the public realm. How those who believe they were born with the wrong bodies are forcing us to re-examine what it means to be male and female.


By Debra Rosenberg
Newsweek

May 21, 2007 issue - Growing up in Corinth, Miss., J. T. Hayes had A legacy to attend to. His dad was a well-known race-car driver and Hayes spent much of his childhood tinkering in the family's greasy garage, learning how to design and build cars. By the age of 10, he had started racing in his own right. Eventually Hayes won more than 500 regional and national championships in go-kart, midget and sprint racing, even making it to the NASCAR Winston Cup in the early '90s. But behind the trophies and the swagger of the racing circuit, Hayes was harboring a painful secret: he had always believed he was a woman. He had feminine features and a slight frame—at 5 feet 6 and 118 pounds he was downright dainty—and had always felt, psychologically, like a girl. Only his anatomy got in the way. Since childhood he'd wrestled with what to do about it. He'd slip on "girl clothes" he hid under the mattress and try his hand with makeup. But he knew he'd find little support in his conservative hometown.

In 1991, Hayes had a moment of truth. He was driving a sprint car on a dirt track in Little Rock when the car flipped end over end. "I was trapped upside down, engine throttle stuck, fuel running all over the racetrack and me," Hayes recalls. "The accident didn't scare me, but the thought that I hadn't lived life to its full potential just ran chill bumps up and down my body." That night he vowed to complete the transition to womanhood. Hayes kept racing while he sought therapy and started hormone treatments, hiding his growing breasts under an Ace bandage and baggy T shirts.

Finally, in 1994, at 30, Hayes raced on a Saturday night in Memphis, then drove to Colorado the next day for sex-reassignment surgery, selling his prized race car to pay the tab. Hayes chose the name Terri O'Connell and began a new life as a woman who figured her racing days were over. But she had no idea what else to do. Eventually, O'Connell got a job at the mall selling women's handbags for $8 an hour. O'Connell still hopes to race again, but she knows the odds are long: "Transgendered and professional motor sports just don't go together."

To most of us, gender comes as naturally as breathing. We have no quarrel with the "M" or the "F" on our birth certificates. And, crash diets aside, we've made peace with how we want the world to see us—pants or skirt, boa or blazer, spiky heels or sneakers. But to those who consider themselves transgender, there's a disconnect between the sex they were assigned at birth and the way they see or express themselves. Though their numbers are relatively few—the most generous estimate from the National Center for Transgender Equality is between 750,000 and 3 million Americans (fewer than 1 percent)—many of them are taking their intimate struggles public for the first time. In April, L.A. Times sportswriter Mike Penner announced in his column that when he returned from vacation, he would do so as a woman, Christine Daniels. Nine states plus Washington, D.C., have enacted antidiscrimination laws that protect transgender people—and an additional three states have legislation pending, according to the Human Rights Campaign. And this month the U.S. House of Representatives passed a hate-crimes prevention bill that included "gender identity." Today's transgender Americans go far beyond the old stereotypes (think "Rocky Horror Picture Show"). They are soccer moms, ministers, teachers, politicians, even young children. Their push for tolerance and acceptance is reshaping businesses, sports, schools and families. It's also raising new questions about just what makes us male or female.

More at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18618970/site/newsweek/

Be sure to check out the additional readings in the box to the right of the article, under the heading "The Mystery of Gender."

[BurtWorm]

1. Looks very interesting indeed.

I couldn't help but notice that 90% of the photos were of men transgendered into women. I wonder if that was a fluke of the conference attendees, or if it reflects the transgender population at large.

:hi:

[Maddy McCall]

2. I have an answer for you, my favorite worm.

:hi:

I picked up this issue of Newsweek at the Piggly Wiggly today, and the article states that Male-to-Female transgenders are 5:1 to Female-to-Male.

The cover photo is of a beautiful baby sitting with his/her finger in his/her mouth, wearing a onesie with a pink front and a blue back. It was such an eye-catching cover--we as social beings want to look at the baby and assign gender, so I think that the cover photo was meant to frustrate--there's no way to know whether that baby is a boy or girl. Well, go see for yourself here: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prn/20070513/CLSU002

There was a photo of a young man in the article who's at Smith's College (I think), if I recall correctly--he hasn't had the surgery yet, and he's binding his breasts, but in every way, he's living as a male.

What I found most encouraging about the article is that therapists now encourage parents to FOLLOW THE CHILD'S LEAD. In the past, the child would be encouraged by parents and therapists to abandon thoughts of becoming the gender not represented by their physical body. Those days are past, according to the article.

There was a sweet story in the article about a child born male who identifies as females. The child attends preschool in dresses, and the other children are perfectly cool with it.

Society has come a long way, no doubt, but there's oh so much futher to go.

[BurtWorm]

3. I had a feeling you'd have an answer, Ms. McCall.

:toast:

I do find that disparity fascinating, considering that natural gender assignment is more or less 50-50. It makes you think there's something about the Y chromosome that contributes to this phenomenon of people getting assigned the wrong gender.

I've got to read the article because a whole bunch of questions occur to me!

[Maddy McCall]

4. Please do read the article.

I think that researchers know that something happens in the womb, but they're not quite sure what or why.

The author also says that it's becoming more common (if that's the right word) for teens to exist in the gray area between male and female...that surgery isn't always the endgame for people with gender dysphoria. She says, though, that it's easier for girls to exist in that indistinct area, because "tomboys" aren't scorned by society in the same way that, say, a biological male in feminine clothes would be. I hope I said that where it makes sense.

It's a really informative article.

[BurtWorm]

5. Here's another article on the same subject I happened upon today

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=30&articleID=727D7A18-E7F2-99DF-306CFA4718A57613

May 20, 2007

Going beyond X and Y

Babies born with mixed sex organs often get immediate surgery. New genetic studies, Eric Vilain says, should force a rethinking about sex assignment and gender identity.

By Sally Lehrman


When Eric Vilain began his medical school rotation two decades ago, he was assigned to France's reference center for babies with ambiguous genitalia. He watched as doctors at the Paris hospital would check an infant's endowment and quickly decide: boy or girl. Their own discomfort and social beliefs seemed to drive the choice, the young Vilain observed with shock. "I kept asking, How do you know?' " he recalls. After all, a baby's genitals might not match the reproductive organs inside.

By coincidence, Vilain was also reading the journals of Herculine Barbin, a 19th-century hermaphrodite. Her story of love and woe, edited by famed social constructionist Michel Foucault, sharpened his questions. He set on a path to find out what sexual "normality" really meant--and to find answers to the basic biology of sex differences.

Today the 40-year-old French native is one of a handful of geneticists on whom parents and doctors rely to explain how and why sex determination in an infant may have taken an unusual route. In his genetics laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, Vilain's findings have pushed the field toward not only improved technical understanding but more thoughtful treatment as well. "What really matters is what people feel they are in terms of gender, not what their family or doctors think they should be," Vilain says. Genital ambiguity occurs in an estimated one in 4,500 births, and problems such as undescended testes happen in one in 100. Altogether, hospitals across the U.S. perform about five sex-assignment surgeries every day.

Some of Vilain's work has helped topple ancient ideas about sex determination that lingered until very recently. Students have long learned in developmental biology that the male path of sex development is "active," driven by the presence of a Y chromosome. In contrast, the female pathway is passive, a default route. French physiologist Alfred Jost seemed to prove this idea in experiments done in the 1940s, in which castrated rabbit embryos developed into females.

In 1990, while at the University of Cambridge, Peter Goodfellow discovered SRY, a gene on the Y chromosome hailed as the "master switch." Just one base pair change in this sequence would produce a female instead of a male. And when researchers integrated SRY into a mouse that was otherwise chromosomally female, an XX fetus developed as a male.

But studies by Vilain and others have shaped a more complex picture. Instead of turning on male development directly, SRY works by blocking an "antitestis" gene, he proposes. For one, males who have SRY but two female chromosomes range in characteristics from normal male to an ambiguous mix. In addition, test-tube studies have found that SRY can repress gene transcription, indicating that it operates through interference. Finally, in 1994, Vilain's group showed that a male could develop without the gene. Vilain offers a model in which sex emerges out of a delicate dance between a variety of promale, antimale, and possibly profemale genes....

[VelmaD]

6. someone needs to explain to the author...

that it's not a matter of either or. One can be both pants and skirt, boa and blazer, spiky heels and sneakers. Sheesh.