Talk Softly and Carry Your Big Stick with Pride

Introduction

As people are so extra with their misconceptions about transsexuality, I thought I'd take the liberty of sharing my thoughts on the matter.

People act as if we chose to transition for shits and giggles, when really it's a need. A need to be who we are. It took me 24 years to finally do something about it.

Before I transitioned, I was angry all the time. At myself for being different. At society for mandating how I should dress and act and everything else based on what genitals I happened to be born with.

But as I'll show here, genitals are just one cog in a much bigger machine.

We all start out basically female in the womb. And from there, a plethora of conflicting factors contribute to our gender. Chromosomes, genes, hormones, hormone receptors, et cetera.

One can easily have XX chromosomes, but be missing the FOXL2 gene (the gene that tells the ovaries to produce estrogen rather than testosterone), yet lack enough androgen receptors to do much of anything with the testosterone.

Biology is fucking bonkers, y'all! We're all just an end result in a chaotic system.

Full disclaimer, I'm definitely not a biologist. I'm just a liberal arts major with too much time on my hands. Don't worry though, I will be citing all of my sources as we go.

Speaking of fields of study that I have no business talking about, we'll also be going into some psychological and sociological factors that go into the gender that we express.

Being as complicated and nonsensical as it is, gender is expressed considerably differently in different cultures, in different time periods, and by different people in general.

This only complicates matters further for anyone who wants definitive answers to what gender is. If you're one of those people, then this book is probably not for you. As you'll soon see, biological sex is not at all linear.

Biological sex is a lot like time – it's a big ball of wibbly wobbly... sexy wexy... stuff.

Even still, a great deal of people believe that transgender folk just have a mental disorder. First off, let's define "mental disorder". Now I'm no psychologist, so I'll just quote straight from the handy DSM-5:

"A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual's cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above."

It's important to note that the exact definition of mental disorder changes in every edition of the DSM. It's gone from exceptionally vague to gradually attempting to establish something somewhat concrete. We should also note that mental disorders don't really exist in any tangible way.

It's all up to interpretation and largely dependent on what is and isn't socially acceptable in society. For instance, talking to an invisible man in the sky would normally constitute a disorder - but not if it's a part of a well-recognized religion.

Homosexuality was once considered a disorder. That was back when society was exceptionally inhospitable to gays. And when society starts locking people up and recommending electroshock therapy to any group, they tend to become depressed, anxious, and otherwise emotionally distressed. Now that society is just a little bit more hospitable to gays, suddenly they seem so much more normal. Imagine that!

In general, if it doesn't cause "significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities", then it's not considered a disorder. After all, if any condition caused no distress in these major categories, you probably wouldn't be going to see a therapist anyway. But this in itself means that a disorder for one person in one career or social group may be normal in another.

The point I'm trying to drive home here is that the notion of mental disorders is largely subjective and dependent entirely on personal variables. Not exactly straightforward. And neither is any of the other information you'll find in this book.