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Caught Between Male and Female

Category: Sexuality Date added: 03:08:42 PM 25/Feb/2014 Added By: ADMIN

We mammals are obsessed with classifying individuals by sex. For humans, it's "She had her baby? Great. Boy or girl?" A baboon asks the same, ambling over to a newborn and prying its legs open to have a look. And the same goes for dogs, meeting and greeting by sniffing each other's privates: What kind are you?

People typically think of mammals as coming in two clear-cut sexual flavors. But, as the ambidextrous will attest, nature often abhors dichotomies.

There are species of fish in which individuals change sex opportunistically: If the sole male in a breeding group dies, the dominant female becomes male. In many species, "typical" male and female sexual behavior operates on a continuum. As for humans, about 1% of us are born "intersexual," with ambiguous genitalia. Recent research on the neurobiology of such cases moves things even further from the idea of a simple, dichotomous universe of pink and blue.

As with most mammals, the brains of humans are "sexually dimorphic," meaning that its structure and function differ by sex. For starters, male brains are typically larger, reflecting the demands of regulating a greater body mass. There are numerous subtler differences, where some brain regions differ by sex as to, for example, the average number and complexity of neurons or the levels of various chemical messengers.

These differences probably contribute to sex differences in learning, emotion and socialization. (The differences are small and variable, however. Knowing information about one of these areas in an individual's brain doesn't allow accurate prediction of the person's sex.)

In the 1990s, scientists began to compare these sexually dimorphic regions in the brains of transsexuals and the rest of humanity. Early work in this area required the examination of brains postmortem; recent studies use images of the living brain.

The results show that when individuals of Sex Adespite having the chromosomes, gonads and sex hormones of that sexinsist that they're really Sex B, the gender-affected parts of the brain typically more closely resemble what's usually seen with Sex B.

Consider an obscure brain region called the forceps minor (part of the corpus callosum, a mass of fibers that connect the brain's two hemispheres). On average, among nontranssexuals, the forceps minor of males contains parallel nerve fibers of higher density than in females. But the density in female-to-male transsexuals is equivalent to that in typical males.

As another example, the hypothalamus, a hormone-producing part of the brain, is activated in nontranssexual men by the scent of estrogen, but in womenand male-to-female transsexualsby the scent of androgens, male-associated hormones.

Two arguments against these findings come to mind. First, sex-reassignment surgery involves treatment with cross-sex hormones that alter the brain. This is true, but the differences in the brains of transsexuals are there before hormone treatments start. Secondly, maybe these findings aren't about the sex one identifies with but are instead about the sex one is attracted to. But no, the findings are the same in transsexual individuals who are attracted to the same or to the opposite sex.

The 2013 edition of the American Psychiatric Association's hugely influential "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" recategorized transsexuals as suffering not from "gender identity disorder" (as it previously did) but from "gender dysphoria." In short, the mental disorder lies not in believing that you're a different gender but in the suffering caused by that belief.

These neurobiological findings suggest that the APA hasn't gone far enough in changing its categories. The issue isn't that sometimes people believe they are of a different gender than they actually are. Remarkably, instead, it's that sometimes people are born with bodies whose gender is different from what they actually are.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304854804579234030532617704/

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