We are talking about transgender people or those who are not cisgender. Cisgender simply means people who were assigned a gender when they were born, and for the most part, agree with the doctor. If they were assigned the gender of female on their birth certificate, they don’t have an argument about that, because their brain tells them that they are female and they have an internal and consistent feeling of their brain being congruent with their body. Transgender people may not have that sense of their brain and body being in sync as far as gender goes. They may have gender dysphoria. Roles and gender expression may have very little to do with the internal sense that transgender people have of gender being in the brain. There may be more biology than the perception of transgender status than most people realize. This article and articles by a scientist named Arthur Arnold, shows that despite the traditional concept of male and female, the way that sex is organized in brain structures is much different than we might believe, which seems to support the idea that transgender status might indeed be biological, or it might even suggest that intersex statistics are higher than most people think. Arnold was the first to describe the way that hormones wash over the fetus’ brain in early pregnancy which leads to many articles on sex and gender in the brain. There are also those people who are intersex which are about 1 in every 150 of persons born who have a biologically diverse gender for which the doctor cannot say definitively “male”, or “female”. See the Prader scale for some examples of female to male intersex diversity.
In some eastern cultures, the concept of transgender is set apart as neither male nor female, but an identity which is in between. For culturally speaking, intersex people and transgender people exist in the same group and are called the third gender. So how do you distinguish between trans men and trans women? Well, trans men look like men. Trans women look like women. If they are in the early stages of their hormonal therapy, they may look somewhere in between, until they can pass (if they choose to pass, or if they are able to pass). Not all trans people have “passing privilege”, or the ability to pass easily due to certain body characteristics.
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