Quote from: Arch on July 08, 2013, 12:05:17 PMIt is possible that if all of society were no longer dogmatic about classifying people by their genitals and absolutely accepting of everyone's self-stated identity, many/most/all of us trans people would just go about our business without HRT and surgery and all of that. We can't know how much the GENITAL binary messes without us and forces us to want the "right" genitals and bodies.
I think there are a couple of areas of study recently that indicate gender has a stronger physiological component than used to be believed and a smaller social component.
1 - Research with newborn babies shows behavioural differences between the genders. Within hours of birth, baby boys attention is held longer by things that move while infant girls are more attentive to faces. (There were some other points that I don't remember.)
2 - Psychologists recognize that a baby/child's development proceeds at a different pace and different order between male children and female children.
3 - Many children how turn out to be transsexual exhibit 'cross-gender behaviour' very early in life and persist despite attempts to discourage such behaviour.
(Although I had always believed in "free will" over biology my personal experience shot down my own beliefs.
I was born out of wedlock and my mother gave me up for adoption at 5 weeks of age. I grew up without ever knowing my mother or anything about here and was raised in a different culture and in adverse circumstances. I made a lot of decisions about the kind of person I wanted to grow up to be and I was always very different than anyone else I knew in terms of personality, disposition, sense of humour, and likes/dislikes.
I met my birth mother when I was 40 and found out that I was an exact copy of her in every way. We had the same type of personality, same disposition, sense of humour, and the same likes and dislikes. I could read her like an open book - and she could read me - because "we were the same person", just 20 years difference in age and raised in different cultures yet we ended up the same.
I had to revise my thinking on the role of biology in who we become!)
