As I read all the pro and con about who is "really" transgender, or whether such people even exist, I keep thinking about a Frederick Pohl story, originally written in 1966 (yes, almost 50 years ago), called Day Million, about the far (?) future.  The relevant paragraph, trimmed a bit, is:

QuoteAbout this business of her being a boy. It didn't matter ... that genetically she was male. ...  Through techniques which are not only complex but haven't yet been discovered, these people were able to determine a great deal about the aptitudes and easements of babies quite a long time before they were born—at about the second horizon of cell-division, to be exact, when the segmenting egg is becoming a free blastocyst—and then they naturally helped those aptitudes along. Wouldn't we? If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one. As sex had long been dissociated from reproduction this was relatively easy to do and caused no trouble and no, or at least very little, comment.

(There's more, but I didn't want to push the limits of "fair use" any further.  I suggest finding the paragraph and reading the rest.)

I really loved the idea that what gender one should grow up as should be based on what one is best suited for, not on completely unrelated accidents of heredity and development.  It sort of turns the whole discussion around, doesn't it?

Yes, it does.  This is sort of how I think about gender.  In an ideal world, we'd all just be ourselves and gender labels would be an afterthought.  You'd use a gender label to describe a person's identity instead of giving people labels first and expecting them to shape their identities in response.

I haven't read any articles about possible biological or psychological factors behind being transgender.  Are there some that are worth reading?

I happened to be watching the beginning of A Clockwork Orange when I read the quote below, especially the music "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary - March" by Henry Purcell. Very surreal reading the extract below whilst listening to the track. Perhaps if Kubrick were alive and directing today, he'd have shot an iconic film about gender, which probably would have been both beautiful and terrifying and genuinely made people think. Or, perhaps its best he didn't :-p But, personally, I'd prefer something iconic & forward thinking, then yet another depressing cliched melodrama about a unpassable transexual with aids/cancer/a criminal record, etc. 

QuoteAbout this business of her being a boy. It didn't matter ... that genetically she was male. ...  Through techniques which are not only complex but haven't yet been discovered, these people were able to determine a great deal about the aptitudes and easements of babies quite a long time before they were born—at about the second horizon of cell-division, to be exact, when the segmenting egg is becoming a free blastocyst—and then they naturally helped those aptitudes along. Wouldn't we? If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one. As sex had long been dissociated from reproduction this was relatively easy to do and caused no trouble and no, or at least very little, comment.

Anway, got side-tracked there. It makes more sense to match someone to what they're suited at, as opposed to just what genitalia you have. We live in a weird world, where the human race distorts and bends nature to its ends in order to live longer and prosperously, yet bizarrely we humans hold onto birth gender and sex with an iron grip. We can go to the moon, create nuclear bombs, have surgical implants, amend DNA and build what we want, yet modify one's gender? Noooooo. That'd just be playing God! And humans have never played God, of course ;-)

It is all in the USA declaration of Independence  "...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.."

Quote from: "I'm Stella Stanhope, and that's why I drink". on February 17, 2014, 02:21:57 PM
It makes more sense to match someone to what they're suited at, as opposed to just what genitalia you have.

Couldn't agree more. And thanks for the Pohl excerpt Asche, very thought provoking.