transgender student OKed for locker room access

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^ My sentiments exactly.

Nobody looks, unless you're weird. But everyone can tell the difference when you're not the same physical form...

Of course the reason transgenders get the flack for the male form being in a female locker/rest room is nobody is going to stress over a girl changing in the men's room. Oh, them poor guys! Unless she's ugly, then everyone will be bitching. But that's beside the point.

No, it *does* mean you are ignorant about this particular variation of human sexual development. Fortunately, if you choose that can be a temporary condition. As has been pointed out, as a health care professional you have a responsibility to learn about such things. Please do so. Your expressed sentiment is no different than a nurse half a century ago refusing to learn that people of other races are indeed still people and deserve the same level of care. It's no different than a nurse a hundred years ago *refusing* to learn about epilepsy and instead continue to insist that the patient was possessed by a demon, because the Bible says so.

Please, learn the science and medicine of what we are all discussing. See if you have access to PubMed. Start with Zhou, et all and work your way forward. Here are the highlights from the last 20 years:

Jiang-Ning Zhou et al., A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality, 378 , Published online: 02 November 1995; | doi:10.1038/378068a0 68–70 (1995)

Milton Diamond, Biased-Interaction Theory of Psychosexual Development: “How Does One Know if One is Male or Female?,” 55 Sex Roles 589–600 (2006)

H. E H. Pol et al., Changing your sex changes your brain: influences of testosterone and estrogen on adult human brain structure, 155 European Journal of Endocrinology S107–S114 (2006)

Kenneth J. Zucker & Anne A. Lawrence, Epidemiology of Gender Identity Disorder: Recommendations for the Standards of Care of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, 11 International Journal of Transgenderism 8–18 (2009)

Heino Meyer-Bahlburg, From Mental Disorder to Iatrogenic Hypogonadism: Dilemmas in Conceptualizing Gender Identity Variants as Psychiatric Conditions, 39 Archives of Sexual Behavior 461–476 (2010)

David L. Rowland & Luca Incrocci, Handbook of Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders (John Wiley & Sons) (2008)

Melanie Blackless et al., How sexually dimorphic are we? Review and synthesis, 12 American Journal of Human Biology 151–166 (2000)

Frank P. M. Kruijver et al., Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus, 85 Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 2034–2041 (2000)

H. Berglund et al., Male-to-Female Transsexuals Show Sex-Atypical Hypothalamus Activation When Smelling Odorous Steroids, 18 Cerebral Cortex 1900–1908 (2008)

Sonja Schöning et al., Neuroimaging differences in spatial cognition between men and male-to-female transsexuals before and during hormone therapy, 7 The journal of sexual medicine 1858–1867 (2010)

Eileen Luders et al., Regional gray matter variation in male-to-female transsexualism, 46 NeuroImage 904–907 (2009)

Sheri A. Berenbaum & Adriene M. Beltz, Sexual differentiation of human behavior: Effects of prenatal and pubertal organizational hormones, 32 Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology 183–200 (2011)

D F Swaab, Sexual differentiation of the human brain: relevance for gender identity, transsexualism and sexual orientation, 19 Gynecological endocrinology: the official journal of the International Society of Gynecological Endocrinology 301–312 (2004)

Alicia Garcia-Falgueras & Dick F Swaab, Sexual hormones and the brain: an essential alliance for sexual identity and sexual orientation, 17 Endocrine development 22–35 (2010)

PENTTI K. SIITERI & JEAN D. WILSON, Testosterone formation and metabolism during male sexual differentiation in the human embryo, 38 Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism 113–125 (1974)

Giuseppina Rametti et al., The microstructure of white matter in male to female transsexuals before cross-sex hormonal treatment. A DTI study, 45 Journal of Psychiatric Research 949–954 (2011)

Damian G. Zuloaga et al., The Role of Androgen Receptors in the Masculinization of Brain and Behavior: What we’ve learned from the Testicular Feminization Mutation, 53 Hormones and behavior 613–626 (2008)

P.T Cohen-Kettenis & L.J.G Gooren, Transsexualism: A review of etiology, diagnosis and treatment, 46 Journal of Psychosomatic Research 315–333 (1999)

That's nice. Just smile and wave as modern society leaves you behind.

It's probably in vain, but I really hope that some of the people here in this thread who are sadly uninformed about just how non-binary and fixed gender can be take the chance to educate themselves with some of the studies that edenthiel graciously provided. It's really not the end of the world or some kind of cultural apocalypse if gender becomes not so clearly black-and-white anymore and we learn to accept people who don't clearly fit that outdated binary that many are still clinging to as they are. It won't harm anyone to educate themselves and have their eyes opened to the possibilities.

I'm sure someone will look at my questions and think it's just a ploy. But seriously, I can't resolve what you people say (at least from what I can figure out), that your head's gender seems to also be your body's gender.

So, Does a trangender male have a male vagina? a transgender female a female penis?

If you'd rather not answer that's fine, I'll understand.

From who I've talked to and videos I've seen, the discussion of private parts is pretty much a no-go.

They just feel like they have been born in the wrong body and reject what comes with being born into a male or female body. I just treat people who happen to be trans like how anyone would want to be treated, with respect and using the proper pro-nouns.

I don't understand people who claim that a transwoman's body is a female body. If it was, she wouldn't need to transition...

However, calling a transwoman who has been on hormones for a while "male" doesn't really make any sense. She isn't female, but male bodies don't have hormone levels typically found in female bodies, breasts, muscle mass consistent with those hormone levels... I generally consider transsexuals to be intersex, made that way through medical means (I would also consider castrated men to be intersex, in the sense that they are not 100% male {or 95%, or whatever the point is to consider someone "fully" male}, though *not intersex by birth*, which is the way intersex is typically used). The further she transitions, the more female her body becomes, though we're not at the stage when we can take it all the way - give it another decade or two, I'd say.

But our present inability to do something doesn't mean our values should be different to what they would be otherwise, and if we would treat a woman with the karyotype XX, and who is capable of conceiving and giving birth naturally, like any other women, we ought to treat her similarly today, even though we're not as yet advanced enough to do that.

"Intersex" is a term owned by people whose genitals & reproductive organs didn't fully develop one way or the other; they are a mix of the two. They have asked that trans people who do not also have intersex conditions to please not expand the term out beyond that narrow usage - and I respect that. My daughter's pediatric endocrinologist, however, tells me that most of her colleagues over in the research half of her life/career medically see transsexuals as being of mixed sex development. So in their organizational system, people with IS conditions are simply one very narrow subset of mixed sex development & transsexual people are a different subset. It's not only the 20+ brain sites and attributes that developed in utero 'opposite' the sex assigned at birth, but also a number of endocrine receptors (such as the ones that co-regulate Serotonin, which is why "cross-sex" hormones have such a positive effect on trans people and a negative one on non-trans people) and a number of sites in the skeletal system (the most famous example is the 2:4 digit ratio, but there are many others).

I have no problem with the respect part. But I can't use any pronouns other than the ones I learned being used for what I see them as. Could be my literal thinking but I can't look at a duck and call it a rose...

Yeah. I'm not sure if anyone would be up to answering my questions. But I figure it's always best to get your information "straight from the horses mouth", so to speak.

So if you go up to someone holding a baby dressed in grey swaddling and they say it's a girl...do you second guess the parents and choose pronouns based on what *you* think the baby looks like, or do you just go with what they said, out of respect?

I am not sure what the question is, however ...

Gender is a spectrum.

People are some % male and some % female.

Everyone starts as female, so with a random distribution outcome, this is not surprising.

You started as female and partially still are.

A woman may have a masculinized vagina, or man a feminized penis ("micro-penis"), or not have sex organs, or have both.

The strict categories that "male has penis" and "female has vagina" are only some outcomes.

I don't believe in using terms based on origin, as opposed to what an object is at the moment. If a birth defect results in an otherwise male fetus developing without testes, that would be considered intersex, would it not? Even though it is effectively the same situation as a male who has been castrated. What other term would you suggest using, to refer to what is basically the same thing but with a different origin? Mix-sexed?

How do I explain this without resorting to buffy speak... sex is polymodal, and when there are enough of them lined up at one end of the masculine-feminine spectrum, we consider that normal male/female; for example, hormones, genitals, gonads, chromosomes, neurology all line up at the masculine end, so that's considered male. But someone who's gonads do not match the masculine end, whether a eunuch who was that way from birth or made that way by men (or made themselves that way for the kingdom of heaven ), is not fully male, because not all their sex modes (which don't necessarily have the same wait) are lined up close to the masculine end. But in this case, they're neuter gonadally, because they don't actually have gonads... how do I explain this again? Perhaps adding in a neuter dimension, to take it two dimensional?

A transwoman who is pre-transition (using the term medically, and talking about sex here) is almost entirely male, but not necessarily fully male because of her neurology. Once she starts hormones, she will become hormonally female, but remain genitally, gonadally, and chromosomally male. If she is then castrated, she will become gonadally neuter, which will shift her sex further towards the female end; if she then gets SRS, she will then be genitally and hormonally female, but chromosomally (and genetically, if we make a distinction there) male, and her overall sex balance will be further towards female than male (which it would be anyway given that hormones should be given the most weight when it comes to determining sex).

Does that make any sense to anyone?

I've seen no answers to my questions yet I'm suppose to be courteous and answer yours?!?

You people say that you want others to be understanding but that understanding must come under your rules. That doesn't seem very respectful to me.

Not a personal criticism, just an observation.

My apologies, RoadRatt; which questions were ignored please?

It seems to buried on the previous page. LoveNotHate seems to have tried to answer but it's of no help as it was pretty much the standard line of argument used in every post that I've already seen.

As I've stated in an earlier post as well, I don't really expect an answer, nor is it mandatory that I get one. It may be that I didn't realize my question might also be "out of bounds" or "taboo", I don't know.