Season 1/Episode 1
Is being transgender biological? Is it genetic? It’s likely both.
Being transgender was first described as being biological, as a subset of intersex, in a medical reference book published in Germany in 1886. Intersex is the condition where a person does not have normal gender traits, such as ambiguous genitalia which is quite noticeable at birth. But there’s other things not outwardly visible that also determine a person’s gender. Subsequent research has shown this to be quite complex, with many factors that go into determining gender. If any one of these factors does not work the same way as the majority that we’re all familiar with, interesting variations occur.
A very good explanation was given in a short article on the subject published September 1, 2017 in Scientific American magazine:
Beyond XX and XY: The Extraordinary Complexity of Sex Determination
A host of factors figure into whether someone is female, male or somewhere in between
More recently, Dr. Rebecca Helm wrote a thread, later reposted on Bluesky, explaining in more depth the process of how gender is determined biologically:
Ann noted that her father was raised entirely different than she was. Besides being raised in a different era, they had opposite religious upbringing, were raised on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and much more, with relatively little contact during much of Ann’s formative years. There the differences ended. When comparing stories late in life, their struggles with gender were much the same, happening at the same time of life. Ann began suspecting the biological connection right away, stemming from the genetic.
Years later, a scientific paper was published about the genetics of being transgender with a small cohort of samples due to budget constraints. This was published in Nature.com:
The Use of Whole Exome Sequencing in a Cohort of Transgender Individuals to Identify Rare Genetic Variants
- J. Graham Theisen,
- Viji Sundaram,
- Mary S. Filchak,
- Lynn P. Chorich,
- Megan E. Sullivan,
- James Knight,
- Hyung-Goo Kim &
- Lawrence C. Layman
Scientific Reports volume 9, Article number: 20099 (2019)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53500-y
In interviewing transgender and nonbinary people that approached Ann for talent management, she noticed many patterns. There’s so much similarity between people who have never known each other, and who did not connect even with similar information sources, that it’s indicative of something they had no control over.
Ann came across others where both the parent and child were trans, although that is extremely rare. More commonly, she found that there were those transgender people who had lesbian aunts.
In general, many transgender and nonbinary people know this was something they were born with, and society can’t seem to accept that there could be variations biologically unless they can see them (like missing or misshapen body parts).
It’s not just genitals and chromosomes that determine gender. We’re born this way, baby!