A study I read years ago showed that about 1 in 20,000 newborns are transgendered.
I’m not sure what it means for a newborn to be transgendered. Transgender in the discourse that exists at the moment is about self-identification and a newborn likely self-identifies as neither male nor female because those are concepts that are learned later.
Maybe you read about a number for intersex children and confuse that with transgender? In the US roughly 1⁄300 identify as transgender and in the rationality community maybe 1⁄30.
This is a sensistive topic where if you join a discussion you shouldn’t bent definitions of words but be careful about getting things right.
I’m not sure what it means for a newborn to be transgendered.
Over the last two to three decades many clinical studies have been developed scanning the brains of transgendered individuals. Brain regions have been identified that mark brains as clearly masculine, feminine, or somewhere in between, and transgendered individuals’ brains show the properties of the brains typical of the other sex, meaning trans women have structurally female brains in male bodies, and trans men have structurally male brain in female bodies. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of papers on this at the Causes of Transexuality Wikipedia article. Additionally, gender dysphoria is characterized, as I see it, by a clear mismatch between body shape and the homunculus, which further points to transgenderism being a neurological fact.
The 1:20,000 factor comes from the prevalence of gender dysphoria in adults, that is, from this brain/body mismatch. This paper refers to different studies and their ranges, some finding a prevalence as low as 1:100,000, others one as high as 1:10,000:
Kenneth J. Zucker & Anne A. Lawrence (2009) Epidemiology of Gender Identity Disorder: Recommendations for the Standards of Care of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, International Journal of Transgenderism, 11:1, 8-18, DOI: 10.1080/15532730902799946
In the US roughly 1⁄300 identify as transgender and in the rationality community maybe 1⁄30.
I’m not aware of these numbers, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a conceptual confusion between being transgender in the strict, biological brain vs. body sense, and being gender non-conformant. In my case, I’m behaviorally gender non-conformant, having a very high number of stereotypically female traits (I’ve been described by people as “very androgynous”, with one saying I was “the most androgynous person” they’ve ever met), but in terms of my brain-body matching I’m clearly cis male, experiencing no gender dysphoria of any sort. Therefore, I don’t consider myself transgendered, although, yes, I can see how there might be a use case in making the word encompass both strict biological transgenderism and gender non-conformance.
I want to acknowledge that this is an interesting subject and that your comment is well-written. You are obviously well-researched in this field. You approach the subject openmindedly while also drawing from personal experience.
I’m not sure what it means for a newborn to be transgendered. Transgender in the discourse that exists at the moment is about self-identification and a newborn likely self-identifies as neither male nor female because those are concepts that are learned later.
Maybe you read about a number for intersex children and confuse that with transgender? In the US roughly 1⁄300 identify as transgender and in the rationality community maybe 1⁄30.
This is a sensistive topic where if you join a discussion you shouldn’t bent definitions of words but be careful about getting things right.
Over the last two to three decades many clinical studies have been developed scanning the brains of transgendered individuals. Brain regions have been identified that mark brains as clearly masculine, feminine, or somewhere in between, and transgendered individuals’ brains show the properties of the brains typical of the other sex, meaning trans women have structurally female brains in male bodies, and trans men have structurally male brain in female bodies. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of papers on this at the Causes of Transexuality Wikipedia article. Additionally, gender dysphoria is characterized, as I see it, by a clear mismatch between body shape and the homunculus, which further points to transgenderism being a neurological fact.
The 1:20,000 factor comes from the prevalence of gender dysphoria in adults, that is, from this brain/body mismatch. This paper refers to different studies and their ranges, some finding a prevalence as low as 1:100,000, others one as high as 1:10,000:
Kenneth J. Zucker & Anne A. Lawrence (2009) Epidemiology of Gender Identity Disorder: Recommendations for the Standards of Care of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, International Journal of Transgenderism, 11:1, 8-18, DOI: 10.1080/15532730902799946
I’m not aware of these numbers, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a conceptual confusion between being transgender in the strict, biological brain vs. body sense, and being gender non-conformant. In my case, I’m behaviorally gender non-conformant, having a very high number of stereotypically female traits (I’ve been described by people as “very androgynous”, with one saying I was “the most androgynous person” they’ve ever met), but in terms of my brain-body matching I’m clearly cis male, experiencing no gender dysphoria of any sort. Therefore, I don’t consider myself transgendered, although, yes, I can see how there might be a use case in making the word encompass both strict biological transgenderism and gender non-conformance.
I want to acknowledge that this is an interesting subject and that your comment is well-written. You are obviously well-researched in this field. You approach the subject openmindedly while also drawing from personal experience.