Does this experience support the trans idea of being born in the wrong body?

[Gettheleather]

Excuse the long post. There was child born in 1988 with cloacal exstophy. The babies genitalia was unidentifiable. During surgery internal testicles were removed. The baby spent their first year being raised as a boy and at one year old it was decided that it would be psychologically better for the baby to be raised as a girl. The Drs were under the impression that it didn't really matter, a child without genitalia could be raised either sex and it be fine.

For the next approximately 20 years the child was raised as a girl, chromosomal testing was done for medical reasons and it was discovered they had the XY chromosome. He decided he was a man. He has spoken of always feeling like something wasn't quite right, he had struggled spending many years trying to convince himself and everyone else that he was something he wasn't.

I know most of mumsnet agree that gender is dysphoria is a very real condition and simply question how gender identity law can be exploited by those not genuinely suffering with it and how it will infringe on others rights. But I do believe there are some who question that you can be born in the wrong body at all. If sex is truly only about genitalia then why did this man feel so distressed by the years of living as female? Is it some evidence that sex and gender are more than just biology?

I'm not being goady, I feel it's a valid thing to question.

I can imagine if you are growing at a different rate to your peers, not experiencing the same body changes...it all must add to an inherent sense of unease even if you don't quite understand it at the time.

Feeling 'not-female' would be an entirely likely response to not actually being female and it would become very apparent because you would be different to all of the other girls around you. Feeling 'not-female' isn't necessarily the same as feeling 'I am a man', but it would be easy to conflate the two in retrospect once you find out the details of your genetics.

On top of all that it is highly dependent on the parents too. As pps have said the parents would have known he had XY chromosomes and it is very possible they pushed more female stereotypes onto him growing up, whether intentionally or not, to try and ensure that he grew up like a girl which could naturally have pushed him the other way.

It could just be a case of the co-presentation of gender stereotype non-conformity and intersex genetics/the surgery causing a sense of unease due to lack of female development, rather than one actually causing the other (i.e. being male causing gender stereotype rejection/feeling like a man because man brain). If he was gender stereotype conforming and loved all things pink and frilly then he might have thought the unease was down to general teenage feelings of being out of place and awkward rather than 'I'm a man'.

These things are so dependent on the individual details of each case that it's impossible to lump them all together.

There's a reason intersex people do not like being used as evidence of trans ideologies, their experiences are completely different and the sooner people stop conflating them (not saying you are OP) the better.

Good post Cabernet

Was that still happening in 1988!

Op Is this man heterosexual? because that combined with all the shit that had been done with him might have confused him.

I don't see how this proves the trans argument. They argue for 'gender' which is the new progressive way the T has gone leaving behind those people who called themselves transsexual. Wanting his body to take on masculine features, wanting to have sex with a woman, with his penis, that could have caused very strange emotions for him.

Not the same as a 17 year old girl who 'presents as female' and has sex with boys but calls herself non binary because being trans 'isn't about genitals'.

I also think that there's an interesting point about choices being made to raise a child as female, simply because his exterior gentalia can be more easily modified to resemble, superficially ,female genitalia

In essence : no penis = female

In relation to 'not feeling right", isn't there some research which suggests that transgenderism is over-represented in people with ASD? In other words (theoretically) when a person feels out of place and disconnected, not conforming to what society expects of them, they may ascribe it to being in the wrong body

I realise I'm taking this in a different direction but it was sparked by SpaghettiandMeatballs Post:

"He was biologically male. That's not my question really. He was raised as a female and always felt it was wrong.

The fact that he always felt male

*OK, but those are two different things when you think about it - he didn't feel female, or he did feel male?

In either case, had I been 'raised as a female', rather than raised as myself I two would feel that that was wrong, and I am one! Albeit a pretty gender non-conforming one, who luckily was raised by parents who didn't force me into skirts, or refuse to buy me toy cars, or stop me doing woodwork or computers, but who supported me in my interests and bought clothes I felt comfortable in, and cut my hair in the various hairstyles I decided I wanted (80s/90s kid, so some were pretty crazy).

I wonder what 'being raised as a female' meant in his case - especially since his parents knew he'd been born with ambiguous genitalia, so were perhaps a little more strict/forceful about it all"

Op, I think your argument is more in line with this than transgender as we know it.

www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/the-astonishing-village-where-little-girls-turn-into-boys-aged-1/

many children who live in Salinas, an isolated village in the southwestern Dominican Republic, who are seemingly born female, only to become men in their teenage years.

The rare genetic disorder occurs because of a missing enzyme which prevents the production of a specific form of the male sex hormone - dihydro-testosterone - in the womb.

When I changed I was happy with my life,” he said. The thing is they don't chose to change. The change happen naturally when they hit puberty. The testicles and balls that should have grown in the womb grows at this stage. They are defiantly not trans in the way that we know it but they do transition from male with no penis (but has one that looks like a vagina) to male with penis.

Guevedoces are also sometimes called “machihembras” meaning “first a woman, then a man”. When they’re born they look like girls with no testes and what appears to be a vagina. It is only when they near puberty that the penis grows and testicles descend.

Around one in 90 children in Salinas are guevedoces and although they resemble sexually normal males, subtle differences do still exist in adulthood. Most have decreased amounts of facial hair and smaller prostate glands relative to the average male.

Gina yes he is heterosexual. He talks about coming to terms with being a lesbian in his teens.

Quencher that's fascinating! Thank you for linking.

I don't know if he just felt not like a woman or if it was that he felt like a man. It's a very good question though.

Joe was initially raised as a boy, wasn't he? I remember his parents being on TV when they were fighting to get his birth certificate changed. They spoke of being told to put Joel to bed one day, then treat him as Joella from the next day onwards, with a new feminine wardrobe.

Joe isn't intersex. He was born with a severely deformed abdomen.

I think he had a really rough time as a kid. Had all these health issues, serious bullying, everyone in the area knew about him/her and his/her problems. Taking pills, growing breasts but no periods whilst other were developing. All of it together can make you feel like an outsider.

I personally wonder if changing his gender (although it was to match his biological sex) was part of starting a fresh. If he was raised as a boy but still bullied etc it might of resulted in him wanting to be female as an adult, or various other problems. There is no way to know.

He appeared on all those TV shows with his parents in the late '80s. He knew that there was some doubt over his assigned sex. He also knew that this particular issue was not affecting his peers. No wonder he started questioning things very early. Those peers probably also knew about Joe's issues - they would have heard about it, even if they didn't understand it fully.

I've noticed from pictures that he has always had a very masculine facial structure, which is lucky for him now. I suspect fewer people were convinced of Joe's supposed femaleness than the gender cheerleaders of the time were prepared to admit.

The only thing I think about this is this illustrates the correct definition of "assigned male/female at birth" rather than the TRA version of it.
That poor boy.

He knew his sex was unusual or indeterminate from quite an early age though. The article says that at age 10 the family won the battle to have his birth certificate legally changed, and he was on the front page of every paper.

It's not clear exactly how it was all explained to him (maybe he was told he was female-presenting intersex) but he obviously understood that he was unlike other girls in significant ways (ie would never bear children, had to take hormones to achieve puberty).

Eventually discovered that his chromosones were XY, and that was an identity he felt happier with. This very complicated case seems to me to be a perfect demonstration of why intersex people ask the trans lobby not to co-opt their conditions.

Surprisingly, and in my opinion shockingly, people with intersex conditions have no protection under the Equality Act in the UK

Surprisingly, and in my opinion shockingly, people with intersex conditions have no protection under the Equality Act in the UK.
Then that would be a much better focus for legislative change than the proposed gender identity bill! Perhaps this is worth raising with Justine Greening. E.g. birth certificate can have intersexed rather than male or female. Someone thus classified can change to either male or female after the age of 18? This seems a worthy cause in its own right. By explicitly recognizing the few people who biologically don't fit the sex dichotomy, this could remove one prop in the campaign for subjective identity.

A child with surgical scars, unusual genitalia, a history of being raised as both sexes, hormonal treatments to artificially induce a form of puberty, an absence of menstruation despite being told they are female...is going to feel different from all the other girls from a very early age.

Not that surprising that he retrospectively put two and two together and decided he was different from the other girls.

People search for explanations to explain why they feel they are different to their peers. In his case he had every reason to feel different, and upon discovering he was truly male I'm entirely unsurprised he felt this explained things for him.

"He was born with his organs on the outside, a gash where you would normally find genitals and his stomach"

I doubt that. You don't seem to know where the stomach is found in human beings.

Fwiw, I'm not surprised that a male isn't convinced he is female when everyone says he is.

That doesn't have anything to do with being "born in the wrong body" which is used for males who aren't convinced they are indeed males & females who aren't convinced they are females.

He was raised as a female and always felt it was wrong. He didn't know he was biologically male until he was 20. My point is, many people believe that sex is only about biology. I'm questioning whether his psychological discomfort shows there is another level of what makes someone male or female other than their biology

Your question is so confused. You're asking if there is more to it than biology but using a case of pure biology to illustrate it? This person was biologically a male but raised as a female, and felt wrong as a female and wanted to be a male. Which they were already in fact.

What has that got to do with someone who is biologically one sex and wants to be another? Nothing.

I think you have your answer then. If they had this range of physical experiences and were given medication, they would of course grow up thinking there was something different about them.

Yeah. Of course he'd notice he wasn't like "other girls."

Especially since, if he didn't have a vagina, they'd forcibly dilate a surgical hole in his body to render him fuckable for other males. That'd give him a hell of a trauma, which would make him jump at the opportunity to socially transition to be treated as a man, i.e. with respect for his bodily autonomy.

And I do think there might be something like a map of the body that's in the brain, and where the genitals might not match up with what is actually there in some cases. That's a disorder, (and people who suffer from it are not born "in the wrong body" but with something wrong in their brain) just like people feeling their left arm doesn't belong to them is a disorder, but I consider it possible to be a genuine feeling. Which might not be fixable, in which case surgery might be the only way to help the patient.

Whereas men who claim that their penis is in any way female are just MRAs by another name.

In either case, had I been 'raised as a female', rather than raised as myself I two would feel that that was wrong, and I am one!

Some trans identified females I talked to were 'raised as female' by batshit insane religious extremist parents with very strict gender norms.

If you ask me, there's no question at all as to why they identify as something other than female.
No sane woman identifies with what the male-god-monotheistic religions consider a woman's duty. To be happy with that role a woman would have to identify as "doormat", and for some reason, that's not one of the new sparklegenders.

'Doormat' gender. I'm so using that. If anyone asks my gender and wants to know why I don't have one I will say it's because I don't subscribe to doormat gender.

So much quicker than a three paragraph essay on why I don't subscribe to female gender stereotypes.

@Datun: Glad I could help!

I also think that there's an interesting point about choices being made to raise a child as female, simply because his exterior gentalia can be more easily modified to resemble, superficially ,female genitalia. In essence : no penis = female

It is so misogynist, isn't it?

I read about a small island tribe (I think it was) where women could change gender if they were infertile, and marry a woman, of whose children they woudl then be considered to be the father.
No working uterus = male makes a lot more sense, as the observable ability to give birth is much more impressive than some dangly piece of flesh between the legs.

Both scientifically incorrect, but the worshipping of penises is something that can only have come about after thousands and thousands of years of patriarchal brainwashing, whereas observing that women can give birth and men cannot is pretty intuitive - more intuitive than genetic fathers.

Is it some evidence that sex and gender are more than just biology?

I think cases like these indicate that gender is not one and the same as gender stereotypes, as it is often insisted as an anti-trans argument.

In this case that internal gender identity might have been caused by biology, or have existed independently of it. Nothing much can be proven either way I think.

What I don't understand is why didn't they do chromosomal tests when he was a baby? Were they not available then, in 1988? Or why his parents / doctors didn't do this at the earliest opportunity.

JAPAB

Two things:

From most women's point of view, it really doesn't matter if a man truly has some kind of essence that tells him he has a lady brain. He has a male body. That is a sufficient distinction. It's also the distinction that will get him treated like a man by everyone else. Irrespective of what he wears. The lived experience of being a male or female is entirely dependent upon your sexed body. (In terms of the difference between men and women).

But secondly, I might be more inclined to give credence to an inner essence, if every single transactivist I've talked to didn't come across as an example of the worst kind of predatory, aggressive, bullying entitled man.

They have no appreciation for, nor understanding of women, either biologically or practically. Their motivation is to dominate, both sexually and linguistically.

Even genuine transsexuals, whilst being far less aggressive, and whilst yearning, often quite genuinely, to have an affinity with women, do not come across as female.

How can they?

They might come across as more feminine, or effeminate, but that's not the same.

So you have one half coming across as masculine and domineering, the other half coming across as effeminate and fragile, none of which makes a person female.

Because being a female is not dependent upon masculinity or femininity.