In the area of sex and gender, we are seeing pressure to form a culture of the exception.  While all of us are, by nature, male and female (sex), including gender nonconforming children and adults, most of what we talk about in our schools, homes, workplaces, neighborhoods, and organizations is gender.

You will likely have noticed the linguistic replacement happening around you.  Perhaps you have seen “gender equity” when the author meant “sex equity”  or legislation against “gender discrimination” when the legislators meant “sex and gender discrimination.”   You will likely have seen a trans person called transgender and “a sex change” called a gender change.

If you have not read blogs 1 and 2 in this series, I hope you will do so now.  They lay the foundation for this blog in which we continue looking at how our culture can help all children rather than focusing only on some.   In the previous blogs, we looked at academic and social media pressure to negate the foundational science of sex and sexual dimorphism, and we looked at some sources of this pressure.  One is the sexodimorphobia (fear of sexual dimorphism, fear of male/female, fear of human nature) that our culture is grappling with now as it tries to discern what is best for 21st century life.

Another is social media bombardment that supports this phobia.  More than a century ago, the novelist Thomas Mann wrote, “In our time, our destiny presents its meaning in political terms.”  He could very well have been writing about our culture in the social media era, when algorhythmically supported short bursts of social media politics bombard our brains with confusion about sex and gender.  Part of why I have invited you on the rather longish journey of these four blogs is to see through the politics to the science.

Sexual dimorphism is the human baseline.  It is the core of the sciences related to sex and gender.  A “gender-reveal” party is actually a “sex-reveal” party, since there is no gender at one month old only sex.  Our government puts our sex on our drivers’ licenses/ID for good reason–if something happens to us and we need medical treatment, our sex matters most to the doctors who will be treating our male or female cellular structure.  Hospitals put “male” and “female” on our birth certificates because the sex of the child is not only useful to understanding the physical and mental health trajectories of that child, but it also sits at the core of the child’s, and adult’s, being.

In blogs 1 and 2, we looked at the downside of removing this sexual dimorphism from culture.  Teachers, parents, organizations, preschools, counselors, and most other professionals working with children, for instance, will not receive training and knowledge in how to raise boys and girls, despite that boys and girls are their charge, including boys and girls that comprise sex/gender exceptions.  Without emphasis on this sexual dimorphism (male brain, female brain) boys of color will continue to fall behind in our schools and neighborhoods as teachers, parents, and communities do not learn how boys learn and grow, how boys and girls learn differently, how boys of color experience their developmental journey, how trauma affects boys and boys of color, why there is inordinate discipline and misunderstanding of behavior among boys of color, and many more important sex/race connected issues.  Simultaneously, without sexual dimorphic training in girl-friendly pedagogy and practice, issues with STEM advancement for girls will not get solved, as well as many other girl-specific and women-specific areas of concern.

In this third blog, we will continue our journey through sex and gender by specifically focusing on trans exceptions because biological and neurological sciences regarding sexual dimorphism are critical for the care and affirmation of trans children and adults.  In the fourth and final blog, we will focus on gender dysphoria and gender nonconforming children and adults.  We’ll continue the point I made in the first two blogs:  each LGBTQ+ child or adult deserves specialized focus, care, and affirmation but LGBTQ+ are not all the same person or same experience.   We must understand each population discretely if we are to be a culture of both protection and inclusion.

 

What Is At Stake in The Trans Debate

 

Over a century ago, the French philosopher Diderot wrote, “a word is not a thing but the flash in which we perceive the thing.”  Social media pressure has become so bombarding and confusing, “gender” is now considered the linguistic flash inside which we are supposed to perceive everything about ourselves related to male and female.  Approximately .3% of people worldwide are trans.  In public debate, they are grouped with LGB and Q+ and linked only to “gender” because, in part, “trans-sexual” has been changed linguistically to “transgender.”  I will use trans, instead, to avoid inaccuracy and confusion, and include all transsexual, transgender, and trans people.

A person whose brain is trans does not merely identify with the other gender, which would be identifying with a different social construction, with the other sex.   The trans brain operates so much more like the other sex’s brain that the trans person will likely seek to undergo an anatomical and biochemical sex change–not a “gender change” but a sex change–to gain the kind of equilibrium that most of us feel in our original brain sex.  This trans brain is not the rule, but it is an important exception to the rule in the human tapestry of sexual dimorphism and brain development.

 

How Does a Brain Become Trans?

 

As a scientific community, we are not sure yet how a brain becomes a trans brain, but we do know that for many, if not all, trans people, it begins with cellular and neural input from gene expression during fetal hormone surges.  These surges and lack of surge between 4 weeks and six months in utero preset all our brains for where we will fit on the spectrum of male or female sex-on-the-brain (brain sex), including the possibility of a trans brain.  As s/he is growing, the trans child suspects that something has gone on in his/her brain development and feels that it is still going on but lacks language to describe it.

We adults also suspect something is happening.  Our young boy or girl may go through a cross-sex experimental phase in the first few years of life (what we will call publicly “gender nonconforming,” initially); we notice this experimentation and present it to professionals who may diagnose it as gender dysphoria (the subject of the fourth blog); as sex hormones flow in pre-puberty and puberty, all male and female brains are affected by the hormones, including the trans brain.  The trans child may likely assert during adolescence: “I am not who I appear to be, I am that other sex, I know this for sure.”

The overuse of “gender” has created confusion for children, parents, and professionals.  Being trans is not the same as being gender fluid or gay despite that LBG and Q+ and T are all discussed in recent times under “gender” and “gender fluidity.”   Most people who gender identify as “they” in our schools are not trans but may be gender nonconforming.  We can see the difference when we scan brains.  Check out this article for more on scans:  https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/.  As scientists scan brains of children and adults, they know there is no single “male” and “female” brain at all but a spectrum of male/female–lots of diversity and variety–at the same time, with the use of scans, they can differentiate trans brains from the majority of male/female brains (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-there-something-unique-about-the-transgender-brain/).

Why is it important to distinguish the trans brain?  Why is it important to look at LGB and T and Q+ separately?  Because trans people need specific services that most children, including gender nonconforming children, will likely not need.  It is crucial to remember that many children who experiment with gender identity are not T, trans, but Bridge Brains (more in a moment on this kind of brain) and/or LGB, which they realize in mid to late adolescence (https://gurianinstitute.com/at-what-age-should-a-child-be-confirmed-as-transgender/) once their brains have fully sexualized.   If a child’s support team members–parents, professionals, clinicians–know the difference between trans (T) and gender nonconforming (Q+), they will likely not move the Q+ child to potentially dangerous sex changes in the neurochemistry of early adolescence.  But the T child, meanwhile, will be thankful that professionals and parents knew how sex works in the brain, so that this trans child and adolescent can get the required services—services that might save his or her life.

 

The Usefulness of Understanding “The Bridge Brain”

 

As we noted in previous blogs, gender fluidity is as much about social construction as brain structure.  Brain structure and function are binary—male and female— with nearly infinite variety in how male and female can operate.  Meanwhile, each human psyche during childhood and adolescence constructs an “I”, a Self, an identity that is, as Jean Paul Sartre famously observed, “a bundle of selves,” a bundle of “Is” and identities.  Among this bundle of selves will likely be a baseline identity based on sex (“I have a penis or vagina, I think I want to have children one day,”) augmented, perhaps, by elements of gender such as, “I don’t want to be either stereotypical masculine or feminine but bridge the two social constructions.”

Many human beings, especially now, are trying to bridge male and female in relationships, a progressive culture shift we are all involved in and have been in since the mid 20th century.  As we noted in earlier blogs, the emergence of gender shifts have been helpful for society; by looking at our “gender,” human beings are bridging social types and tendencies, and expanding our potential bundle of selves.  To include this gender expansiveness but keep with the sexual dimorphism and brain science that is settled science, I coined the term “bridge brain” in the mid 1990s, while doing corporate trainings.  I did this because I could see the variety of brains around me and wanted a neuroscientific way of including and valuing everyone.

In a seminal training I was doing at a Fortune 100 company, a female software engineer came up to me and said, “I know I’m a woman, but looking at those brain scans, I think I am also more ‘male.’  I never liked dolls as a kid, I liked Legos and blocks, and I’m not touchy feely.”  She did not think she was trans, and she enjoyed female advantages, she said, but she also knew her brain was doing something internally that seemed anomalous.  When I asked if she thought she had a ‘male brain’ or she thought she was bridging between male and female brains, she responded, “The latter–I think I exist on the bridge between the two.”  Indeed, if we could scan her brain now, I have no doubt she would show up as a bridge brain.

Similarly, men have come up to me at trainings and workshops to say they connect words-to-feelings very well, are much more focused than wife or spouse on emotions, relationships, and “that kind of thing,” and are “less aggressive than most guys,” and “liked dolls as a kid more than other boys.”   They further say, “I don’t like being restricted to cultural stereotypes of a male.”  Like the female engineer, however, they are not trans, and they enjoy male advantages.  These people are most bridge brains:  male and female at their dimorphic baselines, and retaining the advantages of sex, but fluid in their perceptiveness and vision of bridging sexes and genders.    When I do trainings and keynotes now, I show scans of bridge brains to audiences.  What we can see on brain scans now is amazing indeed.

 

How Do We Protect Trans People While Protecting Everyone Else?

 

I believe many of the children who are exploring “gender fluid,” “gender nonconforming,” “gender nonbinary,” and saying they are “transgender” are “bridge brains.”  The body/brain are still male or female, but the development of personal identity bridges the brain-sex spectrum in three or more of these ways:  emotion-processing (including word-to-feeling ratios), spatial/non-spatial work/play, and varieties of physical aggressiveness. 

Knowing this, helps me help trans people because a bridge brain has a few ways in which it shows bridging on its brain scans but a trans brain, as noted in the studies I mentioned earlier, has approximately 30 different ways it is set up and functions like the other sex’s brain.  This much higher number and degree create significant inward pressure for sex change.  The gender fluid or  bridge brain likely does not need or ultimately want a sex change, which is important to note when medications and surgery are discussed.

Meanwhile, in what I have called our “culture of the exception,” there is presently a culture-pressure to remove the majority, male and female, from our lexicon and replace it with gender, the minority.  This pressure comes in large part so that trans people will feel more comfortable, but while this pressure increases, so does the backlash against trans and gender nonconforming people.  Lawsuits across our culture are now trying to severely impede trans rights–our culture is divided into a sex and gender war without end.  There is a better way to help trans people–and all the rest of us that involves accepting and celebrating the majority of brains while protecting the minority.  This approach is analogous, in my mind, to the situation of religious minorities—a situation our culture has already successfully dealt with.

 

The Trans as the Jew

 

I am Jewish, so I will use that example.

Given that much of our Western culture is linked to Judeo-Christian values and history, my foundational “sex” in this analogy is “Judeo-Christian.”  Because I am, by religion, not Christian but Jewish, I am an exception (in this analogy, “gender/gender non-conforming/trans).  Christian networks and Christians control much of our holistic American culture so being Jewish is an exception just like the holistic foundation of human life is sexual dimorphism–it is on this base that human reproduction and much of culture depends; trans is an exception within that whole.

Understanding this analogy, we can go even further to see the sacred pressure a trans person, like the Jew, puts on our culture–sacred and helpful just like the pressure the Jew puts on us as the Jew seeks identity, too, and a place, and the right to flourish and be.   From Benny Goodman to Jerry Seinfeld to Jewish Mother jokes to film making, fashion, art, to political conversations about Israel-Palestine, nearly every Christian or non-religious person in America and in the West has felt some Jewish “pressure.”  Over the decades, nearly everyone in the culture has absorbed some Jewish values, humor, interests into the Christian or “mainstream American” holistic identity.

But as an enlightened Jew, I do not want to erase the Christian or mainstream reality—what is natural to America–to promote my identity.  To attempt the erasure of Christianity would be destructively pugnacious toward most people around me and become a war I cannot win; so, I protect myself and my family as a diverse element within an American inclusive life.  I battle against excesses or abuses, and I protect my minority rights and minority status, and, fortunately, in America today, the “whole”, the “foundation”, of American life allows for valuation and protection of the minority, the Jew.

In making this analogy with trans, I am aware that a Jew is not the same thing as a trans person, and that protection of the minority by the majority is not clean, often falters, and sometimes does so violently.  But I also know that protection of the minority becomes less impossible when the majority is reassured that they are the majority and most importantly that their children will be safe.  If they don’t get this reassurance and protection, the majority will backlash and the minority will not be served.

 

Putting Constructive Pressure on Society to Protect Trans People

 

So:  for a trans person’s health and safety, I believe it is important to let everyone else know that sex and sexual dimorphism are themselves natural and the trans person knows it.  To do otherwise, would be akin to applying a destructive pressure of the minority on an already positive majority–like putting pressure on human nature to destroy itself.  This is not going to happen, and it is not healthy for individuals or the culture as a whole.  I believe a trans person can gain the most loyalty from the overall culture if s/he says, “Sex is natural, and I am a valuable minority in that nature.”  This is different than saying, “I am transgender,” which elicits social construction arguments.  Better, I believe, is to say, “I am as natural, diverse, God-given as you are, and science proves it; as a natural being, I deserve equal opportunity  in the evolving whole of human nature.”

This kind of pressure is different than what we find when advocates for LGBTQ+ people claim that the existence of the majority creates, by its very existence, anguish for the minority (what we noted in blogs 1 and 2 that the AMA subcommittee claimed).  This obliteration-first approach relies too much on guilt, shame, pseudo-science, denial, and social media rage against the majority.  The majority is already basically healthy on its own, so it has little or no incentive to relinquish control and power.  It will defend itself by calling the minority ill, insane, unfair, wrong, dangerous, and many more negatives, thus sending the shame the minority wanted to foist on the majority right back onto the minority.

As we showed in blog 2, the obliterative approach is also not necessary.  LGB advocates utilized good science to gain protected minority status for lesbian, gay, and bisexual people.  In part because these LGB efforts mainly predate social media’s dominance over cultural conversation, the gaining of equal rights for LGB people did not appear to require as much social pressure to end sexual dimorphism, nor as much sexodimorphobia, as some trans advocates call for.

I believe this is the case not only because of the lack of social media in past decades, but also because sexual orientation was never a “gender” orientation:  it was and is a sexual orientation housed in a particular part of the brain.  Thus, discussion about nature, science, and the brain did not need to get thrown out in the battle to acquire equal rights for LGB people.  In the last ten to fifteen years, as advocacy for trans people is growing, LGB (sexual orientation in the brain) and T (significant brain sex difference) are now grouped with Q+.   This creates some advocacy confusion that the LGBTQ+ movement will need to deal with, and pushes a majority of human beings away from helpful social dialogue.

 

How Do We Make Bathrooms Fair and Equitable?

 

This question is a case in point.  Once our society realizes that a trans (T) person possesses, like an LGB person, a brain difference that is anomolous but also within the bounds of human nature’s helpful diversity, our culture can use the science of brain sex to protect this crucial human minority—and win over the majority.  Keeping the exceptionality of the trans brain in mind presents the roadmap for healing the “bathroom” issue that is, in many ways, tearing us apart—legally, within family systems, and even morally.

I suggest this better, science-based approach:

• If the person has not yet transitioned physiologically/reproductively (still has original penis or vagina), use of the original sex-specific bathroom is warranted and safest. The reason is obvious and natural—an intact adult biological male in a bathroom with young girls will lead to potential sex-based issues that are perhaps dangerous but even if not so, discriminatory to the girls (sex discrimination).  Simultaneously, trying to force that trans man who has not yet transitioned into that girls’ bathroom will ruin political advocacy in the short and long term as society backlashes against trans people for insisting on accommodations that are potentially problematic and just do not feel natural to most people.
• If, however, the un-transitioned trans person is already gender-identifying cross sexually (e.g., wearing the clothes and styles of the other sex), and given the existence of anti-trans bigotry, social stigma, and violence, private, unisex bathrooms should be available in public and private domains (businesses, parks, schools, etc.) by law.  These are the safest alternatives to protect this minority of people who are likely already hormonally transitioning to the other sexes’ biochemistry in anticipation of surgery.
• But if the trans person has transitioned physiologically, like Bruce Jenner to Caitlin Jenner, the transition is considered complete and the question of bathrooms becomes mute: his/her hormonology and reproductive organs have fully transitioned, all human rights, including women’s rights, are protected by use of the anatomically and neurologically aligned bathroom, and is safe and appropriate to live life (including physiologic functions) as the transitioned sex—for instance, Caitlin Jenner uses the women’s room.

Because gender does not replace biological sex on the body or even in much of the brain until full transition has occurred, a roadmap that accounts for sex, first, is crucial.  In this vein, I hope trans people will gradually realize the confusion of using “transgender” when their brain sex is so fully operative in their life-course.  “Transsexual” would be most accurate, but “trans” will hopefully provide enough linguistic clarity for new advocacy.

 

How Do We Make Trans Athletics Safe and Fair?

 

A roadmap for trans participation in cross-sex athletics is on the surface more complicated than the bathroom issue but need not be so if we do what we are all trained to do these days from our Covid experience:  follow the science.  The Olympic Committee guidelines do just that, as I will explore with you now; they provide a template for solutions that we can use for athletics among children–the new battlefront in Connecticut, Idaho, and courts elsewhere.  Why the battlefront?  Not just, as some advocates believe, as an attack on LGBTQ+ people but because what is at stake is also the fair and equitable measurement of girls’ and women’s rights.

The middle ground, the roadmap to solve this issue, involves a science-based distinction like we made regarding bathrooms between a body with its original sex organs intact and a body that has surgically transitioned.  The core question of law and practice will be:  has the person transitioned to the other sex or is the person still operating in his/her original sex?  If the trans or gender-identifying girl still possesses a penis and testicles, she is, for athletics, still a boy and should play with the other boys.  Because sex is binary, she is still in the realm of her original sex, not yet transitioned.  The gender-identity she is choosing right now is not as operative yet, in the nexus of her rights with girls rights, as her original sex is–yet.  Vice-versa: if the gender-identifying boy still possesses a vagina, he is, for athletics, still a girl and should play with the girls.

With a caveat:  male/female differentiation in many sports is generally unnecessary before about 9 years old.  Girls and boys, trans or otherwise, playing together in the early years create little or no tangible disparity or negative effect on the rights of either sex or any gender.  At around 9, however, pre-puberty begins the flood of sex specific hormones.  Boys receive surges of testosterone at between 20 and 40 times the amounts girls receive.  The male brain, body, and cells use the testosterone for more spatial fluency, more fast twitch muscles, more height and weight, more muscle mass in general, more bone density, larger heart and lungs, more strength and speed, more oxygen-carrying red blood cells, more general physical power.  As David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, notes, “By age 14, the fastest high-school boys are beating adult women’s world records.  At the elite level, there is a performance difference between the best male and female runners of about 10%, no matter the distance; in jumping events, it is nearly twice that.  The male testosterone advantage is so pronounced that anyone who cares about women’s sport recognizes the need for separate competition by sex.”

Epstein further notes:  “So far, testosterone has been an imperfect but useful marker.  Testosterone is unlike height in that the male and female distributions don’t overlap:  many men are taller than many women, but a healthy man low in the male testosterone range will still have several hundred percent more circulating testosterone than a healthy woman at the top of the typical female range.  When an athlete who was born male transitions to female by undergoing testosterone suppression, the change in performance is dramatic.”

 

Women’s Rights and Title IX

 

Given all the court cases circulating now, I would expect the Supreme Court to weigh in to resolve this question within the next two years—they will end up determining, I believe, that un-transitioned boys/men competing with girls/women is unfair and discriminatory under Title IX–the law that protects women and girls on the basis of sex.  I believe they will look at the science of sex and gender carefully as a pathway to understanding where middle ground lies.

More complex, though, for them—and all of us–is the person who has already transitioned and has, thus, has experienced his/her morphology of sex organs.  After surgery, the male/female sexual dimorphism exists mainly in the brain not as much in body or hormone levels–now, if the Olympic Committee’s roadmap for using spit swabs to determine testosterone levels shows the transitioned female to be female, that trans person will and should be allowed to compete in women’s sports.  Trans rights and women’s rights will not trample one another.  In our schools, of course, very few children have physiologically transitioned, so very few cases like this will not fit the template I presented above.  However, for those young adults who do transition in adolescence, and for adults who transition, testosterone levels provide a universal and useful marker at the level of nature—of sex–and the Olympic Committee has, fortunately, already done a lot to blaze this trail for all of us.

 

The Future of Trans

 

The novelist Anna Quindlen wrote, in the beautiful anthology of women’s writing, Cries of the Spirit, “The term ‘soul mate’ suggests two people who have everything in common.  But our (sex), with all the differences it implies, divides us…and that is fine with me.”  Perhaps equally important in all of our sex and gender politics is respect for the differences across sexual and gender boundaries.  The future for our trans people is bright, I believe, if we understand their exceptionality, their difference, within the whole.  This will mean distinguishing “brain sex dysphoria” from “gender dysphoria,” which is a subject of the next blog.  It will also mean acknowledging the primacy of sex not against trans people but for them.  Because they are anomalous in sex, they shine in our midst and need our protection.

I also love Quindlen’s line because it hints at this very useful truth of human nature:  Sex and sexual dimorphism are necessary frictions on which social growth depend.  Not only reproductively (the fiction of male/female bodies on one another) but also in mind, heart, and soul, the people and cultures we make include sexual frictions as elements of empathy and human love.  Accounting for nature-based differences in us works best in the long term because those differences help us best adapt to inevitable changes in nature and society.  As I help people now advocate for each social group, I think of the early feminist era in which my parents, ardent women’s rights advocates, and I as their son, played a part.  In women’s rights advocacy, the feminists of my parents’ era realized that leaving the holistic female out of patriarchal culture is a doomed historical strategy–humanity cannot leave out this crucial part of ourselves; we need the necessary friction of women and men who are equally valued in our society.

So it needs to be with majority/minority culture for trans and gender nonconforming people.  The future of trans, LGB, bridge brains, and Q+ people is bright, I believe, if we use science to guide us to enlightened positions that will both fit our laws around sex discrimination and also our common sense.  Within that common sense is and will always be, female and male.  Now we can add trans to female and male as the bridge between us–mediators in our frictions, perhaps, and even more, potential lights shining into areas of life we have not yet fully seen or understood.

 

 

End of Part III

 

Copyright © Michael Gurian 2021