Pete Hegseth says soldiers over age 30 to be screened for testosterone deficiency

I’m trans myself, and I get why this is a touchy subject in the trans community. Many folks get deeply offended if you even try to talk about the “cause” of being trans, or flip out if you discuss the idea of neurology. But unless you want to believe in a soul, we are material beings. Everything I am, including my gender identity, is produced from the physical structure of my brain. There are some trans folks that take it way too far (self described “trans meds"), sometimes trying to use such neurological arguments to rank the validity of various trans folks. ("If you’re happy with your original parts, you’re not really trans!") And that’s bullshit. But other trans folks sometimes overreact badly to this, and end up flipping out at anyone even mentioning the neurological roots of gender dysphoria, throwing around “trans med” as a hateful slur against anyone even suggesting a physical cause of transness, as if there could be any other cause of it.

I view being trans a kind of neurological intersex condition. Basically, there’s some part of your brain that maps to your body’s physical structure and sense of self. You have an internal neurological sense of what shape your body is supposed to be. And trans people are born with a map of the opposite sex (or some intermediate state for NB folks.) And this also extends to sociology. Gender roles sure are culturally specific, they are a cultural construct. But the EXISTENCE of gender roles is not a cultural construct. Every culture and society has gender roles. Gender roles are a social construct. The existence of gender roles is not - that’s just part of universal human nature. What specific form these roles take varies wildly through time and cultures, but their existence is a universality. And human beings recognize gender from birth.

In short, whatever culture you’re born into is going to have a collection of traits and behaviors they assign to males, another for females, and possibly some other gender options. And everyone is born with some innate sense of which bucket they belong in. Most males will naturally latch on to whatever the male-assigned norms of their culture are, and the opposite with females. But for trans people, whatever part of the brain that says, “you’re a boy, you should model yourself on the other boys,” just isn’t built that way. Instead, you end up with someone born with one body, but a neurological structure instructing them to socialize and assimilate with the opposite gender.

Essentially being trans is a neurological intersex condition. Some parts of the brain’s structure are sexually dimorphic, and what you get depends on your genetics and what hormonal cocktail you’re exposed to in utero. Add in a bunch of hormonal disruptors and hormone-like compounds into the mix? Well, trans people have always existed. We have evidence of trans people going back 4000 years. But that doesn’t mean being trans lacks a cause. Even in a perfectly clean environment, natural hormonal fluctuations would mean there still would be trans folks. But since hormones control everything related to sex differentiation, I find it impossible that the compounds in our food and water aren’t having some effects on the rates of queer people being born each year. I think most of the increasing number of trans folks in recent years is simply because people are more comfortable about coming out. But I also find it extremely unlikely that some of the increase isn’t due to environmental factors.

I know that this makes most trans people very uncomfortable. No one wants to feel that their identity and existence is in part due to some environmental effect. But frankly, such folks should get over themselves. We’re physical beings made of atoms. We can discuss the environmental causes of social phenomena without applying a judgment to it. I don’t care if my transness was in part caused by environmental pollution I was exposed to as a fetus. Regardless, it’s simply who I am, the cause is irrelevant to my life. Hell, I would rather be seen by the public as some victim of environmental circumstance rather than a weird pervert. Neither explanation would be entirely correct, but at least people would be more accepting of trans people getting medical care in the earlier case.