The Transgender Scientist

Factors in transgender causation. Why are people transgender? Dana Bevan, The Transgender Scientist identifies 4 factors. They involve genetics, epigenetics, Western culture, and early childhood learning. This episode provides a top-level description of the 4 factors which will be detailed in subsequent episodes.

Transgender Transition: Breast Enhancement Surgery. This episode explains why transitioning transwomen go on hormone therapy and why breast enhancement surgery is often needed. Transwomen want to look like other women and wear feminine clothing but this requires hormone therapy to reshape the body and, in particular the breasts. When hormone therapy results for breast development is inadequate, about half of transitioning transwomen get breast implants for enhancement. The episode also describes what it was like for your Transgender Scientist to get breast enhancement surgery.

This episode provides a critical review of the recent by Lisa Littman of Brown University which claims that gender dysphoria originates in childhood trauma and can be triggered by information "contagion" from peers and the Internet in adolescence. The episode also provides the historical and scientific on background on this claim which indicates that it constitutes a non-scientific attack on affirmative treatment for transgender children and adults. The paper involved a survey, ostensibly from surprised and disgruntled parents which was used to claim based on flawed methodology that their children were not dysphoric in childhood but became dysphoric in adolescence. Littman cannot prove that the children were gender dysphoric because the parents were not asked about a critical criterion of debilitation and distress which is required for gender dysphoria and typically is used as a billing code for transgender transition. Two results were described which support hypotheses for more rigorous study: (1) because the transgender children had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression it is possible that this resulted from living in secrecy as being transgender from earlier childhood (2) because parents of natal female children were surprised by the emergence of their children as being transgender but were not surprised by earlier declarations of lesbian, bi or sexual orientation, the children may have deliberately come out with declarations of alternative sexual orientations that were more socially correct to prepare their parents for transgender emergence.

It is revealed that the idelogy of Ryan Anderson and Paul McHugh is heterogenderism. Real science regarding some of the topics of Anderson's book When Harry Became Sally are presented. Heterogenderism seeks to debase transgender people by saying that they are abnormal or mentally ill. Anderson and McHugh seek to equate sex and gender which denies the existence of transgender people. The combination of heterogenderism and populism results in public policy that discriminates against transgender people and gaslights them by constantly referring to them as inferior.

Culture is the third factor in transgender causation. In earlier podcasts I described how genetic gender predisposition was formed based on two factors: genetics and epigenetics. In this podcast I describe why culture is the third factor in being transgender. It appears that being transgender only occurs in Western culture. Western culture is peculiar among those cultures that have been studied. It has the peculiar characteristics of being binary, cisgender and inflexible. When genetic gender predisposition and culture collide, the result is transgender people. Examples of other cultures that have up to 5 gender behavior categories, that are not cisgender and are not inflexible. Transgender people cannot change their genetic gender predisposition but they can change Western culture to be more accomodating to diversity.