Transgender Issues II

"Gender identity is a person’s inner sense of belonging to a particular gender, such as male or female. It is a deeply felt and core component of human identity. It appears to be related to one’s brain messages and mind functioning, the factors that are now included under the category of neurological sex."
"Every person has a gender identity, which is a deep-seated, deeply felt component of human identity for each person. A person’s gender identity is not a personal decision, preference, or belief. In other words, transgender boys are boys and transgender girls are girls.
"Current science recognizes that gender identity is innate or fixed at a young age and that gender identity has a biological basis."
"At birth, infants are assigned a sex, either male or female, based solely on the appearance of their external genitalia. For most people, that assignment turns out to be accurate and their birth-assigned sex matches that person’s actual sex. However, a transgender person’s birth-assigned sex does not reflect that person’s actual sex."
"By the beginning of the twentieth century, scientific research had established that external genitalia alone—the typical criterion for assigning sex at birth—is not an accurate proxy for a person’s sex. Instead, current medical understanding recognizes that a person’s sex is comprised of a number of components including: chromosomal sex, gonadal sex, fetal hormonal sex (prenatal hormones produced by the gonads), internal morphologic sex (internal genitalia, i.e., ovaries, uterus, testes), external morphological sex (external genitalia, i.e., penis, clitoris, vulva), hypothalamic sex (i.e., sexual differentiations in brain development and structure), pubertal hormonal sex, neurological sex, and gender identity and role."
"When there is a divergence between these factors, neurological sex and related gender identity are the most important and determinative factors."
-- Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D.

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