Okay, this description was really funny, but gender is more complex and inherent and can’t be totally reduced to the social aspects. I say that getting my hormones corrected “fixed me” because, after years of antidepressants and anxiolytics and therapies, turning off testosterone is what finally alleviated a constant, lifelong feeling of something being inherently, unquenchably wrong. This was a feeling I’d had all my life. Treating it psychologically never touched that feeling. Even as my depression and anxiety and truama responses improved, that feeling remained. Even social transition just made it easier to cope with. HRT turned it off. If you or anyone else reading this is familiar with the Dark Tower books, I’ve long made comparisons to Jake’s split timeline. You know implicitly that you should be having a different emergent experience of life, of body, of puberty, but time’s arrow neither slows nor reverses. You’re stuck living in two timelines, and every step towards transition brings them closer to harmony, and at least for me, HRT totally collapsed them into a single life. This is the human experience that has the cultural mapor code of pink vs armies laid over it.
It’s more complex because they’re related, but not always.
Genetic sex is the basis for some epigenetic status, which causes some organs to develop more in this or that way, including structures in the brain, which in turn impact behavior, which tends to cause some social preferences.
But none of those steps is written in stone. While “usually” and “if everything goes as expected” an XY and XX will develop following certain patterns all the way from genetics to social preferences, there are also a lot of cases where either one of the steps didn’t go as expected: maybe it went the opposite way, or only worked partially, or not at all, or whatever else.
It’s basically unpredictable, and the worst thing is to get stuck in a status where part of you says one thing, while another part says something else. HRT is just one way to change the part that’s easiest to change in a particular case to keep things as close to harmonized as possible.
Tbh, this doesn’t feel like a response to my post. All I was getting at is that gender is more complex and inherent than just social structures. There are social, psychological, and physiological aspects to gender. A lot of people reduce it to a social/cultural phenomenon, which inevitably leads someone to question the necessity of medical transition. Many trans people, myself included, will/would permanently struggle with chemical dysphoria our whole lives if we relegate the condition and its treatment to psychology and sociology. That’s all I wanted to say. To me, HRT is that science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. Spironolactone was a revelation in me, and my first few estrogen injections were all but religious experiences.
Okay, this description was really funny, but gender is more complex and inherent and can’t be totally reduced to the social aspects. I say that getting my hormones corrected “fixed me” because, after years of antidepressants and anxiolytics and therapies, turning off testosterone is what finally alleviated a constant, lifelong feeling of something being inherently, unquenchably wrong. This was a feeling I’d had all my life. Treating it psychologically never touched that feeling. Even as my depression and anxiety and truama responses improved, that feeling remained. Even social transition just made it easier to cope with. HRT turned it off. If you or anyone else reading this is familiar with the Dark Tower books, I’ve long made comparisons to Jake’s split timeline. You know implicitly that you should be having a different emergent experience of life, of body, of puberty, but time’s arrow neither slows nor reverses. You’re stuck living in two timelines, and every step towards transition brings them closer to harmony, and at least for me, HRT totally collapsed them into a single life. This is the human experience that has the cultural mapor code of pink vs armies laid over it.
It’s more complex because they’re related, but not always.
Genetic sex is the basis for some epigenetic status, which causes some organs to develop more in this or that way, including structures in the brain, which in turn impact behavior, which tends to cause some social preferences.
But none of those steps is written in stone. While “usually” and “if everything goes as expected” an XY and XX will develop following certain patterns all the way from genetics to social preferences, there are also a lot of cases where either one of the steps didn’t go as expected: maybe it went the opposite way, or only worked partially, or not at all, or whatever else.
It’s basically unpredictable, and the worst thing is to get stuck in a status where part of you says one thing, while another part says something else. HRT is just one way to change the part that’s easiest to change in a particular case to keep things as close to harmonized as possible.
Tbh, this doesn’t feel like a response to my post. All I was getting at is that gender is more complex and inherent than just social structures. There are social, psychological, and physiological aspects to gender. A lot of people reduce it to a social/cultural phenomenon, which inevitably leads someone to question the necessity of medical transition. Many trans people, myself included, will/would permanently struggle with chemical dysphoria our whole lives if we relegate the condition and its treatment to psychology and sociology. That’s all I wanted to say. To me, HRT is that science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. Spironolactone was a revelation in me, and my first few estrogen injections were all but religious experiences.