Gender inquiry loses plot

The Press | Wednesday, 15 August 2007

The signs are not hopeful for the country's first major inquiry into the rights of "transgender" New Zealanders, writes JOANNE PROCTOR.

In March, the Human Rights Commission released a summary of submissions from its "transgender" inquiry.

The final report is due in September. But already it is looking like a case of good intentions, discredited theories and a lost plot.

The commission's intentions seem obvious enough, the theories less so. Many pre-date the 1960s. Some contain echoes of feminist gender politics from that time. All are rooted in behaviourism. Because neurobiology has moved on, they should be past their use-by date. But they are proving hard to kill.

Take the "tabula rasa" theory, for example. According to it, a newborn baby's brain is a complete blank. It has the capacity to absorb and retain information. It has the potential to become sentient, but is unencumbered by those things when it emerges into the world.

The theory had pretty much disappeared by the 1990s. Before that, many experts regarded it as the psychological equivalent of a Newtonian law.

The expert who invented "gender identity" believed in the tabula rasa theory. His name was John Money. He defined gender identity as the "private experience of gender role". Then he defined gender role as the "public expression of gender identity".

Essentially Money's concept can be reduced to a little formula: A + C = D, where A is anatomical correctness, C is gender role conditioning and D is gender identity.

It works like this: first, you have a baby that is a tabula rasa. If he has a willie, then he is anatomically correct. You dress him in blue and call him Colin: that is gender role conditioning. After a while, he learns that people with willies and names like Colin are males. Then he realises he is male, too. Now he has a gender identity.

If the baby has not got a willie, you use pink instead of blue. You put suffixes like "ette" or "a" on the end of names like Colin. You know the rest.

Money believed that humans would not know if they were Arthur or Martha without gender-role conditioning. And Arthur could grow up believing that he actually was Martha if the conditioning was inappropriate. That is called "gender-identity disorder" and transsexuals are commonly accused of having it.

By 1975, the formula had assumed the status of a Newtonian law, and the concept of gender identity had evolved into a sacred cow. Actually it is an idee recue: it exists because people think it does. For all anyone knows, it is the biggest red herring that has been dragged past any inquiry in the last hundred years.

While Money was inventing theories, other experts were busy having arguments with each other. One was over what transsexuals should be called. Some experts believed that anyone who thought it was possible to change sex was seriously deluded. They thought that terms like transsexual and sex reassignment were reinforcing the delusion. Others argued that post-op male-to-female transsexuals were just castrated males who were changing gender roles.

The arguments lasted several years and ended with a decision to use the term transgender to define transsexuals. Transgender is shorthand for "transiting gender roles". Before the 1980s, the word had allowed some distinction between transsexualism and the gender-role transgressive behaviours such as transvestism.

Some transsexuals accepted the label. Others loathed it, partly because nobody had asked them first. By 1985, the belief that transsexualism was all about changing gender roles had become the psychological equivalent of a Newtonian law.

In November 1995, the science journal Nature published research showing that a structure in the hypothalamus (in the brain), called the stria terminalis, was twice as large in males as in females. Gay and straight males were both the same in size. In male-to-female transsexuals, the structure was female sized.

In humans, the stria terminalis is known to affect the production of an enzyme called aromatase. Enzyme levels are much higher with a female-sized stria terminalis.

Aromatase turns testosterone into the female sex hormone, estradiol. That matters, because boy babies need lots of testosterone to become male. Boys and girls are sexually indistinguishable for the first six to eight weeks of gestation.

For boys, a flood of testosterone causes potentially female organs to become male. Some forms of hermaphroditism are caused by low testosterone at this stage. At the same time, the brain is saturated with the hormone, altering its biology and pre-setting its function to male.

Because of their raised aromatase levels, the brains of transsexed males are deprived of the necessary testosterone. Their brain remains pre-set to female.

Transsexuals commonly describe a sense of feeling "trapped" in the wrong body. They experience an aversion to their sex organs. The reason for these sensations is now obvious. For males, transsexualism results from a conflict between their female brain biology and their biologically male anatomy. The reverse is probably true for females.

For years, the intersexed and transsexed have lived with the consequences of other people's theories. Recently science has demonstrated how wrong these were. Yet the commission's summary is riddled with beliefs and concepts drawn from those same discredited theories. It barely acknowledges biology. It certainly does nothing to address it. And that may be where they have lost the plot.

Because if the commission continues to ignore biology, it risks perpetuating the very misconceptions it is trying to resolve.

* Joanne Proctor underwent a sex-change operation in 2002, after a successful five-year battle to have the surgery performed in the public health service.