• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2011 0

Stryker phrased it, and as most of my sources describe it. So if gender-variant people weren’t mentally ill anarchists bent on bringing down the binary gender system through subversive performance, what was the source of gender variance? I searched the scientific literature and was frustrated by the paucity of hard scientific research on transsexuality, transgenderism, and gender variance. Searches on Medline (an online search engine) and PubMed (the National Library of Medicine’s search service) using those keywords brought up very few articles, and most of those were the work of researchers with whom I was already familiar. Then I encountered Christine Johnson and discovered that there was, in fact, a substantial scientific literature on anomalous sexual differentiation, but that I wouldn’t find it in journals of endocrinology or psychiatry. I would find the hard science in the last places I would have thought to look: toxicology and environmental health, the disciplines in which I had been trained as a science writer.

I e-mailed Johnson in November 2001, introduced myself, and shared with her my questions and concerns about the environmental endocrine hypothesis and its possible relationship to our fin de siecle anxiety about masculinity threatened by female power. She responded, “Yes, there seems to be a great deal of discomfort in the media and in our society generally about gender roles and identity. But apart from the media response to these findings, in my opinion, this problem is much more serious than people are generally aware. So while the media may have reacted strongly because of existing social mores, it essentially acted correctly in raising red flags about the relationship between chemicals and sexual developmental anomalies.”

I told Johnson that I had been asking the transgendered and transsexual people whom I was interviewing whether or not there were more gender-variant people in the world today, or whether they were simply becoming more visible as society becomes more tolerant and accepting. She answered bluntly, “I don’t think that asking transgendered people is the proper way to ask this question. This is equivalent to asking cancer patients if the rate of cancer is increasing. How can one know this? What is required is epidemiological studies, period. The fact that there is not a registry is suspicious in my view. Keeping track of the number of sexual developmental anomalies is important in gaining an understanding of the impact.”

Johnson also rejected the notion that the growing visibility of trans-gender and transsexual people was due to greater social tolerance of gender diversity. “Ts find increased acceptance inside the T community, and to a lesser extent within the larger GLBT community, but to extend that acceptance to the general population is a bit disingenuous. Where is the evidence that society is more accepting of Ts? It seems to be that most people claim increased social benevolence, but in general are unable to identify in what tangible ways this benevolence is manifested. We have not achieved many basic civil rights, and if you ask the average (non-TG) person to name a single TG, they would be hard pressed to name anyone, because we are, in essence, the invisible ones. Also to be noted is the fact that Ts are excluded in most cases for insurance reimbursement—this is decidedly not benevolent. So while I see relatively large increases in the number of teen Ts, I see no significant increase in benevolence, at least in the U.S., towards transpeople.”

Regarding the environmental endocrine hypothesis itself and its relationship to transsexuality, Johnson points out that the scientific literature “makes it abundantly clear that it is possible to feminize males and masculinize females by application of exogenous hormones. This is reproduced reliably in the lab on animals, so there should be little argument over the potential of hormonal compounds to alter the ‘normal’ path of development. For the last 40 years, gender researchers have been saying that hormonal variations can indeed cause