The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [15]
The number of people self-identifying as transgendered or transsexual and seeking services (hormone therapy and/or surgery) has certainly risen in every decade since Christine Jorgensen brought the issue to the public’s attention, in 1952. Gunter Dorner, a German en-docrinologist who has devoted his career to studying the effects of hormones on the brain, has postulated a fourfold increase in the incidence of transsexualism over the past forty years in the former East Germany. Is Dorner correct? No one knows. But if various forms of gender variance are indeed on the increase, as seems to be the case, what might be the cause of this phenomenon? Dr. Paul McHugh, former chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a noted opponent of sex reassignment surgery, believes that gender variance is a fad or a “craze” driven by the media and the Internet. McHugh’s views are the flip side of the postmodern “performativity” argument that gender is a cultural construction and that the body is a text upon which individuals are free to inscribe their gender of choice. In this view, gender-queer people are revolutionaries helping to dismantle an oppressive system—and their numbers are increasing, as more and more people challenge the tyranny of the gender binary.
Others believe that greater public tolerance and acceptance, combined with the increased ability to connect with others online and in person, is responsible for the increasing visibility and political activism of gender-variant people. “Twenty or forty or fifty years ago, you couldn’t have had a meeting like this one,” Professor Milton Diamond told me at the 2003 annual meeting of the International Foundation for Gender Education. The majority of the meeting’s participants were cross-dressed men, a group that remains the most heavily closeted of sexual minorities and the most persecuted. “A meeting like this would have been broken up by the police,” Diamond said. Then too, he pointed out, “Many of these individuals think that they are the only ones in the world, and they don’t think that there is a solution, and when they find a solution or find a safe haven somewhere, they utilize it. Many of these activities are like support groups in their own way. They don’t call them that, but that’s what they are.”
Without denying the influence of social factors in helping more people come out, as a science writer I can’t help being interested in biological explanations for what seems to be a pronounced increase in the number of gender-variant people in the world today. An enormous quantity of man-made chemicals has been released into the environment since the chemical revolution began after World War II. According to researchers who have studied their effects, “many of these chemicals can disturb development of the endocrine system and of the organs that respond to endocrine signals in organisms indirectly exposed during prenatal and/or early postnatal life; effects of exposure during development are permanent and irreversible.” Some scientists and transpeople argue that the buildup of these endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the environment has begun to produce the same kind of effects on human sexual differentiation that have already been observed in wildlife and laboratory animals. In this view, a previously rare collection of endocrine-mediated anomalies is becoming more common as a result of the bioaccumulation of these chemicals, many of which are stored in fat and transmitted to the developing fetus through the placenta in pregnancy.
The strongest evidence for a possible biological basis for gender variance comes from research on the effects of the drug diethylstilbe-strol (DES). DES is a synthetic estrogen developed in 1938. Between 1945 and 1970, DES and other synthetic