KARBYTES_JOURNAL_2023_ENTRY_520
At the risk of sounding petty and repetitive, I will briefly mention something I was thinking about this morning which finally started to sound clear enough for me to properly articulate.
I thought about why I am transsexual and not just transgender.
Gender is a cultural phenomenon (but it is historically dependent on sex related biological traits which physically distinguish the female sex of a species from the male sex of that species).
Sex differences emerged as genetically encoded adaptive traits which enabled a species to effectively pass on its genes to offspring (for multiple successive generations) compared to members of that species which lacked such traits or which did not pass on their genes across as many generations.
Gender differences loosely reflect sex differences between male humans and female humans but, because culture is not hardwired the way sex is (because sex is transmitted by information units called genes while gender is transmitted by information units called memes), it is relatively easy for a human to exhibit cultural characteristics which are not historically associated with that human’s sex.
There is a such thing as hermaphroditism (which is when abnormalities in the chromosomes involved in determining a human’s sex cause that human to naturally develop phenotypic traits of both sexes).
It therefore makes sense to say that there are technically more than two sexes given the fact that there are several types of sex determining chromosome combinations which cause hermaphroditism and which are not typically XX (female) and not typically XY (male) (but there could be other genetic factors which cause some hermaphroditic traits to emerge in humans with either the XX chromosome combination or else the XY chromosome combination).
A transsexual is a human who physically and intentionally alters its body to acquire sex related characteristics of sex other than what that human was originally classified as being. I think the most significant of such modifications is taking either estrogen (to acquire non reproductive female traits) or testosterone (to acquire non reproductive male traits) because such hormones do more than alter a human’s physical appearance. Such hormones alter the way that human’s brain processes information, energy, and nutrients. As a human whose sex is female and whose hormone configuration is male more so than female (due to the artificially elevated testosterone levels), I have noticeably and empirically measurably more muscle strength, bone density, hemoglobin levels, and probably differences in my brain structure than what I would have if I did not take any hormones. So, from a first person qualitative point of view, testosterone alters my experience of life because it informs each of my cells how to prioritize different functions involved in resource management. For instance, my cells are chemically informed to prioritize my fighting ability over my ability to get pregnant. The opposite would be true if I were estrogen dominant instead of testosterone dominant.
I think the simplest and most scientifically accurate umbrella term for both hermaphroditic humans and transsexual humans is non-binary while every other human could be classified as either male or female.
A transgender is a person, in my opinion, should check the box labeled non-binary or daresay even intersex instead of either male or female for one reason only: because that person is probably unable to fertilize an egg the way that person probably tries to look. For instance, a male to female transsexual who convincingly passes for a woman might fool people into thinking “she” can get pregnant from a cisgender man while a female to male transsexual who convincingly passes for a man might fool people into thinking “he” can impregnate a cisgender woman.
It should be noted that intersex (i.e. hermaphroditic people) are almost always sterile (i.e. unable to get pregnant and unable to fertilize an egg via insemination).
(Technically, it is physically possible to grow any type of cell (including sperm and egg cells) from stem cells. Therefore, it is possible to transform any human’s stem cells into sperm or egg cells. It is also possible to incubate a fertilized human egg (i.e. an egg (which only has half of a human’s genome) combined with a sperm (which also contains only half of a human’s genome) to form a zygote (which has exactly one human genome within its nucleus comprised of the genes which merged from the two haploid cells (i.e. one egg and one sperm merging)) inside of an artificial womb. Therefore, if what I just posited is true (and I believe it is), sex (and therefore gender) is not necessary to produce new human offspring)).
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