Some men and some women want so badly to appear as the opposite sex that they have their physicians prescribe female hormones to help change heir physical appearance, and then dress and live full time in that role. These people, are also "TRANSGENDERED", but are more specifically referred to as "TRANSGENDERISTS."
And some people want so badly to be identified to the opposite sex that they go through a full sex change transition, taking hormones, having electrolysis if male, living full time at work and at home in the opposite role, having a year of counseling, and ending with sex reassignment surgery. These people are also TRANSGENDERED, but are specifically referred to as TRANSSEXUALS.
The lines between TRANSVESTITES, TRANSGENDERISTS, and TRANSSEXUALS are not clear; they are gradual blends. Many TRANSVESTITES would rather be women all the time but because of family, career, social stigma, financial costs of change, or because they just don't really think it's that big a thing, they just stay as part-time crossdressers.
Many TRANSGENDERISTS-those who live full time in the opposite sex role-would love to have a complete sex change, but cannot afford the costs, or find the reassignment surgery to be mainly a cosmetic correction that's not worth the money and risk. And some post operative TRANSSEXUALS find they have exceeded their needs to feel feminine, and wish they had remained Transvestites.
We know what "trans" means because Trans World Airlines and the Trans-Canada highway tell us it means "cross" or "across" or "between".
But regarding the word "TRANSGENDERED", what's the difference between "gender" and "sex"?
You've probably heard it before: Sex is whether you genital organs are male or female. Gender is what our own BRAIN tells us we are. GENDER encompasses at least two dimensions. (1) which sex we feel like we really are, and (2) the sex of the people we would be attracted to as romantic partners.
In order to understand how we have all gotten to be where we are in the gender spectrum, it is important to start where we all started, "IN THE WOMB".
We now know that all human embryos start out as female. The only difference initially is that some of us have two "X" chromosomes, and some have one "X" and one "Y" chromosome in each cell of our bodies. The embryos with two "X" chromosomes stay girls. But the ones with one "X" and one "Y" chromosome usually turn into males. But the change from female to male doesn't happen all at once. About six weeks after the father's sperm enters the mother's ovum, [that is - conception] a male hormone that we used to call "Bull Durham" but now call "testosterone" enters the embryo from the mother's bloodstream. It reacts with the Y chromosome and causes the embryo to change its genitals from female to male. That's the first time the little kid knows there's something wrong down there; he thinks he's still a girl, but he's got these silly testicles and a penis. Is it any wonder boy babies cry a lot when they have to come out without any clothes on?
If that initial testosterone is low in supply, or neutralized by an oversupply of the opposing female hormone, "estrogen" from the mother, the change is only partly completed. HERMAPHRODITES don't complete the change and end up with both male and female sex organs. A lot of things can cause the mother to have an oversupply of estrogen at that time, including taking it by prescription from her doctor, and some low level diseases. I think I have read that hermaphrodite babies occur somewhere around one in hundred births, but the surgeon usually removes either the male or female sex organs before the infant leaves the hospital. Unfortunately, at that time, the doctor has no way to know whether the brain of the child has gone on to become a boy brain or a girl brain, and sometimes the organs they remove are the ones that would have matched the brain.
Now going back to the first development of the male sex organs in the male fetuses six weeks after conception:
Normally, a few weeks after male genitalia are formed in the XY embryos, the embryo's own testicles produce a flood of testosterone, in its own bloodstream, which causes the brain to be changed from female form to male form. A fully rewired male brain has less capacity to pass general information between right and left sides of the brain because it has less connective tissue between the two sides. It has an additional mathematical/spatial processing center in the right side of the male brain, and a variety of other differences. It is into this special processing center that men tend to retreat while working on deep problems, to the exclusion of nearly everything else going on around them.
Unaltered women's brains, on the other hand, are much more aware of what is going on around them. And their brains are more versatile in noticing a variety of detail that men tend to overlook. People with female brains usually score lower on mathematical and spatial concept tests and higher in language skills.
Male and female brains are the same in many respects. But according to one Johns Hopkins brain researcher, the changes made by that second bath of testosterone causes at least 25 differences in the physical structure of women's brains and men's brains. If there is enough testosterone, at the right time, the brain of the XY embryo will become "re-wired" somewhat analogously to changing a Macintosh computer to an IBM.
But if again, if the testosterone is insufficient, or perhaps is late in onset, or is countered by an oversupply of estrogen, then anything short of a fully masculine brain may result. In some cases nothing happens and the XY child is born with male genitals, and an unaltered female brain. On a "degree-of-maleness scale" of 1 to 10, this brain is a 1. These genital males are TRANSSEXUALS.
Most Male-to-female transsexuals "know they are girls" from just about the time they start encountering sex-differentiated choices. They constantly make the same choices the girls make. Sex-differentiated choices occur just about as early as childhood memories begin. Transsexuals usually grow up hating the fact that their bodies do not match their gender-what their brain tells them they are. Nearly all transsexuals would change their bodies into women if they could, and some do.
If there is some testosterone during that second flood-time in the uterus, but not enough to finish the job of brain changing, the embryo will not have a fully male brain. It may be mostly female (maybe 3 on the scale of 10), mostly male (8 on the scale of 10), or anywhere in-between. And among transvestites, that degree varies with each of us.
The result of having a brain that remains somewhere between male and female, is a person who probably will live his life as a male. But this person will have a desire and need to differ from standard male patterns of behavior and reaction. And he will have a need to express his greater-than-average femaleness.
By the time the embryo leaves the womb as a new male child, the brain is set in its proportions of maleness and femaleness. No amount of subsequent estrogen will change a male brain back to female; no subsequent amount of testosterone will change a female brain into a male one, although it certainly will have other noticeable effects on the body.
Rats have chromosomes and genes, hormones, and a central nervous system just as we do. But the brains of male rats do not change from female until a couple of weeks after the rat has been born. A male rat comes into the world with its brain roughly at the same unformed stages the seven-week-old human embryo. So scientists can study and manipulate brain-sex changes in a rat after its birth. When they castrate him, he becomes, for all purposes other than having babies, a female rat. He certainly thinks she is.
As the neutered rat grows up, it is much less aggressive than its ordinary, male companions. It is altogether a much more social creature, at least by the standards of rats. It will groom and lick other rats like a good mother. (Thus none of its friends will turn out to be dirty rats.) The later the rat is castrated, the less obvious obviously-feminine its behavior is. If you wait until he's ready to die of old age, he'll probably still think he's a dirty old man.
Once the critical time of rat brain development is past, no amount of additional male hormone can make the rat regain its masculinity. But if you later inject the castrated rat with female hormones after it has become an adult, it will behave as a female, curving the back in the presence of males in the typical, submissive manner of a female rodent. It is a male, XY-chromosome rat, but it has a female brain.
This whole process in rats can be reversed. If you start with a new-born female rat, inject it with male hormones at the time of brain differentiation, it will develop a male pattern brain and become more aggressive and try to mount other female rats. Subsequent doses of female hormones after the brain is formed, will not change this female rat's male-style behavior.
The same types of changes have been tried on rhesus monkeys, who have 28-day menstrual cycles, and approximately the same nervous system as humans. Scientists can alter and redetermine the behavior of monkeys by injecting the pregnant mother with male hormone at a time when, like humans, the brain pattern is being set.
These mothers' female children will behave in the boisterous, male manner. Furthermore, by giving the injections at different times during pregnancy, the scientists can induce specific masculine behavior. They can make the females mount their mothers, or they can produce females who are more aggressive in play, but do not mount their playmates. (But they will certainly be scolded often by the playground supervisor.)
In other words the imprinting of male behavior is not a sudden, one-shot business; it happens gradually. The hormone causes different behaviors by altering the wiring in discrete areas of the brain, bit by bit, function by function. Tweaking the developing brain of an animal with extra hormones changes its structure, and a change in structure corresponds with a change in behavior.
The book, "BRAIN SEX", which contains all of this information, doesn't show us why some of us change during the brain differentiation period and end up gay, while others end up Transgendered. But it seems quite clear to me that variations in the timing and intensity of estrogen and testosterone are responsible for both types of variations.
Well then, among the TRANSGENDERED, we have some people with FEMALE ORGANS and often female appearance, whose brains are very masculine, and they are referred to as "FEMALE to MALE TRANSSEXUALS"
When another person has MALE GENITALS and a MALE APPEARANCE, but whose brain has never been restructured into the male pattern, we have a "MALE to FEMALE TRANSSEXUAL" In most cases these people hate their own genitals and appearance, and often are never satisfied until they can make a full sexual transition including sex-reassignment surgery.
There are also MALES, whose brains have changed only a little of the way, may really feel mostly or entirely FEMALE, and choose to dress, and live as WOMEN, to take female hormones to change their physical appearance, and never let anyone know they have male genitals. These people are referred to by the specific term, "TRANSGENDERISTS".
And then you have those of us whose brains made it part way, but did not have enough male hormones to makes us entirely male, or had too many female estrogens to let the testosterone do all of its work. We might be anywhere from 3 to 8 on a maleness scale of 1 to 10. We are the TRANSVESTITES, most commonly referred to as "CROSSDRESSERS".
TRANSVESTITES usually live most of their lives in a male role; they play competitive sports; they join the armed forces; often take very masculine jobs, and try like the dickens not to let anyone know that sometimes they really want to be women, at least for a little while. For these people, "Being a woman" is not practical or possible, but LOOKING and ACTING like one is.
For TRANSVESTITES, being DRESSED in women's clothing, wearing makeup; stressing their nurturing, interpersonal side and shedding their natural male aggressiveness, at least some of the time, is a psychological need. It is often enormously helpful as a relief from the aggressive, disciplined life they usually must lead as males.