Caitlyn Jenner and Our Cognitive Dissonance

While biology shows us gender can be fluid, our brains struggle to see it that way.

 Somewhere in the middle of the night in a Central African rainforest, a chimpanzee gives birth. Soon after, as the sun rises, mother and newborn sit there, dazed, amid a coffee klatch of friends and relatives. Inevitably, at some point, virtually every member of the group will come over, pull the kid’s legs apart and sniff: Boy or girl?
.. There are parthenogenic species, where females reproduce without males—numerous reptiles fall in this category, including the incomparably cool Komodo dragon.
.. And then there’s sequential hermaphrodites like the sea wrasse and clownfish, where an individual changes sex opportunistically.
.. The sine qua non of human sex designation in humans is chromosomal—all your cells either have two X chromosomes, making you female, or one X and one Y, making you male. End of story. But no: Instead, there’s various chromosomal disorders where individuals can be XYY, XXY, XXX, X, or XXYY. Most result in infertility; some, like Turner syndrome (in which there is solely an X) produce neurological, metabolic, endocrine, and cardiovascular abnormalities.
.. Much more interesting than these rare disorders is the recent finding that adult men typically have some XX (i.e., female) stem cells scattered throughout the body, which have differentiated into mature cells, including neurons. Meanwhile, women who have given birth to a son have a similar scattering of XY stem cells. Remarkably, during pregnancy, some maternal stem cells become incorporated into the fetus, some fetal stem cells into the mother.
.. The hormones you’re marinated in then determines which type of genitals you form as a fetus, as well as secondary sexual characteristics ranging from the chemical composition of your sweat to the workings of your brain. Chromosomal, gonadal, endocrine, genital, and phenotypic sex go hand in hand.
Except they don’t, as it turns out—there are numerous disorders where someone might be male in some of those ways, but female in others.
.. chromosomal sex and gonadal/anatomical sex can disagree. In a syndrome called 46,XY DSD, people have normal male sex chromosomes, testes—genitals that are usually classified as male—plus a womb and Fallopian tubes. In ovotesticular disorder, the person has the sex chromosomes of one sex, but both ovarian and testicular tissue, producing ambiguous genitals.
.. Thus there’s numerous ways where chromosomal sex and phenotypic sex differ, accounting for 1 percent of births. This is not rare—pick a human at random and the odds are greater that they were born with ambiguous intersex genitals than they have an IQ greater than 140.
.. So you have someone who by every measure discussed, from sex chromosomes to phenotype, is Sex A, but who insists that they have always felt like they are Sex B. What’s up in the sexually dimorphic brain regions? A number of studies report the brain bears a close resemblance to Sex B. And this shouldn’t seem surprising—we are determined by our brains, we are our brains, regardless of our pattern of facial hair, the thickness of our larynx, or what the landscape is like between our legs.
In other words, it’s not that transgender individuals think they are a different gender than they actually are. It’s that they’ve had the profoundly crappy luck to be stuck with bodies that are a different gender from who they actually are.
.. we might expect that in the near future people will effortlessly think about gender as fluid and not strictly male or female. To be blunt: No way. That’s because our minds are very resistant to continua. Instead, we tend to break continua into discrete chunks, into categories.
.. The visual spectrum produces a continuum of color; despite this, we perceive color as if it comes in categories, invent words in every language that arbitrarily break the continuum.
..  In the first part of the study, subjects are shown a series of photos of guys in basketball jerseys, each paired with a sentence, such as “You were the ones that started the fight.” Half of the players are white and half are black
.. What does that tell us? That gender is a stronger, deeper automatic category in our minds than race and visual cues.

..After all, before some scientific advances in the mid 20th century—that is to say, 99.9 percent of hominid history—a male with testicular feminization syndrome was just a female who couldn’t get pregnant.