Essay On Transgender Identity

Scientific findings are often taken to be a final authority and science is often presented or interpreted as inerrant or objective to social values. The recency with which non-binary and transgender identities have come into social discussion has sparked controversy due to the way in which transgender identities challenge a long accepted societal idea of a strict gender binary. Many people have thus turned to science to find answers. Online forums and blogs are full of questions and comments all wondering “Has science proved transgender identities exist?”. While the question itself is misinformed due to social nature of gender identity, it indicates another salient issue within Western society, considering science to be value free. Completely objective science is not an achievable goal is a society so strongly influenced and driven by social hierarchies and norms. While a scientific or “biological” explanation for diverse gender identities would be comforting in some respects, blindly waiting for scientists to feed the public facts based on …show more content…
Other than sex differentiation at birth there is little evidence for any further differentiation in men and women due to sex chromosomes. It does not follow that chromosomes should be an explanation of gender identity either since there is no reasonable correlation. While chromosomes do influence sexual organs, what people usually refer to as “biological sex”, gender and gender norms are a product of the society in which they are expressed. Our western society has ideas of masculine and feminine that are conflated with XX and XY. For this reason, genomics neither explain nor refute the possibility of transgender identities, however, the huge amount of transgender people in our population provides convincing evidence of the existence of trans