Today, I talk about gender ambiguity and how it relates to medicine and research. First off, I have to say that I don’t keep up with ongoing treatment models for diseases and it’s been a few years since I last read much about treating depression! The way we handle that may have changed, and I did catch myself mixing up some drug classes while I was talking, so they may have already found some more effective ways to handle treatment!
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That out of the way, the point of today’s video is to talk about the nature of how we study people. The issue of gender and romantic attraction is appealing to and seems easy to understand, and you can find an audience for these subjects all over Tumblr and elsewhere. Sadly, most of the data you find is ideological in nature, or otherwise not terribly focused on teaching people what we actually know about gender development. There are a lot of flimsy studies out there that sound emotionally compelling, but the simple truth is that we know almost nothing about why people grow into certain habits or traits that you might consider either male or female.

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The reason is, psychology is still growing and evolving as a science. It’s next to impossible to learn what kind of mental illnesses a person has just by asking, since self-reporting is very unreliable. We sometimes hear about ADHD or depression being over-diagnosed, and it probably is, but there’s not a way to prove it yet!

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But to the point, gender ambiguity is a real thing. It’s a documented, medical phenomenon that occurs in about 1% of children, if you can believe the numbers are really that high. Of course, before anyone gets excited, most of these cases arise as a result of issues we can take note of and understand, so it should be theoretically pretty rare that you’d have a child of ambiguous gender and not be able to pinpoint the reason for the ambiguity. How you handle it after it’s discovered depends on the reason it occurred.

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But at times when the ambiguity is more subtle, a person can very well live their whole lives without ever realizing they’re affected. We know these people exist and it is not a secret that they do. People of ambiguous gender have been written about for as long as we’ve been able to write! Of course, sometimes people aren’t so lucky and it doesn’t work out without a hitch. There are a few really morbid case studies about people raised to be a gender they weren’t, and it ruined their lives – although of course there are case studies to the contrary, which is the type of contradiction that makes case studies useless as research tools.

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There is also an ideological movement that seems to be approaching the concept of gender development as a form of social rebellion. They’d like to argue that gender is a social construct and that all those various hormones aren’t really important when you get right down to it. It’s not very scientific, and I know someone who’s been talking about getting gender reassignment surgery for the ideological reasons – to prove the ideology is true!
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So what is my bottom line and what is my agenda? Well, there is none, really. The point of the video is that it’s tough to do research on this stuff and we don’t know anything about it! I don’t know how to feel about having a friend who is claiming to be transgender so he can make it possible for more people to say they are transgender. It’s like pretending you can’t whistle to expand the acceptance of people who can’t whistle; and I guess that would work if my friend weren’t making visits to Texas to tell everyone how terrible they are for not accepting his inability to whistle.
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So my bottom line? The bottom line is… it’s a thing! It’s a thing we don’t understand too well yet, and anyone who tells you they do completely understand it merely knows nothing. And if you meet people who are transgender, how should it be approached, then? Well, it depends on the person. Just recognize that the people on stage are up there for their own reasons, and those who aren’t on stage are merely whatever type of person they are. It’s a funny old world like that.