Why I Vehemently Deny That Gender Is a Social Construct-And Why It Is a Beautiful Thing That Women and Men Are Inherently Different

I feel just as threatened by theories that posit gender is completely social as I do by the transphobic individual. Both insinuate that my very architecture is not authentic, that the elementary particles of my identity are in the eye of the beholder, and not my own body.

My body is my body, and not a cultural category.

Social constructs might be human conceptions, but humans are not.

Even in the most enlightened of societies where gender stereotypes have been eradicated, the 10th grade me still would have cringed when adults told me knowingly that I would want to have kids when I was older. To them, pregnancy would always be a potential life, a protagonist, a gift that gentrifies the empty nests we all come to build following a secondary education.

To me, the conceptualized child that I would be expected to carry to term would still join the ranks of the monstrous, like the dead deer lying on the highway divider as my parents' car drove down Rt. 9.

The diagrams of vaginas and fallopian tubes in our health class textbooks still would not apply to me. The female-oriented support groups that were listed when I Googled "eating disorder" in high school still would not apply to me. Efforts on behalf of the staff at my Jewish sleep away camp to promote healthy body images among the female population still would not apply to me.

To imply that gender is purely social is to imply that the temple in which I spend every waking and sleeping second is at the mercy of whatever some postmodern philosophical quack decides to preach from the pages of the same insipid publication that proposes quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct (yes, that actually happened).

Would you call schizophrenia a "problem of living?" I would hope that, given its universal distribution across cultures with varying degrees of westernization and the enormous progress that has been made in identifying the biological basis of schizophrenia, this assumption would never leave your mouth, let alone cross your mind.

Certainly, strong interpersonal support acts as a buffer against the worst symptoms, while lack of these same resources is associated with higher relapse and hospital admissions rates. But at the end of the day, if you are hallucinating, it is not solely because you lost your job. It is because a pre-existing genetic vulnerability to the manifestation of schizophrenic symptoms has been activated.

The point is that biology fucking matters. First, I am going to provide additional evidence to support my argument. Then, I am going to explain why I don't think it is a bad thing to say that men and women are qualitatively different.

In preparation for my own hormonal shift, I spent months consuming volumes of literature that described in detail the biological differences between the sexes and how this translated into behavioral differences.

For example, I read in one book that researchers from Cambridge University found that gender differences in what babies prefer to look at are present the day they are born. In their experiment, male babies fresh from the delivery room were more than twice as likely to look at a dangling mobile, while female babies were more likely to look at a young women smiling at them. Sex differences in the anatomy of the eye may suggest that boys are pre-wired to be interested in motion and girls are pre-wired to be interested in faces. The retinas of almost every male animal is significantly thicker because they contain a much higher concentration of "M" (magnocellular) cells, which receive input from the color-blind rods and detect motion.

On the contrary, female retinas are dominated by "P" (parvocellular) cells, which receive input from photosensitive cones and detect information about texture and color. They are more involved in object identification than "M" cells. At very young ages, even before they have any conception of gender, studies show that on average (although obviously, there is major variation within both groups), girls tend to voluntarily seek out dolls and boys tend to voluntarily seek out trucks or cars to play with. When they reach school age, girls tend to draw people and use warm colors. Boys tend to portray verbs, such as vehicles in motion, and use very little color. Given these discoveries, it might offer a possible explanation as to why more women receive degrees in fields that center around people and feelings, such as psychology and English (although social factors are also important to consider).

Now came time for the real test. Taking testosterone was going to teach me first-hand whether these differences actually mattered. Would they be profound, like the unmistakable effects of a prescription sleeping pill on the central nervous system, or barely discernible, like the tendrils of fatigue brought on by drinking a cup of chamomile tea?

The answer was delivered rather quickly. Within the course of a month, I found that some of the most enduring and defining characteristics of my psychological life had been dismantled and constructed into something entirely different. The manner in which I had experienced emotion and thought for nearly two decades was altered profoundly in a relatively minuscule period of time.

My meticulous documentation of the "new me" (which is still sitting in my Gmail drive to this very day) makes it clear that I am not the same person I was before taking testosterone. Fundamentally, I am the same. Qualitatively, I am so very not the same.

I changed so fucking much. To deny this is the name of political correctness would require turning my back on a nearly eight month roller coaster ride.

I went from being the kind of person who cried every day and was moved so easily by any remote vestige of sadness in the world to someone who was largely unable to cry (unless shit got real) and was no longer physiologically engulfed by emotion. Now, my body exhibited greater selectively when reacting to sadness or fear. My anxiety attacks became more centered around a cognitive appraisal of stress, and not the recurring autonomic arousal that I had learned to live with for years.

I had always approached problems logically, but prior to T, I felt my way around the world as much as I thought it through. Now, the ability to detach entirely from the emotional aspect of a conflict became possible, even habitual.

To say that my emotions were no longer expressed in a manner that was consistent with venting is not to say that they disappeared entirely. It was quite the opposite, actually. They were not destroyed-they simply changed form.
Now, I felt things deeply inside of me, and not on my face. Everything was so heavily internalized, in spite of my new outwardly reserved nature.

There were things about being male that just clicked once I started T that I never would have been able to understand prior to taking it. It suddenly made sense why women saturated the couches of therapists all across the country. It wasn't because society discouraged men from talking openly about their feelings. It was because something about testosterone made it impossible to discuss emotions and that much easier to act on them.

I remember telling a close friend, during a particularly dark moment, that it suddenly made so much sense to me why men completed suicide at a rate that was four to five times that of women. There was something about this inhibited male darkness that could be detrimental to one's survival.

All of a sudden, I really and truly preferred social isolation during my worst moments, and wasn't just saying that I wanted to be alone. For years, my first instinct during times of stress would be to talk to someone or surround myself with friends. I'll never forget the first time I experienced this foreign male practice called repression. After an intensely stressful night at work (I was a waiter at the time), I went to reach for the phone while I was waiting to hand in my tips so that I could call my best friend, as I had countless times before in similar situations.

Suddenly, talking about my feelings seemed like the most futile thing in the entire world. I could feel the unspoken sentiment being sucked back into my chest as I lowered my hand and marveled, honestly marveled, at how easy it was to swallow up the significance, bury it, and wait for it to build up.

Which leads me to the build up part. I had a lot of anger in the beginning, and while it died down, it continues to be the intrinsic motivation behind everything that I do, whereas my previous-and, up until this point, unchallenged-muse had been sadness. For me, this was huge. It was like a fucking paradigm shift. Instead of running into the bathroom and crying at work every time I was misgendered, I felt flashes of rage being internally directed towards the customer that had addressed me improperly. I began to hate my parents for everything they did to me over the years, and not just myself. The burden of blame became more evenly and fairly distributed. The tone of my writing changed as the pervading theme morphed from despondency into fiery passion.

I remember the stark understanding that registered in my head while watching the crime show Numb3rs on t.v. When a character whose daughter had been kidnapped knocked down all of the book shelves in his study as the time that he had to find her ran out, it clicked for the first time that this was a rendition of male sadness. Contrary to what a first glance might suggest, this man was not full of rage. Rather, he was full of despair. That never would have made sense to me prior to taking T. This is merely one of many ways in which I came to understand what it means to experience emotion as a male.

I continued to be affectionate with my close friends, but found it increasingly difficult to be indiscriminately nurturing. I simply was no longer comfortable with saccharine displays of affection unless I knew somebody really well. I went from being a big ball of love all of the time to someone who could no longer find the right comforting words unless it was a true crisis. Otherwise, on a day to day basis, I found that it required much more work on my part to sustain the quality of my interpersonal relationships. Emotional intuition became something that I had to exercise daily, or I would lose it.

I refuse to believe that the development of what would be deemed by society as male- typical behaviors progressed as a result of being socialized as male. This is due to the fact that although these tumultuous changes were erupting inside of me, it was a good two months before my customers (who, as complete strangers, serve as a valuable reference of progress) at work started addressing me as "he." In fact, apart from my customers and coworkers, who didn't even really understand what was going on and continued to treat me as a female, I barely interacted with anyone, as I had confined myself to self-imposed isolation until I could emerge from my chrysalis like the Butterfly Man that I was. Everything else in my life remained constant. The only variable that was being manipulated was the hormonal balance in my body.

This is why I believe that men and women are different. And you know what? That's a fucking great thing. People are special and have unique talents! We claim to live in a society that cherishes diversity, when in reality, there is an uproar any time a new scientific finding suggests that we all diverge just a bit from the basic biological template that underlies us all. This standard deviation is something to be celebrated, not suppressed.

While I absolutely prefer to experience emotion and thought as a male, simply because this is who I was supposed to be all along and I needed hormones to fix the awful disease that stunted my true development, my experiences have made me able to appreciate the sheer beauty that is exuded by women and all that they are capable of.

I spent my entire life resenting the womanhood that had been imposed upon me. Now that I am healthy, and my body is moving in the direction of where it should be moving, I am viewing femininity with fresh eyes. It seems paradoxical, but it is precisely because I have been imbued with male biology that I can start to see how my curse is someone else's greatest gift.

I suddenly have this insane respect for women and a deep reverence for everything that they do. I absolutely love women like I can't even begin to express. I even consider myself a feminist now.

I think that it is amazing, all that women have to offer the world, as women, and not as men. Because even though I was not meant to be female, I can still acknowledge the merits of femininity. It saddens me when I hear radical feminists vehemently denying all that makes them unique and special. They denounce traits that I used to possess-traits that I coveted highly and struggled to part with on the eve of my transition-and speak of them as though they are deplorable.

I haven't a single regret about how things turned out for me, but I can still acknowledge that a loss was sustained.

It saddens me when women deny all that makes them valuable assets to society and truly magnificent members of our species. It saddens me that our idea of praising women is glorifying men, and that the only way a woman won't be seen as a traitor to her chromosomal tribe is by emulating a traditionally male role.

I think that women are fucking wonderful and I refuse to demean them by saying that they are the same as men and that there is nothing, nothing that sets them apart in the most positive of ways.

You are doing everyone a disservice when you deny that gender is biological. You undermine the deeply painful existences of trans people whose lives are centered around trying to fix what nature fucked up.


You undermine the experiences of anyone who is a gender non-conforming individual by insinuating that who they are is deeply societal rather than deeply personal and fixed. Males and females are exposed to vastly different sex hormones prenatally as well as during puberty, when secondary sex characteristics emerge. Because the brain has numerous receptors for these hormones, development may diverge based on which chemical is being secreted. In fact, studies have shown that girls who are exposed to abnormally high levels of androgens before birth tend to have male-typical toy preferences, play patterns, levels of competitiveness, occupational preferences, facial perception skills, and mental rotation abilities.

You deny the beauty in every woman that blesses this earth with her presence.

You hurt men, too. There also exists a stereotype that boys don’t like to read when actually, they are alienated by English assignments that focus on role-playing, analyzing character motivations, and discussing feelings. This does not appeal to most boys. One reason for this is that in men, the amygdala, which plays key roles in emotion regulation, has fewer connections to the prefrontal cortex, which is the epicenter of articulation. Women have many more connections between their amygdala and cerebral cortex, so they are equipped to verbalize what they are feeling. Generally, men are less capable of coherently addressing emotion. In school, boys score significantly better in all areas of comprehension when they are assigned nonfiction reading, newspaper articles, and assignments that play on their strengths. Literacy and the ability to communicate effectively are lifelong skills that are more important than ever, regardless of profession. By ignoring innate gender differences, men are subjected to disadvantages, too.

Basically, everyone is hurt when you say that gender is entirely a social construct, and nothing else.

Biology allows us to breathe a sigh of relief. It lets us know that we are born this way. And that there is nothing wrong with that.