Let's Talk About Sex, Baby

Meet Norrie May-Welby. Born a man, reassigned as a woman, and officially gender neutral as of January of this year, thanks to the progressive Australian ruling classifying May-Welby as a "neuter."

Pronouns be warned.

After a recent intellectual discourse on the subject with a similarly curious mind, I learned that the most common form of gender reassignment is apparently for men who feel they are lesbians. I know one such case personally and though, admittedly, it was not expected, it made perfect sense. I met this person as a man. I went to a tea party with this person as a woman. And I have to say, she was far and away much better for the transformation. The altering of demeanor and morale was so strikingly positive, I could not be anything but supportive and excited for her. What a relief it must be to finally know thyself. Is that not the ultimate goal: nosce te ipsum.

Oh, but the conversation doesn't end there, how can it? Something so human, so important, so spiritually personal, begs for deliberation. What exactly happened here? I do not believe she has had or will have a gender change, anytime soon anyway. So what exactly changed? What are those things that make a man a man and a woman a woman?

Mentioning this to my baby siblings, with their young, eager minds, forged a new question. If we are beginning to redefine gender identity, how now do we categorize sexual preference? If your orientation is grounded in your biological gender, what are you then, for the sake of labeling, if you are of this new breed "neuter?"

Before I can explore what homosexuality really means, I suppose I must first understand how we distinguish ourselves as any particular gender in the first place.

Before I go on, I want to point out that I use any and all formal technical jargon and phrasing somewhat uncomfortably. There are areas of science that I fear stray a bit from humanity, but that is a private qualm. I mention it only in the event that my words and descriptions might offend unintentionally.

Consider the Cognitive Correlates of Biologic Sex and Gender Identity in Transsexualism, a study undertaken by the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Studies at University of Washington, one of the leading medical schools in the US. To be elected for a sex change operation, a patient must undergo a battery of psychological evaluations in order to be determined psychologically fit for the physical change. (For those less inclined to read peer reviewed journals, may I suggest TransAmerica or Boys Don't Cry as a glorified, hollywood alternative. Lights, camera, and action aside, it's an interesting peek into this topic for those who are unfamiliar with this culture.) In this study, twenty-two clinically determined transsexuals underwent two different psychological profiles. In addition to the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and what they refer to as a "measure of conceptual styles," the investigators used the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale, your typical IQ test, in which the subjects aligned with their biological gender. The other measures associated the subjects with their gender identity but with no psychopathological explanation for the varying results.

All that the IQ test tells me is that there are in fact both male and female brains, but this identification is somewhat meaningless and has less to do with gender identity than merely perception of and engagement with the world. Several years ago a neighbor was on an education board and needed young kids to test drive a new IQ test. Dutifully, my mother lent her my brain, much to my dismay, for four hours one painful Saturday morning. I never got the results but I can assure you, asking an ADHD kid, last minute, to sit for four hours and answer questions about shapes and numbers and words in a classroom full of windows, toys, and pictures, is not going to give you accurate results. Granted she was not testing my gender association, who knows where my profile would have fallen.

Then there's the observation that you can classify one individual as both 'male' and 'female' depending on what test you give them, what statistics you present, etc. And here is where science fails us. We are attempting to take this deeply personal quest and slicing and dicing it under a microscope to try and define it biologically. It is interesting that wherever science falls short, philosophy and spiritual theory jump in. To know thyself is in its own phrasing personal, so what then does it matter how you package it up in societal words and labeling?

In this light if it feels right to May-Welby to be a neuter, and for my friend of a friend to be an XY lesbian, who am I to question it? I'm putting science aside on this one.

As for where I stand, well, you'll have to take me to dinner first.