Boys Will Be Boys Or Will They

If you're born with a Y chromosome, you grow up to be a man.

If you're born with an X chromosome, you grow up to be a woman.

That's the norm.  The baseline.

But what if your own brain rejects this?

No matter the genetic and physical evidence of sex, it doesn't match your gender?  What if the genetics just confuse matters?

Now what?

We're not good at making life easy for people caught in this fine little trap.  If anything we make it harder on them than it has to be.

Don't have to tell Erin this, I'm sure.

What can we do now?  Out of basic politeness we could just go along with treating them as the gender they ID with.  That'd cure so many ills.  Essentially ignore the deviation from the norm because a guy in a dress isn't hurting you.  Even if that guy is in a dress simply because he likes dressing that way doesn't hurt you.

Being bothered by something is not at all the same thing as being harmed by something.

How do we cure such deviancy?  That's a deliberately loaded way to say it.

Especially so since abnormal and deviate mean whatever condition in its most negative light.  We never say Albert Einstein had a deviant intelligence, for example.

In a strict sense they only mean the subject does not match the baseline and assign no direction to the difference.  The terms have come to be assigned a negative direction to the difference from the norm.

A cure can be one of several things; but the big two are...

We can get the brain to accept the same gender as the sex.

We can change the body to match the brain's expectations.

Getting the brain to agree with the genetics would seem to be preferable option since it's much less invasive and poses fewer health risks.  But... thanks to a lack of understanding and some religious evangelical types, actual therapy in this direction is ineffective in many cases and downright traumatic as well.  Even the successful treatments are not certain and require some finagling to be counted as successes.

Making the body match the brain isn't really any more successful.  First there's the invasive surgery and hormone treatments.  Then when everything is "done" (and it's never all done) there's often years and years of feeling less than a whole member of the new sex.  Particularly in the case of male-to-female sex changes where the hormone therapy is screaming "GO GET PREGNANT!!" and it's just impossible.  There's a lot of post op depression and suicide.  A lot of "I went through all of that and I'm STILL not better?"

As it stands we're kind of offering a choice between Hells.

It's so much easier with science fiction.  Places like Ghost in the Shell, where you just move your mind into a fully cyberized shell of the appropriate sex to your liking.

Places where genetic medicine is such that you can have that X or Y chromosome edited to change sex.

Places where you stick you head into the therapy machine and your mind is altered and you emerge with your thoughts matching your genitalia.

Places where there's no gender, even if there are sexes.

There's a ton about gender that's just fashion.  A man wearing a skirt, is a cross dresser.  Make the skirt plaid and call it a kilt, however...  A man wearing a dress is also a cross dresser.  Make it white and put an agal on his head and it's not a dress, it's a thawb.

When you remember that the bearded lady in the flower print sun dress is not hurting you, why hurt them by being rude?