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PR: Have only glanced over this article, but it should be interesting even more to you because it examines how religious people approach intersexuality. Er, I mean I read some of it and the author is not a nutcase.
www.geocities.com/leylasuhagi/brain.html
Brain gender, the causes for transsexuality and the sayings of noble Prophet Muhammad:
The "Why?" of transsexuality and transgenderism is an essential issue that may define future attitudes of followers of many religions towards transgendered individuals. Nowadays, the "Why?" -question of transgenderism is answered in a quite negative way by many self styled conservative Jews, Christians and Muslims. Ususally they assume transgenderism to be some kind of a psychological disorder, something that may be resolved by some kind of psychological treatment. These people obviously donīt have the experience of ever having felt the emotions of a transgendered human, they donīt understand that the feeling of belonging to the gender of the opposit biological sex is so deeply a part of a transsexual` s identity that it is part of the core of his/her inner soul It is not something that has been learned and it has not the slightest resemblance to a chosen excentric way of life (as some people think). Modern science has approved this, it has found out that gender identity is not a result of one` s upbringing and that it is not a psychological desease (more a physiological - there is a wrong body). No therapy has ever cured any transsexual, many therapies with that goal even ruined the life of the individual completely. A male to female transsexual really has a female self and a female to male really has a male one!! But what is the cause for this self? What is the reason for our gender identities. People usually assume that genitals and/or chromosomes define what we are, but members of many faculties of the medical community did already criticize this popular view. It may be true that in most cases the genitals, the chromosomes and the gender identity of a person are in accordance with each other, but there are many people - not only transgenders - where this is not the case. Intersexuals - of which the so called "hermaphrodites" are the most well known - are such individuals. Many of them have a composition of chromosomes that are quite unusualy (like XXY), there are also cases of intersexual girls who are born with completely female looking genitals, a feminine gender identity and a normal male chromosomal structure (XY). This latter condition is called cAIS (complete androgen insensitivity syndrome) and it may be related to the condition of transgenderism. In the cAIS cases the chromosomal - genetical make up of the embryo is male, but the hormonal developments in the female womb cause the child to "wire" female brain structures, i this condition holds on it also causes the child to develop female looking genitals. When growing up these girls usually always define themselves as completely female and they usually are defined as such by outsiders as well (many famous beautiful models and actresses are said to have been cAIS - girls; to my knowledge actress Jamie Lee Curtis is one). Some scientists assumed that male to female transgenderism and especially transsexuality may be caused by similar means, actually being some kind of a partial cAIS where the development stops after having "wired" female brain structures and thus causing the embryo to grow male looking genitals. They actually found out that in fact many male to female transsexuals seem to have brain structures different from male structures but quite similar (if not identical) to the brain structures of genetic women. These discoveries still have to be evaluated and one should be careful with claiming a sure connection between brain structure and gender identity, but there is some significant evidence that transsexuality is actually some kind of intersexuality and thus caused by biological reasons and that gender identity is formed in early pregnancy and not by chromosomes or upbringing. Early Arab and Muslim culture probably instinctively knew this, there are resources of early muslim medicine (the ancestor of modernw estern medicine) which speculate about an origin of the condition of the mukhannathun, the Arab male to female transgenders, in early pregnancy. Actually the terms that our noble Prophet Muhammad (s.a.s.) used for male to female transgenders and intersexuals and which later became part of the High Arabic language were derived from one grammatical root and hint to a close relation between both groups. Both terms are derived from the word "khanath" (roughly "hermaphroditism"); "khuntha" describing the intersexual and "mukhannath" the male to female transgender. In general speech both terms were sometimes used interchangeably and popular culture did not seem to discriminate a lot between a khuntha and a mukhannath. Although the Holy Qur`an already mentions the fact that it is the entering of the amle sperm into the female ovum that defines the chromosomal sex of the embryo and although early muslims were aware of this, the ahadith of noble Prophet Muhammad (s.a.s.) also hint to the idea that the causes for one` s gender identity are established by God later during early pregnancy together with the fate of the person:. E.g. Sahih Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 6, Number 315: Narrated Anas Ibn Malik: The Prophet said, " At every womb Allah appoints an angel who sais, `O Lord! A drop of semen, O Lord! A clot. O Lord! A little lump of flesh .ī Then if Allah wishes (to complete) its creation, the angel asks, `Will he be male or female, a wretched or a blessed, and how much will his provision be? And what will his age be?ī So all that is written while the child is still in the mother` s womb."
Back to the main page! A useful scientific article on brain-established gender identity!
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