It's a boy! OK, but now what?

Seconds after I was born, back in the 1970s, the doctor threw a cursory glance between my thighs. On his words, the nurse wrote boy in the official document that announced my arrival to the administrative world. The whole process took only a second. It was not fast because my bits would be so big and obvious – although, for doctors and nurses, I guess after seeing hundreds, it becomes that obvious. No, in truth, it was more that they really don’t take any time doing this. It is a requirement that they must write down the gender, and so they do, but the bulk of their work is elsewhere. I bet many don’t give it second thoughts, it’s almost a reflex to look briefly and speak aloud “girl”, “boy”. That is all it takes to create the gender definition of a human being: a quick glance from a doctor or nurse and a large chunk of your identity is set for life.

And so, my elated parents now had a girl (my older sister) and a boy. They had hit the two-children-per-family normality threshold, and all was great in the world. Even for me. What did I know? At that time, boy or girl made no difference to me, I was mostly sleeping, eating, pooping, and screaming for either of these. Being a baby is OK; consciousness has not hit you yet. The “I think therefore I am” moment tends to come later in life; the first few weeks or months are actually fine (unless, of course, you have been abandoned or are brutalised, but that was not my case, so I can’t quite relate to what it would feel like).

But slowly, the insidious feeling of something being at odds creeps in. I was a boy at home. Then I met other boys. And girls. I went to mixed schools from the very start, which allowed me to meet all other babies and. Not just “those like me”. Initially, it was fine, I was shy and didn’t really go out of my way to socialise, even as a toddler. But as I started seeking friends, without knowing what gender might be, I wanted friends across the spectrum. My childhood in the 1980s understood only two concepts for gender:

1. It was binary. Boy or girl to become man or woman.

2. It never changed. You were born one and would live and die with it.

I didn’t question any of that, I simply realised that I liked being with girls too. This, at the time, would have looked suspiciously like an early sign of gayhood. A stop was put to it, and at primary school, my friends were boys. Who was I to challenge teachers and parents? A little 6-year boy, that’s who I was.

And now, four decades on, a man is what all my paperwork says. It’s the box I tick in forms that only offer the old two options.

If I had the chance to start life again, I would absolutely want to be a girl next time around. I almost want to believe in reincarnation for that very purpose, but I am worried the choice, once more, would not be mine. There is the option of transitioning, but do I truly want it all the way?

I am not sure what I want because I am not sure who I am. And that is where the confusion arises.

My naked body indicates a gender-based on a simple binary system. My genome would confirm this and show the infamous Y chromosome. Just to recap, a human body is an assemblage of billions of cells constructed from a blueprint that we call DNA. This blueprint or plan includes 20.000 genes, individual blocks of information that determine how a cell is to be developed and what it does. Genes are stored in 23 pairs of chromosomes. Only one pair differs between male (XY pair) and female (XX pair). The Y chromosome includes 27 genes, of which 1 is the sex-determining region Y gene (SRY). Of the 20.000 genes, it is generally accepted that about a third have a sex bias, meaning they have different activities whether they are in a male or a female body. Interestingly, those are not on the Y chromosome.

OK, cut the science and explore it differently. I can offer two ways of looking at this, which, although contradictory at first, may, in fact, be very much complementary and helpful to explain the rich diversity of our species.

First, we are all created female to start with. Sperm and egg meet, and fertilisation starts. Around 12 weeks later, the SRY gene kicks in, and the embryo will either continue to develop as female or take a turn and become male. It takes just a little twist of the SRY gene to separate sex. It also indicates that we somehow all start in exactly the same way, the change coming a bit later. So, our foundation, if you want, is the same independently of sex. Then it takes a little tweak to veer us down one of 2 different paths. In this argument, I would say we all have a lot in common, and the male/female dichotomy is not as wide a gap as we may be led to believe.

Second viewpoint, there are maybe around 7.000 genes in our body that act differently, whether in a male or female body. That means about a third of what creates a human is sex-biased. That can lead to a huge amount of diversity. Each of these can dial up or down certain functions, certain physical aspects of our body. The potential for difference is on an imaginable scale. Although there might be some grouping, some of these genes working in harmony together, it still leaves room to create billions upon billions upon billions of combinations, each one forming a different human being, a different person.

And so, on the one hand, we have so much in common, and, on the other hand, we are so uniquely different from one another. As I said, it may appear contradictory, but I don’t believe it is. It actually pretty much summarises the human species: yes, we are quite similar; our bodies, for the most part, look the same, do the same things. But we also have subtle differences, hair colour, skin resistance to the sun, ability to digest alcohol, susceptibility to a certain virus, capacity to store fat and so on. We are all unique and similar, and that extends to gender. That is precisely why gender and sex are not synonyms

Sex is biology, what body we have, which of the two most common humans we are (remember that in some cases, people may be born with 3 X chromosomes or may have both sets of genitalia. Nature is powerful at creating little changes every now and then.)

Gender is the summation of those many subtle little tweaks that make us a person.

Sex is determined for us by how our bodies are built. Gender is in part determined for us by societal and cultural constructs and can be decided by us as part of our identity.

When they do not completely match, confusion ensues both for the person and others. That is why, today, as various countries are starting to become more tolerant to differences, it is becoming more acceptable for individuals to challenge the binary model of biological determination. It is the result of this introspection that also leads to the complexity of a taxonomy that keeps growing every day. The LGBTQIA+ alphabet soup keeps evolving because even with dozens of options, it is not always possible to identify firmly with one of them.

This scares a lot of people. If you know me as ‘he’, refer to me as ‘him’, see the stubble on my face, can spot the expected bulge in my trousers, then all is fine and easy. Where it gets troublesome is that, yes, I am a ‘he’, but you can refer to me as ‘they’. I shave my face but also my legs and thighs and whole body. I wear tights and a skirt, sometimes heels but often with a male t-shirt or shirt on top. Sometimes I sport a dress, makeup, wig. Sometimes I refer to myself as ‘she’ and use my alternate female name. I don’t follow male trends of competitiveness and sport addiction, I can be very sensitive and cry in public. All this is me, and much more. And that can be very confusing for many. The big problem here is that it is confusing for me because between you and me, I still don’t know what I am.

But I am trying to find out. Thank you for joining me in this journey. It can be a lonely quest.