CHARLOTTE, NORTH CAROLINA - When Preston Agee first learned his child was transgender, he walked into his own bedroom, shut the door, and thought, “Oh, my God, not this. Anything else.”
He wasn’t being judgmental about his then 13-year-old’s decision to transition from a boy to a girl. He was scared.
“It’s something that could hurt her, seriously hurt her,” says Agee, aware that transgender people face higher risks of abuse, depression, and suicide.
But sitting side-by-side with his wife, Jet Leblanc, in their single-level brick home in Charlotte, North Carolina, Agee makes it clear he supports his child, now known as Gwendolyn, no matter what.
Gwendolyn, now a thoughtful and confident 14-year-old, doesn’t seem upset.
Sitting in her dark green bedroom, incense burning in one corner and her pet snake Samba slithering around a glass terrarium in the other, Gwen says her main concern is that her hard drive crashed, spoiling days of web design she was working on.
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?She’s wearing a charcoal T-shirt and tight-fitting black jeans. Her brown hair sweeps across her forehead, partially covering her oversized glasses. She could easily pass for a boy or a girl.
In the year since she told her parents about her gender identity, Gwen hasn’t even bothered taking many steps that would make her appear more like a girl.
“I don’t really feel the need to wear female clothes,” she explains. “I haven’t really been attached to clothing. I just don’t really enjoy wearing skirts or dresses or anything like that.”
Gwen has pretty much always been uncomfortable with rigid gender stereotypes. Even as a 3- or 4-year-old, she would sometimes have intense reactions to clothes that labeled her as a boy.
“This is stupid,” Gwen’s mother recalls her saying on one occasion as they stormed out of a kids clothing store that only had truck-themed boys clothes. “I don’t want clothes like that.”
It wasn’t until 10 years later, right as puberty started to hit and her body began to change, that Gwen realized something more significant was going on.
One of her main fears was that her voice would get deeper and that she’d start growing facial hair. That hasn’t yet happened. But even now, when she looks down at her body, she gets a “kind of painful, nasty feeling.”
That feeling of being uncomfortable with the gender one is assigned at birth is known as gender dysphoria, and it can start showing up in kids as young as 2.
Often times, those feelings are temporary, reflecting only a natural part of growing up. But with others, the feeling never goes away, and scientists are discovering more about why that is.
Until very recently, medical experts treated gender dysphoria as a mental health disorder, the result of social or environmental factors, and tried to “cure” people who experienced it (much like the way they once “treated” homosexuality).
But scientists are discovering evidence that suggests gender identity is hard-wired and cannot be changed.
One of the leading experts to take this view is an endocrinologist and professor at the Boston University School of Medicine.
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?“I am very much in the camp believing that there is a biological basis for gender identity,” says Safer, who has treated hundreds of transgender individuals at the Boston Medical Center.
The best evidence that gender identity is built-in, according to Safer, comes from a 2004 study documenting attempts over the last 25 years to treat babies born with male-pattern XY chromosomes, but who had ambiguous genitalia.
Since it is easier to surgically create female genitals, the children were given female body parts shortly after birth. They were also given estrogen at puberty, to ensure breast and other body development, and otherwise raised as “typical” girls.
But when scientists checked in on the kids years later, they found the majority were living as men. The effort to manipulate the babies’ gender had largely failed.
“Basically, we know gender identity is biological because we thought it was malleable, and we found out (we were) wrong,” Safer explains.
Chromosomes, genitalia and gender identity align in most people, but in transgender individuals they don't. Why?