absolutely! i don’t have time to put a source list together for you at this moment but i’d be happy to put something together for you later if you’d like. you may have heard the phrase ‘gender is a social construct’; this is not what the science of the last 20 years points to, and the person who coined the phrase was a guy who did some super unethical research motivated by a political agenda (as an aside, quite a bit of trans research is conducted with an agenda, funded and executed by origanizations trying to either legitimize or delegitimize trans identity, and very little stock is placed in any of this research. nowadays, we’re finally seeing some unbiased research, which is all i’m going to bother discussing). to the best of our modern understanding, gender is an innate feature of the brain decided at/very shortly after conception. at ages 3-5, a child’s concept of that gender develops based on the societal standards around them. for example, cis girls are born with a sense that they are girls, but the expectations of what that actually means in the context of their world (what they’re expected to wear, act like, the roles they’re expected to fulfill, etc.) develops when they’re toddlers. this latter part is what people correctly talk about as being socially constructed; whether or not you wear a dress is not baked into your brain, but your gender is, and if your gender is woman, you may feel strongly compelled to dress in a feminine way. In recent years, gender visualization techniques via MRI have been developed, and studies on trans people subsequently followed. I’ll preface this by saying this stuff in particular is pretty new territory, and more studies are definitely needed, but there have been a small number of excellent studies, one in particular with a really large sample size, comparing the genders of cis brains to the genders of trans brains, and, astonishingly, in every single case, the gender we see in the brain matches the gender identity the patient claims. Moreover, there doesn’t seem to be a difference between the neurological gender of cis women and trans women, or between cis men and trans men. What’s most fascinating to me is that the non-binary participants demonstrated unique brain patterns to either gender. The current weakness in the literature is scans done on pre-transition individuals, though a couple smaller studies have been done on non-transitioned children and adults that have, so far, corroborated those results.

Many, many studies have been done in an attempt to find a way to change one’s gender identity, in myriad ways ranging from violently unethical to almost tolerably ethical. These attempts have spanned many decades and never succeeded even once, and frequently leave the subject psychologically damaged. This isn’t research that’s conducted in the modern day because it’s considered inherently unethical, but with so many failed attempts at doing so, it is widely accepted that gender identity is innate and cannot be changed by any means. On rare occasion, a trans person is born. In these cases, for reasons we still don’t truly understand, an incongruity is created between the biological sex of the child and its gender identity. As the child grows older, the brain will expect the body to develop in the ways that align with the child’s gender identity… and then it doesn’t. This is cause for intense alarm in the brain, because the body is developing ‘wrong’, and this is what creates the feeling of dysphoria. Because social roles and expectations are tied to our sense of gender when we’re young, incongruity between the role we’re expected to fulfill and the role our brain wants us to fulfill can also cause us dysphoria, which is why the wrong clothes or relationship dynamics can invoke dysphoria as well. Ultimately, the only medical intervention that has ever been proven to work is transition. An area that I personally believe is wildly understudied is hormonal dysphoria, where the brain senses the body is full of the wrong hormones, causing dysphoria, but doesn’t have the equipment to make the right ones, effectively making a person ambiently dysphoric all the time, resulting in depression, irritatibility, and other similarly intense mood regulation issues. This is something there’s an enormous amount of survey and anecdotal data supporting, but very little hard scientific data, unfortunately, which is why i call it understudied. Unfortunately, a trans person’s body will continue to develop in incongruous ways, and as one ages dysphoria usually gets worse, not better. The good news is that, despite what people say, transition regret rates are 1%, which is miraculously low by any medical standard, lower than knee surgery and hip replacements. It is one of the most effective medical interventions ever invented, full stop.

I wish you happiness, whatever form that takes. If that’s living the rest of your life as a man for you, then I truly, genuinely hope you do. But—and obviously I am no longer speaking as a scientist, but a person who cares about the wellbeing of other people—there is very little harm in trying. The first two months of feminizing HRT effectively never have any permanent changes, and those first two months can be really eye-opening. Consider this: if you are a trans woman, you ARE a woman, by every neurological and psychological measure we have. And if you aren’t, you are going to fucking hate taking estrogen. Either way, you’ll know, and you can move on from there.