Gender Identity Disorder and Asperger's Syndrnome.

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I don't have any kids, but one of my boyfriends is most likely an undiagnosed Aspie, and he is bi-gendered. He is not gay, but he feels like a girl....or really, he feels like he is both...and sorta switches between the two...but he likes to cross dress and he is slightly effeminate (in a different sort of way from effeminate gay men)....and even has some feminine female characteristics..like a really slender waist, and a slightly more feminine finger digit ratio...
He does not regard it as any sort of disorder, it is just the way that he is, and he is happy with himself.
Part of his confusion as a child, was that not only did he feel like a girl, but his mom would dress him like a girl..
I wish that there were more acceptance in society for people who feel this way about themselves, because if they feel this way when they are young, chances are, they are not gonna grow out of it.

I was a very boyish girl growing up..I grew out of it to a degree...maybe it is easier for girls..dunow...

I was also a tomboy up till age ten. I liked boy toys and did boy stuff. I still did girly things too and wore girl clothes. f**k doctors.

exactly. that is by far the most apt and eloquent and beautifully phrased post i have read on WP in a very, very long time.

a truer word could not have been spoken.

That's not actually true. Hormones are very important in the development of sexual traits. A person with XY chromosomal identity can develop without the usual suite of male sex traits if they are androgen insensitive (as just one example of the importance of hormones).

An objective examination of the facts demonstrates that it is not BS. Gender varies a great deal more across time and space than does sex, and than can be realistically accounted for by bio-genetic changes. The only sensible conclusion is that gender is not purely biological, and is only correlated to biology. It is a social construction.


How you are socialized is very influential in determining your notions about gender and your gender performance. If gender were biologically objective, then all human societies would have the same gender system, the same gender norms, and the same gender beliefs. Yet despite the lack of significant variation in the biological facts (of sex) gender systems, norms and beliefs vary significantly across time and space.

This isn't about sex. It's about gender.

I'm not sure if I have AS or not but I have been formally diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder and I am transgendered (FTM).

well I'm biologically female, but between the ages of 13 and 17, I wanted to be a boy and I lived my life as a guy.. I came out as transgender (FtM) and that's how I lived my life.

It was a faze I went through.. I'm no longer transgender. However sometimes I have feelings where I wish I was a boy and as quite a few have said on here, I think, I dress boyish because its comfortable and I like looking tomboyish

No I have never seen my penis as a big clitoris.

Those with AIS are biological males with defective androgen receptors that are unable to bind to the androgen hormone or DNA. In any case, it is a rare X-linked mutation; most of the "transgendered" have an absence of this condition.





Gender norms may have some variations across the globe but that itself says that being "transgendered" is a socially constructed condition and not a biological reality. If it’s simply social construction it isn’t reality. Historically, gender has been assigned according to biological capabilities. Reality is independent of man’s consciousness or any observer’s knowledge or beliefs. Man does not create reality; he merely perceives it.

They might well be termed male according to modern biological understandings, which are evidently very much under the influence of social norms/beliefs and concepts (like our beliefs about gender).

You argued that gender being a social construction was BS (sociology construes gender as a social construct and social identity, that includes mental qualities, not as "mental sex" per say), and I responded to that argument (although I might have neglected to explicitly correct your understanding of how sociologists construe gender, and can see how this might have caused confusion). I have made no comment on whether or not "transgendered" is a socially constructed condition (although I am skeptical that it is not a very real condition).

Historically gender has been defined according to varying things, including the extent to which one is full of a substance called Nu. Anglo Western history is not the only history.


Actually the consciousness of human beings either does not exist or is part of reality; the same is true of any observer's knowledge or beliefs. Humans are constituent parts of reality, as our products (including social constructs).

To get back on point though, there clearly do exist instances where gender acquisition does not follow gender norms, resulting in distress for the effected individual. I do not see why this would necessarily not be a "condition".

I don't have any sense of gender at all. I know I'm female, but that means nothing to me, and I could just as easily be male. This lack of sense of gender is supposedly a gender identity disorder, from what I've read about such thing - people are supposed to identify with their gender and have some sense of their gender and act accordingly - this is supposed to develop in early childhood. But it is not a problem or an issue for me at all. It's just totally irrelevant to my life - rather like fashion or pop music.

No, timeisdead, the reality is that a great many - perhaps a preponderance - of people simply decide that they want to have a problem with it and use claims of "objective reality", God, or whatever to justify the fact that they are too ignorant, insecure or bigoted to even acknowledge that among the six billion-plus individual variations of the human species there just might exist people that have an innate gender identity different from what they have been assigned by society based solely on the genitalia visible at birth.

Much as with autism, the scientific community currently knows precious little about the undoubtedly complex and multiple aetiologies of the spectrum of conditions classified as "gender identity disorders". While certain "official" intersex conditions - chromosomal ones such as Turner's Syndrome or Kleinfelter's Syndrome, or endocrinological ones such as androgen insensitivity syndrome - are identified and fairly well understood in some cases, there is much more that we don't know about intersex conditions, particularly neurological ones. We haven't yet proven or disproven that a female brain can exist in a male (or predominantly and functionally male) body, or vice versa.

Those who claim "objective reality" are staking claim to this territory of the unknown. It is of course reasonable for people to form beliefs on such matters, but in my opinion these beliefs are not worth much when they come from someone arguing "objective reality" that has never lived five minutes as a person who has know from earliest memory that they had a persistent, overpowering, inexplicable sense that they belong to the other sex, without being able to name a single reason why they so desparately need to "switch sides". Surely these "objective realists" did not grow up hiding their natural behavioural tendencies at the risk of perpetual ridicule and violent reactions, even at home, without even able to talk to their own mothers about it by the time they are four years old. They probably would not be able to comprehend that such an oppression of self takes an incredible amount of effort, relieved only slightly by occasional private moments out of the "shell" character - an emotional expense that accrues year after year to the point where it destroys them physically or mentally unless they abandon everything - family, children, ability to be hired, etc. - just to escape the unbearable oppression of self.

Anyone that has ever experienced such things knows that the real drivel is the claim that it is "objective reality" that such people either do not exist or are just sick. Unfortunately, that is most people in most societies today, as it is much easier to simply discard the weird, freaky person than adjust one's attitude to acknowledge that their reality just might be different from yours.

Maybe someday it will be conclusively proven that there are no chimeric people or people with 46XX/46XY mosaic chromosomes or other non-standard genetics; that not a single one of the body's 400 or so androgen receptors can function differently from the norm and cause or contribute to a cross-sex neurological wiring; that every Y chromosome contains an intact SRY gene and that the gene always verifies, completely and without exception; that foetal hormone levels never vary or that such variation cannot possibly affect brain development; or maybe even that there is no physiological difference whatsoever between male and female neurology. Should that day arise, I will concede "biology and objective reality" to the majority fortunate enough to never have to live as transsexual people and seem to advance these conjectures as incontrovertible fact. Until then, sorry, I, for one, respectfully disagree.

Would you attempt to use the same "logic" to argue that autism also does not exist and is just psychobabble and drivel, given that you can't see it objectively and no cause is known with certainty? Didn't think so. Would the difference be, perhaps, that most people are either familiar with autism (by knowing real autistic people, not just stereotypes) or find it ultimately non-threatening, while those same people almost invariably have never met a person who has undergone gender transition, and find that the idea triggers their deepest latent insecurities and consequently scares the ever-loving you-know-what out of them? I'm genuinely curious about this one.

I'm curious - if it isn't too much of a personal question, how are you aware of genders being activated in you? I have no awareness of my gender other than by the shape of my body. Are you talking about an inner awareness of being both a male and a female?

The biological capabilities of males and females, the innate differences in reproductive organs and skeletal structure, as well as the hormonal and chromosomal differences are not formed by social construction.




I meant the concept of gender as defined by sociologists.


Genders may have had different roles according to differing societies but can you name even one that failed to differentiate between males and females according to their distinct biological capabilities?


Although the consciousness does exist, it doesn't always portray objective reality. Almost all of our thoughts have some kind of unconscious subjective bias.



Then what exactly is differentiates the condition of transsexuality and a treatable mental illness? One may yearn to be Napoleon but it doesn't make it so. I never stated that transsexuality never existed; I merely don't believe in the notion of a true male living trapped inside of a female body.

We are also assigned to the binomial nomenclature "homo sapiens". What if a man decides he is truly a cat on the inside? Who are we to define reality based on objective scientific means?




In other words, your stance on the issue is entirely hypothetical.



This can be also be applied to many treatable mental conditions. If a man believes he is Jesus Christ for example, would you also accept his version of reality?






Are you under the assumption that all human thoughts conform to scientific reality with no subjective bias?




Not all transgendered people have biological disorders. If the cause is hormonal or biological, why not medically treat it?




Autism does exist but the notion of the Autistic spectrum strikes me as a bit inaccurate. In fact, those with Asperger's have opposite profiles in intelligence in comparison to Autistics.
Those with Asperger's are typically verbose with higher verbal IQ's than performance. In high functioning Autism, the affected typically have a bit of trouble verbally expressing themselves and tend to be visual thinkers.
With Asperger's there are also pervasive special interests that are often absent in Kanner's Autism.

I am not suggesting that those things are socially constructed, but I do insist that our conceptualization of these things, and in particular our categorization of them into a binary system (male or female) is most certainly socially mediated.

To consider that anyone with a Y is male and the rest are female, regardless of anatomical structure, follows from a binary gender system more readily than it does from a gender system characterized by more than two genders.

So did I. Sociologists are referring to a social construction/social role/social identity that while including mental aspects, is not simply "mental sex".
Can you name what those distinct biological "capabilities" are? I ask because whether you choose to go by structural anatomy or whether you go by chromosomes, (two things we have already established do not consistently match up with each other) will of course determine which example fits that bill.

At any rate, it is a mystery how you think that a lack of such examples would support the notion either that gender is not socially constructed, or that being transgendered is not a real condition. Could you perhaps clarify the relevance you believe any absence of such examples has to establishing either that gender is not socially constructed or that transgender conditions are not real?

Thinking about the implications of that for a particular aspect of human cognition, such as classification of anatomical traits and chromosomal identities into sex categories, what do you think this might mean for such classifications?


Transexuality is not about a true male (sex) living inside a female (sex) body. It is about a masculine identity (gender) inside a female (sex) body, or a feminine identity (gender) inside a masculine body.c