Submitted by twovests in yourpersonalblog

There's a lot of things humans can be, but our vast variety is (1) a tiny space compared to all possible combinations of atoms in a human-spaced shape, and (2) necessarily placed into the context of a society.

That is to say, humans exist along a distribution. And humans really are sexually dimorphic, in the sense that there are two large reproductive roles and a huge variety of patterns, largely overlapping, between those, with no hard boundaries or rules.

Going on HRT has been such a revelation. I've had so many personal experiences, and so much thinking about what gender and specifically being trans meant, that had really been separate before. "Transgender" as a concept isn't purely a thing identifiable only in this current cultural concept.

I've said this before, but going on HRT has put me strongly in the camp that there is a largely biological component to this. I know a lot of research has said that, I know a lot of our vaguely-shared gender-theory-du-jour says that, but now my brain says that too

But, man, I'd love to have longitudinal, latitudinal studies that can elucidate this. When I talk about sexual dimorphism as clouds, I wish there were actual high-dimensional point clouds of data over which real distributions can be fit. I wish there was space to do component analysis. Maybe trans people will overwhelmingly differ on specific axes identified as projections of just a few variables.

Fuck, if even the data existed for this, I could do that research! I could just download the 1_billion_people_with_1000_data_points.csv, it'd be a project tantamount to, like, a grad-school course project. It could be processed on a laptop.

I'm not a transmedicalist, I'm not a truscum. Our generation is full of people all-too-happy to pathologize and medicalize. But I am convinced being trans is something that is etched into the shape of humanity, and I think that might be something measurable and observable with basic data science tooling.

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Alessia wrote

I'd love to know the genetic and environmental factors that made me trans but I know as soon as they are discovered the knowledge will be used for a kind of biological conversion therapy.

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