- 13 -
accessHealthNews.net
January 2022
Volume 8 | Issue No. 53
T
hough heated debate about gender is
ubiquitous in politics and social media, the
real human suffering exacerbated by that
violent and dehumanizing rhetoric is rarely
acknowledged. Transgender people are four
times more likely than cisgendered people to
be victims of a violent crime. According to a
2015 U.S. Transgender survey:
• 46% of respondents were verbally harassed
for being transgender within the past year.
• 47% were sexually assaulted at some point in
their lives and 10% within the past year.
• 65% reported having experienced
homelessness.
• 54% experienced intimate partner violence.
The exact death toll often goes unreported, as
people from marginalized communities are less
likely to report violence for lack of support and
fear of re-victimization. And the toll keeps rising,
as 2020 saw the most recorded transgender
people killed since HRC began keeping track
in 2013 — until 2021 broke that record and
became the new deadliest year.
Misinformation justifies hate, hate begets
malice, and malice spawns violence. The
power to end the violence lies in the facts
of the transgender experience — scientific,
historical, and personal.
WHAT IS GENDER?
A transgender person has a gender identity
that differs from the sex that was assigned to
them, usually by a doctor, based upon their
genitalia at birth. A trans person may realize
this at any point in their life.
In today's culture, gender is generally broken
down into male or female with no regard for
the possibility of a middle ground. Individual
experience aside, this purist dichotomy is not
scientifically accurate. Despite widespread
insistence that gender is "basic biology,"
science has long known that the nuanced
complexities behind DNA, sex, and gender are
a poor fit for the strict binary model of male
and female.
When people discuss gender, they are often
talking about a combination of complex
factors, such as:
• Genotype: The genetically defined
chromosomal karyotype of an organism (XX,
XY, and all variants thereof).
• Phenotype: The observable primary and
secondary sexual characteristics (genitals,
fat and muscle distribution, bone structure,
etc).
• Gender: The unobservable sexual
characteristics, the internal mental model of
a person's own sex and the way that they
express it.
It is estimated that almost 1 million Americans identify as transgender,
with 18% of the population reporting knowing someone who is trans.
Transgender people's safety depends on updating the modern narrative
about sex, gender, and biology.
