This is a list of frequently asked questions and answers about gender dysphoria and trans topics. This FAQ is not meant to be the FAQ, but rather a FAQ, one set of answers rather than the only answers. If there are typos, factual errors, or if you have suggestions, please open an issue on Github or submit a pull request.
Each question is a heading and has an answer that follows.
Here is a list of all the questions, (use ctrl + f to navigate):
Transgender is a term that designates a person whose gender is different from the sex they were assigned at birth, for example someone who is a man but was assigned female at birth.
As an umbrella term it can also broadly mean anyone whose gender violates social expectations or norms, including crossdressers, drag artists, intersex individuals, androgynous people, non-binary people, butch women, and so on.
Cis is just the opposite of trans, it just means your gender conforms to the sex you were assigned at birth, for example a woman who was assigned female at birth or a man who was assigned male at birth.
In science, cis- is a common Latin prefix that means “on the same side as”, while trans- means “on the opposide side of”.
In 2022, the Williams Institute estimated around 0.6% of people 13 or older identify as transgender in the United States. In the same year, Gallup surveyed 10,000 U.S. adults and similarly found 0.6% identified as transgender. Likewise, the Pew Research Center surveyed a similar number of U.S. adults and found 1.6% identified as transgender or non-binary.
It would not be unreasonable to guess that between 0.5 - 2% of the U.S. population is transgender.
Depending on how you define transgender, this number could be much higher - if it’s just having a gender different than the sex you were assigned at birth, the estimate is as much as 5% in young adults (according to that Pew Research survey).
In the Gallup poll,
The reasons for this are likely complex, for example the AIDS epidemic killed many trans people in those older generations (HIV is more common in trans women because they are more likely to end up sex workers, see Wikipedia for an overview). Boomers, born between the 40s and 60s, were in their 20s - 40s during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in the 80s and 90s (source).
Increased social acceptance in the U.S. and reduced medical gatekeeping of transgender people also likely plays a role in how many people come to understand themselves and publicly identify as transgender.
The proportions of trans individuals in other countries are similar, for example around 1% of Dutch people are trans, non-binary, or genderqueer according to a 2023 population study in the Netherlands (source).
In Thailand, around 300,000 of the 66 million people in Thailand are trans, making up aroudn 0.5% of the population (source).
Unfortunately, there is no blood test or objective measure that provides material evidence that you are trans.
Desiring to be a gender other than what you were assigned at birth is a key sign, as that is not typical for cisgender people to feel. For example, a cisgender person who was assigned male at birth who is raised as a boy does not typically wish to live and be a woman - this is an example of a sign that you might be transgender.
Gender identity, or subconscious sex, has a biologic basis (source). While choosing to transition is a choice, the motivations that lead people to transition, like gender dysphoria and gender euphoria, are not a choice.
For a long time, clinicians have attempted to treat or cure gender dysphoria through various methods, often by reinforcing gender conforming behavior and punishing gender non-conforming behavior.
These attempts, however, have not succeeded in treating gender dysphoria, and we now have a significant body of evidence that conversion therapy is not effective, while gender-affirming care has been found to significantly improve the well-being of trans individuals (source).
For this reason, most medical organizations condemn conversion therapy as unethical and unscientific, and most medical organizations endorse gender-affirming care for trans adults and youth.
It is not surprising, given the evidence we have about the biologic nature of gender identity, that attempts to change someone’s gender to match their assigned sex at birth are not successful.
In the case of David Reimer, a sexologist named John Money had Reimer raised as a girl after a botched circumcision that left Reimer without a penis. Money believed gender was a social construct and that children will be whatever gender they were raised to be.
Since Reimer lost his penis as a baby, the idea was that raising him as a girl would not only be a good case study to confirm Money’s theory, but would allow Reimer to live as a “normal” girl since it is easier to perform surgeries to produce a vagina and female anatomy than to reconstruct a penis. Money believed it was preferable to raise Reimer as a girl with a functioning neovagina than as a boy without a penis.
Unfortunately, Money’s theory was wrong and David Reimer struggled to live as a girl. Reimer, as a cis person, experienced gender dysphoria living as a girl, and realized somewhere between age 9 and 11 that he was a boy.
This evidence indicates gender identity is not exclusively social as previously believed, and that trans experiences and gender dysphoria are not caused by or subject to change from social influence or learning.
Gender clearly has social aspects, and social learning clearly informs the content of gender roles, the forms gender expression take, and so on - but the subconscious sex that determines how people orient in the socially informed context of gender seems to be at least partially “hard-wired” in the brain.
Yes, this is likely due to breast budding, which is the onset of boob growth which normally happens during the onset of female puberty.
Sometimes estrogen can cause breast tenderness and nipple pain even when the breasts are not growing, but when beginning estrogen breast tenderness can be greater and is related to the initial breast growth.
The common definition you might hear for a woman is an “adult human female”.
This essentially is just a way of saying gender is the same as sex, that women can only be female (and presumably people who believe this also would agree that men can only be male).
There are a few problems with this definition, but one of them is that it avoids defining “female”.
It is difficult to come up with a perfect list of necessary and sufficient conditions that define a woman (or a female person).
Based on a misconception of how sex as a concept is used in biology, some people will refer to biological concepts like defining someone’s gender and sex based on their reproductive capacity.
For example, you might hear that a woman is a female, who is someone capable of bearing children (while men are males who are capable of impregnating women).
The obvious problem with such a definition is that it leaves out people who lack the capacity to reproduce: what should we do with men who don’t produce sperm, or women who don’t produce eggs, and so on?
Concepts in science are often pragmatic, used to categorize in ways that are useful. Even the concept of “life” in biology is not settled - there is no list of necessary and sufficient conditions that always correctly identify what is alive as opposed to what is not alive. Instead, biologists have come up with a variety of concepts of life that are useful in different contexts. The same is done with concepts like species, and also sex.
So reproductive capacity might be how a biologist roughly categorizes sexual differentiation in a species, but what is useful for a biologist is not always relevant to the rest of us.
Let me introduce you to Alicia Weigel - take a look at her photo and tell me what you think her gender is. Is she a woman, and thus an adult human female?
Let’s say you are serving ice cream and Alicia walks up to you to buy a scoop. I expect you would see her and think she is a woman, and you would likely treat and refer to her like any other woman. You know very little about her biology - whether she produces eggs or sperm, what genitals she has, what her chromosomes are - but you are able to tell she is a woman anyway. And yet she has some “male” biological characteristics, like XY chromosomes, making her not strictly “female” but intersex.
So this is another problem to consider, the knowledge gap: if women are only females, does this mean you cannot know whether anyone is a woman until you have further information about someone’s biological characteristics to confirm they are female?
So we don’t know exactly which biological characteristics we could come up with that would perfectly define females from males, but we also wouldn’t necessarily have access to that information when interacting with other people.
Scientists might be able to run a test and know someone’s chromosomes, but when they ask the lab assistant to help them, they infer what pronouns to use to refer to them without that information.
It seems like we actively “gender” people in our minds without knowing biological characteristics like chromosomes, genitals, or reproductive capacity.
We might “gender” someone partially based on visible biological characteristics, like the presence or absence of a beard, the presence or absence of breasts, or the way someone sounds (testosterone during male puberty causes vocal tracts to lengthen and vocal chords to thicken, causing them to sound different from people who don’t undergo male puberty).
But we don’t think a beard or thickened vocal chords are the essential characteristics that make someone a man or a woman, they are just little clues that we use to infer someone’s likely gender. We also look at the way they dress, the way their hair looks, they way they speak, and many other characteristics to help us infer gender.
If your definition of gender is based on what gametes are produced or what chromosomes someone has, then we have to wonder what you think this “gendering” process entails - are we just wrong to think we ever know someone’s gender without knowing their reproductive capacity or chromosomes? Does this mean most people go their whole lives never knowing their own gender?
Instead, I think common sense would tell us that gender is precisely these social categories and ways we are perceived and treated in the world.
Sometimes a person’s gender does not line up with their biological sexual characteristics. Some people don’t have biological sexual characteristics that all fall under male or female.
So it really seems like not all people perceived and treated as women are female, and not all female people are treated and viewed as women. This complicates the simple definition of woman as just being an adult human female, which might work as a definition in some general ways (e.g. maybe many women are adult human females, and the definition is thus useful), but the definition falls apart as a strict or universal definition.
See also: “What is a Woman? (a response)” by Julia Serano.