*This is not a community diary or a safe space. I am willing to engage conflicting opinions and evidence in the comments, even when expressed insensitively. Please only HR comments that are off-topic, deliberately inflammatory, or personal attacks.*
LGBT advocates are often accused of being anti-science. It's claimed that we operate from a 'faith-based' position in which individual experience is granted precedence over objective reality and scientific facts.
Since I am a science student and active researcher, the son of a professional scientist, and an activist for science education and science in public policy, this accusation cuts deeply for me in particular. There are many other LGBT people working in scientific fields who probably feel similarly.
I am not a biologist or psychologist or formally educated in either field. But over the years of coming to accept myself as trans, I took an active interest in the science of sexuality and sexual development because it bothered me that the things I could not help believing about myself clashed with what I had been taught about biological reality. When I was young, I dismissed my male identity as some sort of crazy delusion because it didn't match with what I knew about the world. So I can understand where those of who who think trans activism is anti-science are coming from; I was there once.
However, over the years I've spent more time reading the relevant science and come to the conclusion that the world is a lot more complicated than what we are taught in high school biology. Human development is a sequence of extremely complicated, time-sensitive interactions between genes and the environment, where things can (and do) often go differently than predicted. I'd like to share what I know about the details of human sexual development and why "XY = male, XX = female" is not a simple scientific fact.
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