Do you know a Redhead?

The Supreme Court's decision on Transgender rights

Do you know any redheads? My Irish family was full of them. Fire-engine red hair with freckles was my brother’s natural coloring, while my sister was a platinum-haired toddler whose haired darkened to the color of a bright copper penny by high school. I was the only one who missed the red-haired gene.

The frequency of natural redheads in the worldwide population is between 1-2%. Just about the same percentage of babies born with intersex traits (1.7%) The two have nothing in common except their frequency: If you have ever known a natural redhead, you have also probably known a person whose body was born with ambiguous sexual traits, not clearly male nor female. That number includes not only those whose external genitalia are ambiguous, but also those with genetic and hormonal ambiguity not discovered until puberty, when developmental irregularities lead to testing that shows some biological “girls” have no uterus, but internal gonads instead. Similarly, birth-assigned boys may not develop the testosterone-based secondary sex characteristics of the male body, revealing genetic or hormonal profiles that fit neither male not female, but contain components of both.

Intersex is a natural biological variation that occurs in animals as well as humans and has many complex manifestations well beyond my biological expertise.

But let’s try a simple thought experiment. Close your eyes, imagine that when you open them again, your sexual characteristics will have taken on the opposite form: female to male; male to female. Try to stay in that space for two minutes, creating in your mind’s eye the distinct body of the opposite gender you hold now.

Most of you will have opened your eyes before you intended. It’s an uncomfortable experiment, one that makes us feel weird, unsettled. Few feel neutral, comfortably curious about taking on another sexual form. The pull to be what feels right to us is strong; the idea of shifting to the opposite gender can feel frightening, disgusting, unsafe, or raise other complicated feelings that make you want to stop the experiment. Take me back to “normal,” your psyche demands.

What does this have to do with being gay, straight or transgender? Not much we can prove scientifically. Intersex people are not more likely to be gay, bisexual or transgender. The world of human sexuality is complex, and gender identity is a social construct as well as a hormonally influenced bodily awareness. Sexual preference develops around issues of arousal, not identity, and how these two interact is still largely unknown.

But our simple experiment does suggest something else that’s psychologically important.

We are discounting the intensity of these issues when we call them preferences, as though they are the color palette that fits your skin tone best. They are instead primitive elements of who we are, wired to our survival instinct and our procreative instinct in ways we can not easily disrupt. And those whose identity is constantly violated by the appearance of their own bodies deserve our compassion. They are not cosplaying a role. They are living inside a body that does not fit who they know themselves to be. And for many that is agony.

Yesterday’s decision by the Supreme Court to uphold a law restricting gender transformation treatment leaves me feeling sad, angry and disappointed.

To be honest, I am also a little relieved. There may not be enough scientific information to guide every single decision about gender transformation. Waiting until late adolescence or adulthood for permanent medical changes is arguably a conservative decision preserving each person’s right to decide based on full bodily integrity and experience. But some will not survive that journey. And many will suffer psychological damage I cannot discount.

But I am sad and angry and disappointed that the arguments for this decision disparage science and take a swipe at experts trying to help patients with this life-altering decision. This is not about states’ rights, or parents’ rights, and it certainly should not be about re-enforcing some outdated but comforting notion that children are born biologically male or female and must make do with what God made them, no matter what.

If God made any of us, He made us all: male female, intersex, gay, straight, and transgender. Biology is real, and complicated, and perhaps beyond what the Supreme Court should be asked to parse. Law was never intended to delineate the highest levels of moral functioning, but to draw red lines at its base. The more complex the ethical decision, the less likely black letter law can help. One need look no further than the Dobbs decision to see this: how antipathy for abortion led to death by miscarriage in hospital parking lots.

Some decisions are too important, too complicated, too unique to be made by judges deciding right and wrong. They must be made by the rest of us, willing to face the scientific complexity and the unknown, the ethical conflicts and the moral ambiguity. Doctors, biologists, psychologists, parents and patients. Acting together.

And doing our best not to lose our humanity along the way.