I remember watching this Nova special in the early 80s as a kid. There was a woman from Scottland who was in her 60s at the time of this documentary. So in the 1940s when she was nearly 20 or so, she went to the doctor to complain that she never had her period or any signs of puberty. The doctor chalked it up to some sort of endocrine disorder and that was that.
She eventually grew breasts (mostly because she became obese, not because of any actual hormones…) got married to a man widower with kids and was a mother to them.
At some point in the late 70’s, she ended up having surgery in her abdominal reason—can’t remember now why. But when she had the surgery, it was discovered that instead of ovaries, she had undescendend testicles. Her “vagina” was basically a malformed inverted penis. The doctors looked at her chromosomes and she was biologically male.
At the time in Scottland, there were some rigid gender laws. Her marriage was legally dissolved and she was required to change all of her ID and proclaim herself male. She was forbidden to use women’s restrooms. This was someone that up until she was in her 50s had never questioned her gender. Some scientists performed some brainwave activity tests. Apparently there are slightly different ways that men and women process language. She was well within the standard of a normal female response on all of the tests.
She and her husband ended up moving to England, where the laws of gender weren’t quite so strict. She was allowed to retain her female identity and remarried her husband. She said that she never felt male in her life at all—not even when her chromosomes were revealed to be male.
That documentary always stuck in my head and so even at a very young age, I could accept that gender was a whole lot more than simple XX, XY. From high school on, I have always been friends with transgendered folk and it’s never seemed that odd to me.
In fact, most of my transgendered friends have seemed much more natural to me once they had full reassignment. I remember one friend of mine from college who was this really awkward geeky boy who insisted that his life would be better as female. I though—poor guy. He’s going to end up this awkward geeky girl—it won’t do anything. But once she started dressing and finally had multiple surgeries, she got more and more outgoing, attractive and seemed more “real” than she ever was as a boy.