It's never about chromosomes.

0:00 Viewer discretion is advised. Here's the usual story. We're all born with either XX or XY chromosomes with one of two kinds of parts between our legs, eagerly waiting to fill our pre-ordained roles. None of that is true. When you're born, the doctor assigns you a sex based on your parts. Unless someone ran a carotype test to diagnose a problem, nobody knows what chromosomes you have. You could have XXY chromosomes, for example, or just a single X. Some people are born with ambiguous parts. This is more often from a hormonal imbalance in the womb than from chromosomal shenanigans. Either way, you have a baby that's otherwise healthy but falls outside the popular conception of sex. They could grow up to live as a boy or a girl or something beyond. But how do

0:45 they decide what's right? About half of us are assigned female at birth and about half are assigned male. One half is supposed to push an entirely new person into the world and the other is supposed to sit nearby looking helpful. Yes, there are biological differences among the sexes. There are also differences that feel biological but aren't. The labels man and woman come with expectations for how to act, how to dress, how to live. Are you a girl who wants to wear jeans with big manly pockets? That's not very ladylike. Are you a boy who cries when Jesse's owner outgrows her? Man up. There's no law of the universe making girls wear clothes with tiny pockets or stopping boys from crying at old Pixar movies. Otherwise, we'd all behave exactly as we should, and this video wouldn't exist. This is

1:30 baggage we place on the sexes as a society. That's gender, and that's what people mean when they call it a social construct. I think of gender as a two-sided coin. On one side, there's the performance. When you size someone up on the street, you quickly put them in the man column or the woman column and expect them to act accordingly. A man is likely to be assertive, to be dominant, to harass total strangers. A woman is likely to be passive, to be subservient, to warn others about harassment. On the other side, there's our feelings about the performance. Your dad says you should play football, but you'd rather do ballet. Your boss says you should smile more, but you'd rather tell them where you can shove those words. It's the performance that makes the gender. There's no heads up display telling you a stranger's chromosomes, so you can only tell by how a person carries

2:16 themsself. If we wanted, we could decouple sex and gender with a hot take. Nobody likes a genital inspector. Unless you're actively practicing medicine, there's only one reason to want to know what's in someone's pants. With that attitude, you can carry yourself however you like. You might have noticed there's not just one way to be a man or a woman. Some men are lumberjacks, some are tennis players, some wear dresses on their album covers. There's a masculine ideal on one end and a feminine ideal on the other. And we all fall short in our own special ways. That's what people mean when they call gender a spectrum. We know what traits and behaviors go into these buckets. And most of us try to fit ourselves in one bucket. But of course, some people don't fit into either bucket. And why would they? Our narrow cultural lens can't reflect the

3:02 rich inner lives of everyone on Earth. Some folks might want to wear a suit with eyeliner and lipstick. They might want to crochet and mow the lawn. Whatever they do, they've adopted a gender identity beyond the fixed binary choice. So, we broadly call these folks non-binary. In English, the most common pronouns for these folks are they, them, and theirs. This usage dictionary has a surprisingly deep history of pronouns. We've used singular they for a hypothetical person since the 14th century, as anybody can see for themselves. If you wanted to refer to a specific person of indeterminate gender for a long time, that was he, which caused friction among the non-hees. But singular they has been the prevailing standard in British English since 2000 and in American English since 2020. Prominent dictionaries recognize

3:47 singular they even in the 20th century. This Random House dictionary published in 1987 put it best. Such use is not a recent development nor is it a mark of ignorance. If you have trouble using the plural words for one person, well notice that I said you have trouble and not you has trouble. The romance languages like Spanish and French aren't so generous. They force binary gender on all people, all inanimate objects, and all abstract ideas. I bet language plays a big role in understanding gender, but I can't unpack that today. You don't need to change your pronouns to play with gender. See those guys from earlier? But I'll be the first to admit that I could never put on a dress. I'd just feel awful. If gender is both the outward performance and the inward conception, I'd feel a terrible disconnect between

4:33 the two. It'd be like the opposite of euphoria, dysphoria. You've probably met someone who's trans. If you don't think you have, surely you've heard of the closet. Different people discover they're trans in different ways. Some people have known their whole lives. Others don't know until they're 40. Some people feel like they were born in the wrong body. Others were fine living as a woman, but they realize being a man suits them better. Some people were fortunate enough to explore their identity in a safe, supportive environment, whether that's among friends, online, or on stage. What binds them together is they were told how to live and it felt wrong. Where does this feeling come from? It's a difficult question. We all have ways we like to live and we only get interrogated when we stray from the status quo. Why do you use Mac OS instead of Windows? Why be an artist

5:19 when you can make more money coding? Why do you put pineapple on your pizza? What are you stupid? For the handful of trans folks I spoke with, it's as natural to them as not being trans is to sis folks. I don't want to put on a dress, and neither do most transmen. It should be as simple as that. How many trans people are there? It's hard to say. Just look at this chart from Gallup. 2% of boomers report being LGBT versus 22% of zoomers. What's more likely? That people are becoming more queer due to some unseen insidious force? Or that the kind of self-reflection and experimentation that leads people to discover they're queer is becoming more acceptable? As a hint, here's a graph showing left-handedness in the US by birth year. students were forced to use their right hands until the midentieth century when this chart

6:06 plateaus. I hope to see a similar pattern in the LGBT poll someday when people are no longer afraid to be themselves. In the meantime, how do you deal with dysphoria? Start with the simple things. Change your hair, your clothing, your pronouns. Ask people you trust to try calling you by a different name. These low-risk experiments are easy to walk back, but if it feels right to you, that's when you can start considering the medical stuff. You'd think with all the hysterical opeds that you could walk to the ginger store and get a dozen surgeries today, but no. It takes a long time to get in front of a doctor and even longer to transition. You should hear the details from actual trans people like Abigail Thorne and Alex Aila who've been generous enough to share their stories. If you're lucky, you can emerge on the other side as the

6:52 person you'd like to be. Very few people get to medically transition, but those that do are overwhelmingly happy about it. This academic study says it best. Rate of regret after gender affirming surgery is approximately 1%. Other life decisions such as having children and getting a tattoo have regret rates of 7% and 16.2% respectively. That moment where you no longer feel the disconnect between performance and self-conception is known as gender euphoria. What I found interesting in my interviews is a point beyond euphoria where you stop thinking about your gender and move through the world as your true self. That's the real ideal. Trans people just want to live with dignity as themselves without intense scrutiny, misinformation, and hatred. I don't have

7:40 to dwell on examples. Transphobia is in the water. It's in the air. It's in every newspaper you read. Instead, I'll try to dispel a few common myths about trans people. Trans people have existed longer than you might think. As a synthesizer enthusiast, I have Wendy Carlos to thank for making these beepy little machines popular. She made Switched on Bach, a classical music album played on a giant Moog system. She socially transitioned in 1968 and underwent surgery in 72. You can find cultures across the world that recognize a group beyond typical cis men and women. Various Native American tribes, for example, have non-binary gender roles. These tribes have many languages and therefore many names for these roles. So we Bakaga collectively call them twospirit. But what about sports? Sports. It's just a game folks.

8:27 If you must know, the big sport leagues already had rules about trans athletes. Before Charlie Baker kissed the ring, trans women in the NCAA, of which there were less than 10, had to be on hormones for at least a year to compete in women's leagues. Trans women in the Olympics, of which there were zero last year, are subject to a vague 10-point framework that each sport can interpret, however it likes. The most dispiriting thing I hear is that the fight for trans rights diminishes other battles for equal rights. First of all, it completely ignores that trans people come in all shades. It's hard to be trans and it's hard to be black and it's even harder to be both black and trans. Second of all, I think a lot of transphobia comes from the vice presidential urge to treat women like furniture. If men and women were truly on equal footing, what would

9:13 stop you moving from one side to the other? If gender is a social construct, shouldn't we work to construct gender without subjugation? Finally, it's a big world. We can fight on multiple fronts. For solidarity, this is where I have to reveal that I'm Puerto Rican. I've always thought the huffing and puffing about border security was absurd. What? I was born on the right patch of land, so I get to call myself an American, while people who look like me get torn from their kids and stuffed in cages. I know some of you don't want to make this leap, but here's how I see it. Where you're born is arbitrary, and how you're born is too. Why should it matter if you want to live as an American or as a woman? I've made this video despite not being trans because a

9:59 house divided cannot stand. If we can't empathize with the struggles of other people, what chance do we have to survive? [Music]