Taken from "how sex changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States"

[magistrate]

In the Netherlands, where doctors keep such records, they calculated in 1993 that 1 in 11,900 persons born male and 1 in 30,400 persons born female had taken hormones to change sex.

First person to guess the primary reason this struck me as significant/unexpected gets a prize. I'm not sure what the prize will be – sketch, ficlet, something in the mail – but you'll get one.

(And hell, I'll give one for the first on Dreamwidth and one for the first on LiveJournal. Why not?)

Comments

[yetregressing]

Does it have to do with the fact that more men, who have the benefits of privilege associated with their sex, want to become women, who are more marginalized than they are?

*is totally stabbing into the dark liek whoa there* *also is not very educated on these matters, but agrees there's a significant thing about that, though what I have no real idea*

[magistrate]

*dingdingding* CORRECT!

It calls into question a lot of assumptions about how people approach these things and what it must mean – especially because not only is MTF transition a trade to a lower social status, it's more difficult in a lot of ways. Not only is the target status lower, the act of crossing the gender boundary is much more marked in MTF than FTM cases – masculinity is seen as superior, so girls who act in masculine fashions are often seen as admirable. A girl who wears a tuxedo, for example, is much, much more likely to be seen as making a bold-yet-acceptable-and-even-compelling fashion statement than a boy who wears a prom dress. That's more often just seen as sick, misguided, disgusting.

And the mere facts of hormones and transition mean that MTF transpeople generally look much less like biofemales than FTM transpeople look like biomales. Testosterone in particular has a powerful effect on the body, changing bone structures, changing voice, that can't easily be disguised. No post-op transperson, with the technology of the day, will come out with functional and "normal" genitalia, but MTF transpeople are often of markedly non-"normal" appearance in a lot of different ways.

So if people are willing to go through with all of that in order to live as the sex they identify themselves as, and if the more difficult path is actually the more common, what does that say about the motivation behind it?