Floor debate began Tuesday in the Nebraska legislature on a bill that bans gender-affirming care for minors and it quickly grew contentious with supporters and opponents admonishing each other for a lack of collegiality.
John Lowe of Kearney cited an activist group’s claim that gender dysphoria in youth “is just temporary,” while Brad von Gillern of Omaha compared gender-affirming treatment to shock treatments, lobotomies and forced sterilizations of years’ past.
Bellevue Senator Carol Blood countered that if lawmakers really cared about medical procedures affecting children, “how come we’re not talking about circumcision?”
And that was only the first three hours of an eight-hour Senate debate expected to stretch into Thursday.
The bill introduced by Omaha Senator Kathleen Kauth would outlaw gender-affirming therapies such as hormone treatments and gender reassignment surgery for those 18 and younger.
Kauth introduced an amendment today dropping the ban on hormone treatments, limiting the to only gender reassignment surgery for minors, but it wasn’t enough to sway opponents, who kept up their objections.
Leading the way was Omaha Senator Machaela Cavanaugh, who had staged a nearly three-week filibuster of every bill that came before lawmakers to protest the trans bill.
Cavanaugh yesterday appealed to Republican members of the legislature to return to their party’s core principle of getting government out of people’s lives and their own repeated concerns about government overreach.
She said “This bill stands in opposition to the tenets that many of you have expressed to me are the foundation of why you are here.”
Kauth believes her amendment to ban only gender reassignment surgery for minors does have enough votes to pass and beat the filibuster for 1st round approval of the bill.
Cavanaugh has said if the bill advances, she will resume filibustering every bill through the end of the 90-day session in early June.
I hold a degree in Biology, and it is biological “LAW” not a theory that in humans there are only two sexes; XX and XY. Any other chromosome anomalies such as XXXY( super females) usually do not survive or are severally retarded.
Don, stop lying. you hold no such degree and we all know it.
the existence, and asymptomatic nature of triple x syndrome is just one of the reasons you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Incoming science!
Sex is far more complicated than XX or XY (or XXY, or just X). XX individuals could present with male gonads. XY individuals can have ovaries. How? Through a set of complex genetic signals that, in the course of a human’s development, begins with a small group of cells called the bipotential primordium and a gene called SRY.
A newly fertilized embryo initially develops without any indication of its sex. At around five weeks, a group of cells clump together to form the bipotential primordium. These cells are neither male nor female but have the potential to turn into testes, ovaries or neither. After the primordium forms, SRY—a gene on the Y chromosome discovered in 1990, thanks to the participation of intersex XX males and XY females—might be activated.
Though it is still not fully understood, we know SRY plays a role in pushing the primordium toward male gonads. But SRY is not a simple on/off switch, it’s a precisely timed start signal, the first chord of the “male gonad” symphony. A group of cells (instrument sections) must all express SRY (notes of the chord), at the right time (conductor?). Without that first chord, the embryo will play a different symphony: female gonads, or something in between.
And there’s more! While brief and coordinated SRY-activation initiates the process of male-sex differentiation, genes like DMRT1 and FOXL2 maintain certain sexual characteristics during adulthood. If these genes stop functioning, gonads can change and exhibit characteristics of the opposite sex. Without these players constantly active, certain components of your biological sex can change.
But wait!!! There’s still more! SRY, DMRT1, and FOXL2 aren’t directly involved with other aspects of biological sex. Secondary sex characteristics—penis, vagina, appearance, behavior—arise later, from hormones, environment, experience, and genes interacting. To explore this, we move from the body to the brain, where biology becomes behavior.
When the biology gets too complicated, some point to differences between brains of males and females as proof of the sexual binary. But a half century of empirical research has repeatedly challenged the idea that brain biology is simply XY = male brain or XX = female brain. In other words, there is no such thing as “the male brain” or “the female brain.” This is not to say that there are no observable differences. Certain brain characteristics can be sexually dimorphic: observable average differences across males and females. But like biological sex, pointing to “brain sex” as the explanation for these differences is wrong and hinders scientific research.
Let’s just take the most famous example of sexual dimorphism in the brain: the sexually dimorphic nucleus of the preoptic area (sdnPOA). This tiny brain area with a disproportionately sized name is slightly larger in males than in females. But it’s unclear if that size difference indicates distinctly wired sdnPOAs in males versus females, or if—as with the bipotential primordium—the same wiring is functionally weighted toward opposite ends of a spectrum. Throw in the observation that the sdnPOA in gay men is closer to that of straight females than straight males, and the idea of “the male brain” falls apart.
Trying to link sex, sex chromosomes and sexual dimorphism is also useless for understanding other brain properties. The hormone vasopressin is dimorphic but is linked to both behavioral differences and similarities across sex. Simply put, the idea of a sexual binary isn’t scientifically useful, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the brain. It also happens that transgender people have the brains to prove it.
It’s easy to see sexual dimorphisms and conclude that the brain is binary; easy, but wrong. Thanks to the participation of trans people in research, we have expanded our understanding of how brain structure, sex and gender interact. For some properties like brain volume and connectivity, trans people possessed values in between those typical of cisgender males and females, both before and after transitioning. Another study found that for certain brain regions, trans individuals appeared similar to cis-individuals with the same gender identity. In that same study, researchers found specific areas of the brain where trans people seemed closer to those with the same assigned sex at birth. Other researchers discovered that trans people have unique structural differences from cis-individuals.
The science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real. It is time that we acknowledge this. Defining a person’s sex identity using decontextualized “facts” is unscientific and dehumanizing. The trans experience provides essential insights into the science of sex and scientifically demonstrates that uncommon and atypical phenomena are vital for a successful living system. Even the scientific endeavor itself is quantifiably better when it is more inclusive and diverse. So, no matter what a pundit, politician or internet troll may say, trans people are an indispensable part of our living reality. Transgender humans represent the complexity and diversity that are fundamental features of life, evolution and nature itself. That is a fact.