Born in the wrong body: The transgender struggle

Some 700,000 U.S. adults are transgender. The fight for acceptance has just begun.

Chaz Bono
(Image credit: (Vince Bucci/Getty Images, Facebook/Chaz Bono))

What makes someone transgender?

Transgender is an umbrella term for several kinds of gender dysphoria — a conflict between someone's internal sense of gender and their biological sex at birth. UCLA's Williams Institute, which focuses on legal issues that affect transgender people, estimates that about 0.3 percent of U.S. adults — or 700,000 people — are transgender. The origin of the phenomenon is not well understood. One theory is that during the period in utero when hormones help shape gender, an imbalance occurs that results in a male embryo having a feminized brain, or a female embryo having a masculinized brain. Some psychologists, however, are convinced that gender dysphoria is primarily psychological in origin. Eric Vilain, a UCLA geneticist who has spent his career studying gender identity, says it's likely some mixture of factors. "There is no evidence of a biological influence on transsexualism yet," Vilain says. "Are we expecting to find some biological component? Certainly I am."

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