To the Editor:
In reference to Dr. Thomas Wise's "Transgender Truths" (Letter to the Editor, Oct. 12), I have to disagree with his statement that gender dysphoria is a psychiatric disorder.
While I do not disagree that the gender dysphoric can have significant psychiatric disorders, due to social response to the individual, recent research has begun to clarify the cause of the syndrome.
Recent research has considerably clarified that situation. Brain sex researchers in the 1990s such as Allen and Gorski at UCLA, Swaab in the Netherlands and LeVay at LaJolla have accumulated a substantial body of knowledge regarding brain sex development in humans and experimental animals. Briefly, the brains of male and female humans and other mammals differ in several areas and these differences are due to fetal hormone exposure. The brains of gay men resemble female brains in two areas (LeVay, Allen), while the brains of male-to-female transsexuals resemble female brains in a third area as well (Swaab). Schafer has recently discovered a fourth brain area in which the brains of male-to-female transsexuals resemble female brains even before estrogen treatment.
I respectfully submit that the conclusion that transsexualism is a congenital condition of reversed brain sex is becoming inescapable. As such, the syndrome can no longer be treated as purely psychiatric.
