The 65th Annual Meeting of the Society for Reproductive Investigation was March 6-10 in San Diego.
It seems there were some surprising presentations. I highlight one in particular.
Critics of transgender identity say the condition is ‘all in the mind’, and transgender people have a psychological problem rather than a medical one. But by highlighting genetic mutations that affect brain development, the latest findings point towards transgender identity having a physical basis.
Highly respected researchers at The Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University in Georgia, the University of California at San Francisco in California and the Greenwood Genetic Center in South Carolina performed whole exome sequencing on the DNA of 30 transgender people (14 trans-masculine and 16 trans-feminine).
Whole exome sequencing, with a coverage of 98.36% and average read depth of 75, was performed in 30 transgender patients, demonstrating 120,000 genetic variants. After filtering, 30 variants in 20 genes were selected for further analysis. These included 9 likely pathogenic variants of genes involved in neurological development and/or sex steroid metabolism, as well as 11 missense variants predicted to be deleterious. Sanger sequencing was performed on 21/30 variants (9 are still ongoing). Of those, 18/21 variants were confirmed. The majority of confirmed variants (16/18) were heterozygous, while two were homozygous.
---and thus requiring discussion by someone steeped in the jargon of genetics, rather than myself, a mathematician.
But, my take-away is...those people who argue against our existence because “you’ll never change your genes!”...argument busted!
We identified genetic variants in 20 genes that may play a role in transgender identity.
‘The most promising of these include variants of genes involved in neurologic development and sex hormones.
These are highly reputable folks going about this exactly the right way, searching the genomes of transgender people to highlight which genes they have variants in. It lends legitimacy, if that needs to be added, that transgender is not a choice but a way of being.
It lends legitimacy, if that needs to be added, that transgender is not a choice but a way of being.
--Dr. Ricki Lewis, geneticist and science journalist
Abstract.