Secondary sex characteristics are what cause gender distress
Dr Helen Webberley on Triggernometry: the trans debate, with Konstantin Kisin, Triggernometry
The distress trans people feel is about their genitals. That is the assumption underneath so much of the public debate: that trans identity is fundamentally about what is between someone's legs, and that gender-affirming care is therefore a response to something private, even strange.
What I was pointing to in that clip is something most people simply have not been taught. Primary sex characteristics, your genitals, your gonads, are present from birth. Secondary sex characteristics are what puberty builds: the breasts, the hips, the voice, the jaw, the body hair, the shape the world sees and responds to every single day. And it is that mismatch, between the body puberty is building and the person living inside it, that causes so much of the distress trans young people describe to me. It is not abstract. It is visible, daily, and cumulative. The people who keep steering the conversation back to genitals are not following the evidence; they are following their own discomfort. The trans people I have listened to over the years are not focused there at all.
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