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279 pages, Hardcover
First published October 20, 2015
Lesson number one: “Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with,” he told Spack. “Gender identity is who you go to bed as.”
Nicole’s story had started before she was even born. So had Jonas’s—in atoms and molecules, in liquid beginnings. One DNA, two souls, and a billion possibilities.
Sometimes it all made Kelly and Wayne’s heads spin. But just because they didn’t understand it all didn’t make it any less true.
Recognizing that the sexual differentiation of a fetus’s brain happens later in pregnancy than genital differentiation and that both are complex biological processes, the fact that variations in gender identity exist should ultimately come as no surprise.
Ultimately gender identity is the result of biological processes and is a function of the interplay between sex hormones and the developing brain, and because it is a process that takes place over time, in utero, it can be influenced by any number of environmental effects...Beyond chromosomes, any kind of mutation, or change, in the balance of hormones will tip the sexual development of the fetus toward one side or the other independently of what the chromosomes “say.”
For so long Wayne had tried to analyze kids, including his own child, looking for the right descriptions, the right terms, to explain it all, but here in Machias, in this dormitory suite, he finally gave up. It didn’t matter to these kids whether someone was called gay, transgender, genderqueer or whatever, so why should it matter to him?