What, if any, is the biological difference between a trans woman and a cis woman?

Christine Penn
4 min readJul 17, 2023
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

This question was asked on Quora and I answered it. You can use the link below to see the original question and others responses. I think the answer I provided is worth sharing here as well.

My Answer

Wow, I’ve read some of the responses here and can’t believe them. Biology is much more diverse.

First — the starting point. While science is well aware of how transgender people can be created through a variety of means, they are also well aware that they likely have not discovered them all yet. However, of the ones we know about, it presents a picture that things can go down different paths during fetal development that can cause different areas of the body to develop differently from a sex standpoint. This can result in brain structure differences, hormonal balance differences, etc. (Trans people explaining having female brain into a male body is actually something that really happens.)

This is made possible by the simple fact that all bodies have the instructions…

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Christine Penn

Trans woman, parent, cyclist, software engineer, author, chef, and many other things.