An exceedingly common and very poignant question, usually spoken rhetorically, as the result of having to endure a great hardship.

There is no rational way to perceive transsexuality except as a predicament, and one that in our age still is filled with much difficulty in addition to the pain it causes of itself.

Knowing the cause of transsexuality is only slight comfort, the fact remains that it hurts like hell until it is remedied, and that much must be endured. Even after remedy, there is no total peace, as the loss of years of desired experiences can never be remitted, and the experience and actuality of being transsexual forever sets one apart from all who never have known gender dysphoria.

The reason for our having to endure such a thing would seem the same reason that folks must endure any biological hardship, for being born with any imaginable deformity or medical condition; no reason at all. It happens because Nature is not perfect, She is a vast and living machine, and She is sloppy, messy, and sometimes mistakes occur. However, it is the mistakes that lead to evolutionary benefit, and sometimes that benefit is not easily determined in a cursory examination, for it can be subtle.

I wish to propose to you an intriguing theory, which I submit for your consideration. As we have learned in the "What Is Transsexuality"
section, transsexuals have many curious statistical advantages over the base population. Transsexuals are generally far more intelligent and creative than the general population, and possess brain structures from both sexes. Transsexuals cannot help but see the world uniquely, and as a being perceives and reasons, so they also may act.

Imagine our human species from a high, utterly cold, and godlike perspective, watching it only as an animal upon the earth, and consider that which might benefit it. In primates, such as the Bonobo chimpanzee, homosexuality helps to bond both males and females with members of their own troop, reducing inter-group competition and aggression. I suggest that transsexuality serves a useful purpose in the scheme of things as well.

Consider the benefit to the animal human, to possess the capacity to produce the occasional individual that, while perhaps not contributing to the gene pool commonly, instead contributes socially, just like homosexuality does in primates. The value of a human with generally superior intellect and creative abilities, curiosity and drive to match, a brain capable of intersexed functioning - and thus an unusual viewpoint - with the additional benefit of being a reproductive dead end...and thus expendable biologically... cannot be underestimated.

Since we have learned that transsexualiity can be caused by - among other things - stress affecting pregnancy, it is tempting to consider that there is survival benefit in transsexuality.

A population of highly stressed and struggling paleolithic humans, perhaps at some great impasse, might well be saved by the cross-hormonally induced birth of transsexual members. A hyper intelligent and creative disposable personage would be the most likely to try new things, even highly dangerous things, things that no ordinary individual would think to try. The tormented transsexual would have less to lose, and be less of a loss to the gene pool if the new idea had fatal results. Ultimately, the transsexual would be very likely to find a solution, a way, that would otherwise be missed.

I suggest that transsexuality is a natural function, a way for human animals to produce a subset of their population effectively suited to discovering new and useful survival options, with minimal loss to the genetic pool overall.

In effect, the transsexual is Nature's Little Wild Card. The disposable enhanced Survival Scout, who tends to be generated in proportion to the overall stress the population endures, and which serves a valuable function in the scheme of basic animal survival. Transsexuals are the Hyper-Homosexuals, the guardian angels of the primate world. They not only function as homosexuals do for social bonding, but go a great step further...finding new ways that no others are constructed to find.

Admittedly, it is a cold and mechanical value, but then I asked the reader to consider it from the Blind Watchmaker's position, the dispassionate and living machinery of Nature.

I submit, that from the position of pure survival, of cold hard reality, that gender dysphoria may well be a useful evolutionary development...a "deliberate" (as though Nature had the faculty of choice!) mistake that can serve a vital function for the survival of the Whole, with no concern whatsoever for the agony of the individual.

There can be found a gentle nobility in being an Evolutionary Angel, an emergency Wild Card. Who know how many catastrophes the paleolithic transsexual may have averted?

Perhaps it is no random thing that all early societies revered the transsexual, and made place for and wonder of them. The closer to the struggle for survival, the more aware of what is valuable and what is not....at least for those who are consistent survivors.

So Why Me? Perhaps it is not just bad luck. I suggest the existence of transsexuality serves a real value to any social species.

If this theory has value, it would help to explain the existence of transsexualism in non-primate species, such as rats, dogs, wolves, and the like.