ABSTRACT:

In older times, sex was absolutely reproduction-centered and all "abnormal" persons were killed, all intersex babies were immediately murdered.

Then a new perception of reality developed and intersex and gender dysphorics were no longer automatically killed, but some intersex babies were/are "corrected" and "assigned", in reality sometimes mutilated. Gender dysphorics - someone with no genital atypical development but with a gender atypical development - were/are considered as a social waste or, as sinful persons, if possible to be hidden in ghettos.

Nowadays, due to human overpopulation and the development of a new perception of reality, these old conservative concepts are changing.

The reproduction-centered background is moving to a more pleasure-centered and even stress-releasing-centered point of view. Intersex and Gender Dysphoric's organizations have improved and are more visible and their voice is louder.

We intend to consider here a new development for understanding gender and sex and their variations, not from an old-style ideological, based on an "authority" point of view, but based on a new scientific point of view.

A truly scientific point of view derived from the thermodynamics of open systems, far-from-equilibrium systems.

We believe we all - patients and experts - agree that a gender dysphoria is the result of something far-from-equilibrium. Sometimes we may discuss from what equilibrium we are talking about - mental equilibrium or typical development equilibrium.

We consider here that gender and sex are natural developments that may trigger natural self-organization and a creative system's emergence based on dissipative structures. These structures are presently studied and considered in all branches of science, including Economics, Ecology, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Biology, Astrophysics, Sociology, Cosmology and also, more recently, Psychiatry , Psychology and other life sciences.

We will do nothing new, we will only consider sex and gender as a natural dissipative system that may have adaptive answers near the steady state and that may elicit new creative structures when far from equilibrium. We intend to show that what is typical is near steady state and what is atypical is far from equilibrium, so potentially creative.

Our conclusion points to a new perception of gender architecture, erected by biological and social self-organized structures and pointing to a new normalization of sex and gender.

That scientific perception was the background for the development of Gendercare's Unexpected Gender tests MFX and FMX for male and female assigned persons, respectively.

It is also the scientific background to the development of the Gendercare Web-based evaluation and treatment of gender variants, when they show no real mental disorder. These evaluations are not psychiatric/psychologic, which need no face-to-face psychotherapeutic supervision, because the patients are normal people in a space of diversities.

Normal people - in the mental sense - sometimes need also medical help to be socially recognized and to have absolutely necessary corrections made - so in no way these corrections - medical and surgical may be considered "cosmetic" - even when we perceive the patient has no mental disorder.

Terminology and philosophical considerations are very important in considering sex and gender.

Terminology is important because we are referring to human beings who need all our respect.

Philosophical considerations are important because we are considering very complex systems, even when they appear to be simple and sometimes obvious.

Around 98% of the human population have no sex or gender development problems. They are and feel as normal male or female persons in a world divided into two almost symetrical sex spaces.

The other 2% of humans - some 120,000,000 people - a lot of people - have some kind of sex or gender atypical development or "problem".

Some have existential problems and need some help - mainly medical help for transition/adaptation and surgeries - when others feel they have no problem and no need of herlp - only to be considered normal people with the same opportunities others have - socially included and never excluded "a priori".

I am not saying these 2% of human population have necessarily a real disorder - neither a sex disorder, nor a sex development disorder, neither a gender disorder, nor a gender development disorder - nor a disease. But living in a world where sex and gender are so clearly delineated and any confusion is considered taboo, surely all these 2% feel they have a problem - existential and social or only social - but always a problem.

The ICD-10th (International Code for Diseases and Causes of Death- 10th) from WHO (World Health Organization), which includes gender dysphorias as a classified disease - a GID-gender identity disorder - is a catalog of "Causes of Death", really therefore a catalog of life-threatening conditions that really need medical help.

But do these 2% of human population have a life-threatening problem, or are they only living a possible but unexpected variation among a system full of possible diversities?

Sex may develop in Typical and Atypical ways. What we may consider more common, statistically more usual, as something typical, does not mean the uncommon, the "Atypical", have a real problem, a life-threatening problem.

What we need to understand is that sex is a process, a process of formation and development, a very complex process that may develop variations due to the complex architecture of that process development.

To understand the particular characteristics of sex development we need to know something about dynamic - linear and non-linear - processes. The same is true for gender development, which is even more complex than sex development.

We need also to consider that sometimes sex and gender do not walk together, but may go their separate ways. Due to the complexity of each system, which are not always in syncronicity, sometimes they are not "coupled" due to known and unknown factors.

So what is more important is to understand that Sex and Gender are not as simple, or obvious, nor are always in harmony, as 98% of the population feel and live.

We suggest that to study sex and gender development as dynamic systems, that is complex and nonlinear systems, far-from-equilibrium systems, we need to start understanding a little about dynamic systems, and the possible peculiarities these systems may develop naturally.

Life needs to have a reproduction system. A kind of auto-catalytic system to replicate the species through the replication of individuals - by partenogenesis for unicellular organisms and for more complicated organisms through more sophisticated processes.

That life system architecture naturally, through creative ways borne of necessity and stimulated by the environment, developed the sexed system of reproduction to have more chance to continue the species when there are hard environmental changes.

So originally sex was innately related to reproduction, and gender identity was related to sex.

Mainly due to that fact, some centuries ago, when a baby was an intersex - someone with an Atypical Sexual Development/ASD - with probable reproduction problems, that baby would be killed immediately, as a curse and a menace against a divinity, and society.

Nowadays doctors, authorities and parents do not kill them, but threaten them with mutilations to try to impose on them a particular point of view. They need to look like a man or a woman - they need to be sexed - as our society believes they need this to survive, even if they do not. The Atypical need to conform to the Typical. Really for us our typology is sacred, is correct as a point of principle, in a sense is divine.

The manipulation of that kind of "sacred typology" has stages of power, and manipulation of power. To have more power, some "experts" derived the following statement: they have - all intersexuals have - a DSD - a disorder of development. We need to say that statement was determined not by someone, but by a group of "experts" as a declared "Consensus", a consensus determined by a small group of people. That group was almost all from Anglo-Saxon countries, who intend always to state what is good and what is bad for all humanity, with the participation of just a few intersexuals, all from one North American organization. That small group intended to establish as a "consensus", really as a very particular "authoritarian interference in intersexuals' autonomy", that all intersex/ASD persons have necessarily a "disorder" because they are different from the common typical situation. Complementarily considering also that almost no intersexual has any gender problem, which is not true.

Some voices in disagreement, such as Dr. Milton Diamond and Dr.Torres among others, have suggested that, instead of disorder, the best terminology would be "variation". These voices have been absolutely ignored.

In the same way other "experts" also classify an Atypical Gender Development - when someone feels in a differently about their gender as defined by genitals and social expectations - necessarily as a Gender Identity Disorder.

We have been conditioned by the Sacred Typology to transform our expectations of the Typical into reality, and so we can then easily classify the Atypical as "diseased" (for that is what disorder means) and requiring our expert treatment when they are not molded to our expectations of the norm.

Is that position scientific?

Or is it only an ideological and authoritarian point of view?

I intend to show you that position is purely ideological and not scientific.

How?

Showing you what really happens in sex and gender development if we consider only a scientific - based on far from equilibrium background - a real and hence a more complex and difficult, point of view.

Everything inside our Universe is dynamic. All that exists is continuously changing - the atoms and its particles are always moving, even in solid matter.

All that exists is moving. Surely what really exists is movement.

Movement not only in space but also in time. Life is a time-series - existence is a time-series - of unknown factors but which follows a basic law, really a series of laws, called thermodynamic laws.

The first of these laws refers to energy production. Nothing or no one has created energy nor destroyed energy since the big-bang. The energy in the overall Universe is always the same.

Einstein showed we may create matter from energy; and liberate energy from matter. But we may not create energy, nor destroy it. That is the first law of thermodynamics. A very general law, inside our reality and our Universe.

But energy flows. Energy is continuously flowing. Time we feel as an arrow that continuously passes. Energy flows as a river - really a river flows because it's energy must flow - from the higher level to the lower level. Always. So time is the flow of energy - really time is the resultant of the energy flow balance for the Universe as a whole that passes through us from the higher level to the lower level, as a synthesis of the flowing of all energy.

In other words, time is a function of symmetry and the asymmetry of the energy balance of the Universe.

We think time is flowing but really time is the measure of the flowing of energy, the overall energy flow of the Universe, as perceived/lived by us.

All processes inside our Universe, all energy inside our Universe, flow that way, and the result of that flow we call time. That is the second law of thermodynamics.

The quantum of flow of energy- is called ENTROPY. When the energy flows from the high level to the lower level naturally, entropy is POSITIVE. Natural energy flows from higher to lower levels producing positive entropy. By definition.

So we may say that the energy flow balance of the overall Universe, when entropy is always increasing is TIME and our perception of that flow, time.

So, when the system comes from a lower energy level to a higher one - when we need to go up a mountain as alpinists with a lot of effort, and in danger of falling due to the second law of thermodynamics, we need to do WORK to block the natural dissipation of energy from the actual level to the thermodynamic equilibrium level - the lowest level possible - and then, with work, the entropy of the system DIMINISHES.

Now comes the big question. Do all natural systems always flow from a high to a low energy level as a mandatory rule?

The great scientist that answered that question was the Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine (Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977), when he studied that problem at Université Libre de Bruxelles, and concluded that NATURAL FLOW FROM A LOWER LEVEL OF ENERGY TO A HIGHER LEVEL IS POSSIBLE IN NATURE when the system is very far from equilibrium - thermodynamic equilibrium - and is an open system - a system that exchanges matter and energy with the environment.

Prigogine called these situations "dissipative structures" and showed these systems could happen in nature when a system is very far from the thermodynamic equilibrium and "at the edge of chaos" or when it lives an "unpredictable" disturbance/situation due to interferences from the environment.

We may call the dynamic equilibrium of one open system - an steady-state or "HOMEOSTASIS" .

So, what we need to have IN NATURE for a DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURE is a system far from the equilibrium and subjected to a "near chaotic" situation from environmental interference.

When we call something ATYPICAL, we are exactly saying it is the result of an unpredictable situation - a far from equilibrium situation.

The TYPICAL development is something predictable, something near the homeostasis or the steady state, a structure near local equilibrium. A structure whose equilibrium the environment most of time is not challenging.

"Normal males" and "normal females" in our society live as an homeostasis condition - not in danger from the environmental that is not chalenging.

For example, Mom and Daddy through ultrasonography discover they will have a boy - really they discover the fetus has a penis - and they accept without question that the baby will be a boy, someone that will surely live, and be happy to live, a boy's life. But sometime not long after birth, usually after 3 or 4 years, the baby starts showing he feels like a girl and likes girlish things, and one day that "boy" will say he/she always felt like a girl. An unpredictable result, from a "seems -to-be predictable-start-condition". All chaotic conditions have extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. All chaotic situations, atypical situations, are derived from bifurcations - when the same system typically follows one way but sometimes in one atypical behaviour may follow one unpredictable way. Like that baby.

Atypical sex and gender situations, mainly gender situations in fact, are most of the time related to almost absolute unpredicability.

One very interesting aspect Prigogine discovered about dissipative structures was their possible creativity - natural creativity/novelty.

2% of humans live, in diverse ways, a dissipative "transforming" structure, as a structure that has inner creativity in the Prigogine self-organization sense.

Prigogine (see Kondepudi & Prigogine, 1998, Nicolis & Prigogine, 1977; Glansdorff & Prigogine, 1971; Prigogine, 1978 for more details) also discovered that all dissipative systems near a steady state that may be affected by the environment by fluctuations in an "edge of chaos" situation could show order ("order from chaos") as a new structure, a transformation structure that would reach a new level of steady-, or near steady-, state equilibrium as a "creative novelty" or "point mutation", a transformation known as a "regime shift".

But for that creative dissipative structure to be triggered needs a catalyst, something or someone that could direct the energy towards creativity and diversity.

To understand what a dissipative structure means is not so easy when we consider gender or sex directly, or even nature and evolution.

Let's consider a much more understandable system due to our human scale. To measure energies and entropies on a small scale - even on a macro-scale such as cellules and organisms is more difficult - I suggest we study a company, an organization and not an organism.

Organizations consider money as energy and the flow of money as entropy. Even being sometimes very complex, they are more simple to be studied and to consider as an everyday example.

Let's consider our system is a small, very small, company in a small village - our environment. Inside that small 1000 persons village we take for our system a small food shop, a very old styled food -shop selling and almost everything.

That small organization we will call John's all possibilities shop.

John's Shop is the only shop in the small village. All families buy there all, or almost all, they need.

John has two employees to help to work the shop.

All expenses of John to keep his shop open - to rent the building, the wages, merchandize, stocks, etc. we will call INNER ENERGY and its flow INNER ENTROPY. All the time inner entropy is increasing because John expends money to pay for merchandize, electricity, taxes and wages for the employees and so on. That inner entropy is always POSITIVE because it is always INCREASING necessarily and being used - as time.

But John's shop sells a lot of merchandize to all the village and receives EXTERNAL MONEY. That external money we will call EXTERNAL ENERGY and its flux from the outside to the inside we will call EXTERNAL ENTROPY. That is negative because that entropy is not dissipated but it is stored, possibly stored in a bank or at home.

The signs of the entropies are inverse. External entropy flow we say is negative - if we consider the inner entropy flow necessarily as positive - because the entropy flux, in that example, is always reversed.

For John's shop the entropy balance is always negative - more money enters the shop than leaves. The net entropy balance is negative due to the continuous work of John and his helpers.

If the external income is bigger than the internal outcome, the net difference we may call the negative entropy accumulation, or, as stated Prigogine, a positive entropy EXPORTATION.

John's shop increases with the selling, and the village remains more impoverished spending all its money at John's shop.

In that sense, John is importing free energy, MONEY from the environment, and exporting entropy, the waste energy, to the environment.

Prigogine states that naturally the systems attractor is the steady state if there are not fluctuations far from equilibrium in the environment. Far from the equilibrium that kind of dissipative structure exists and is creative only WHEN AN AUTO-CATALYSIS triggers the process. In John's shop the auto-catalysis that triggered the existence of the shop was John's idea and initiative to be the first to open a shop at that small village.

Let's consider that village and that shop existed there for more than 5, 10, 20 years in the same way. John getting richer and the village surviving, or even getting poorer for some years, if they had nothing more to do. John never imagined to transform his successful small old styled shop in a bigger Wal Mart, nor even to buy a computer and electronic tills - he lived very well without these sophisticated things.

What John's shop lived was a steady state, as a homeostasis, for a long time.

John achieved that steady state for years living a good honest life selling goods to his village.

But one day, John's problems to maintain his homeostasis started.

A kind of very small and antediluvian Wal Mart bought a good site near his shop and they started erecting a Super- Market, not an old style shop like John's. All the villagers were very excited with that novelty, but John was in a panic.

John started living a nightmare, his life from then on was "at the edge of chaos". Surely his shop would not survive. He needs to do something creative and fast, or prepare to close his shop and die.

The red arrow shows the necessity of a cathalysis.
This figure shows what John's shop was experiencing. From a stable situation, a steady state, suddenly a Wal-Mart, a disturbance in the environment, something unexpected, atypical for that small village appeared.
Oscillation of the future, an edge of chaos condition.
But, with creativity,as after such a catalyst, if John has money/energy and good ideas, he could create something new and catalyse that novelty, redirecting his money, his energy, to a new level of organization to achieve a new steady state path, to continue to live.

Most people and businessmen in John's situation close the shop, the shop with no energy/money and/or lack of creativity dies. But a smart John has some money he saved all that time, some energy, which he may now spend TO TRANSFORM THE SITUATION.

That is the way a dissipative system reacts in a CREATIVE WAY when far from equilibrium, when an environmental fluctuation starts triggering an edge of chaos unpredictable future, and the dissipative system does not want to die. It naturally reacts and self-organizes on a different level,on a level where it is able to survive, at another level of inner energy. It survives, it is renewed... and increases its life.

Prigogine and Nicolis showed us with a complete mathematical background that, for a dissipative system far from equilibrium to react in a creative way to a critical situation, it needs a catalyst, something that redirects energy as an absolute necessity.

What was the source of the catalysis that would permit John's shop transformation? John's perceptions, John's ideas, John's necessity, John's money/energy may cause a transformation to occur naturally in order to survive. With no catalysis capacity, the shop would die.

The red arrows show the necessity of a catalysis.
Here we see how the system - or the shop - in a fluctuation condition will have a bifurcation - two ways - or a cascade of ways - or a chaotic cascade of ways - in front of the situation.
To renew itself the system needs some energy and a catalytic capacity.
If the catalytic capacity vanishes, or does not exist at the exact time, the system will lose its steady state - will go to the thermodynamic equilibrium - in other words, will die.