(CN) - Biologically male U.S. veterans were twice as likely as their civilian counterparts to identify as female, a former military psychologist told Courthouse News, discussing a soon-to-be-published study of more than 5 million service members.
No information has been released indicating whether the subjects of the study sought sex-reassignment surgery, or more generally disassociate with the sex of their birth.
The study by psychologist George Brown follows up on his 1988 paper, "Transsexuals in the Military: Flight Into Hypermasculinity," which relied on interviews with 11 service members who identify as male-to-female transgender, meaning that they were born as biological males but identify as female. Many prefer the umbrella term transgender over the more narrow descriptor transsexual, which usually implies surgical alteration.
"A striking similarity was noted in the histories of nearly all of the military gender dysphorics," the 1988 study states. "They joined the service, in their words, 'to become a real man.'"
"Flight into Hypermasculinity" speculated that enlistment statistics could bear out the theory that male-to-female transsexuals might enlist as a way of "purging the feminine self."
"Current military policies, in association with the proposed hypermasculine phase of transsexual development, may actually result in a higher prevalence of transsexualism in the military than in the civilian population," the 1988 study theorized.
Brown, a veteran himself with 12 years of service in the U.S. Air Force and 13 years in the Department of Veterans Affairs, now says that his new research backs his 24-year-old hypothesis.
"I have data from a study I did in VA that demonstrates a prevalence double that in the nonmilitary population," Brown told Courthouse News in an email. "It is unpublished data, pending presentation in San Francisco in the fall. It totally supports my 1988 work. The denominator in the study is over 5 million veterans. So, I am now confident that my early theory was correct."
Brown, who has 118 scientific papers and abstracts under his belt, added that professional ethics prevent him from describing the study's data in further detail before its public presentation.
In his 1988 research, Brown cited figures from Laura Giat Roberto in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that said transsexualism among males has an incidence between 1 and 37,000 and 1 and 100,000.
Twenty years later, the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Gender Identity and Gender Variance relied on statistics that said 1 in 11,900 male-to-female transsexuals experienced gender identity disorder. It noted that transgender activists in the research community, such as University of Michigan professor Lynn Conway, say the numbers are underreported.
It is unclear at this juncture where Brown compiled his latest data.
Brown currently sits on the board of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which publishes the Standards of Care for Gender Identity Disorders recommended by the American Psychological Association.
Aaron Belkin, the director of the Palm Center, a research institute studying sexual minorities in the military at the University of California Los Angeles, said in a phone interview that he believed Brown's new study could make transgender soldiers more visible to the public.
"People who oppose transgender rights and LGBT rights more broadly would have you believe that there's no such thing as transgender troops," Belkin said, using the abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.