Quote from: amber1964 on January 06, 2014, 08:03:24 PM
Yes, read that study. Mildly interesting, slightly suggestive but as you pointed out post mortem and sample size way too small to be meaningful.
There is a well known person, a trans woman, who posts all over the internet. She is a rocket scientist, just ask her and a self appointed expert in all science matters, studies, material, theories etc ad nauseating when it comes to the so called transsexual condition. She even invented a whole new syndrome to explain her sudden and spontaneous change of sex when fully mature and in her (i think) thirties. Heck, she might even be right.
For some, this knowing or trying to know why the have the feelings they do is very important. They need an explanation and will invest all kinds of efforts trying to find one. Like the one that has to do with that di whatever it is med that women took during pregnancy. Might be true for all I know. Im not a scientist but I can read and I have a working sense of smell.
All kidding aside. Its fine to be curious, I sometimes have the same curiosity. But all the well adjusted trans people I have ever met just dont care. Anytime someone takes an unusual interest in this topic they are telling you something about how they feel about themselves. If you are transsexual, you will know. You will either come to terms with it or not. If you get stuck, worrying that it may be some kind of moral defect then its not surprising you might want to invest unreasonable amounts of time desperately trying to find some other reason.
For myself, I could care less. I am what I am and I am okay with it. I dont know why I am this way, I just know the way I am. Thats all I need or care to know. Nothing anyone says, writes, researches or says will change that.
Amber, I presume the rocket scientist you're referring to Zoe Brain. I've read her biography and how she spontaneously started changing sex. I don't think she's making up a story, I think she's just misinterpreted what actually happened to her. Something very similar happened to me in 2007, with similar symptoms to what Zoe describes and the same very abrupt onset. It wasn't "changing sex" though, it was my testosterone production (which has been below normal male all my life) finally shutting down, which resulted in my developing most of the symptoms of acute secondary hypogonadism. Some of those symptoms can include gynecomastica and other feminising effects, so, if what she experienced is similar to what happened to me, I can see why Zoe interpreted it as a spontaneous sex change.
I can see where you're coming from with your professed lack of interest in what made you trans. After all, there's absolutely nothing any of us can do about something that was hardwired into the structure of our brain before birth (apart from make the best of the situation). Nonetheless, I think it's important for trans people to know that we're not crazy or perverted, that there's an actual physical basis for why you identify as a woman even though you were born in a male body.
It was because of wondering why my brain seems to have partly developed as female instead of male, that I first started looking into how sexual development and masculinisation of the brain take place.
Although we have a sex chromosome (the Y chromosome) that ordinarily determines what sex we develop as, it only holds a few dozen functional genes, and all it actually does is instruct your undifferentiated gonads to turn into testicles. All the instructions for both male and female development are held elsewhere in your genome and everyone has the full set of instructions for both sexes. Something has to tell your body which set of instructions to follow, and that something is testosterone.
If, for whatever reason, the testicles fail to develop, the hormones that would ordinarily be produced in the testicles aren't produced, and the result is Swyers Syndrome, a condition which produces a person who appears to be female despite being genetically male. Something similar occurs in a condition called Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (or CAIS), where a mutation in a single gene produces a person who is to all intents and purposes a woman despite being genetically male. The defective gene in CAIS is for the androgen receptor, and it means that androgenic hormones (primarily testosterone and its derivative DHT) have no effect, so that development in people with CAIS takes place as if those hormones weren't there. With both these syndromes, despite being genetically male, those affected look and behave exactly like ordinary girls at birth and throughout childhood, to the point where the condition often isn't even picked up until, as teenagers, they fail to start menstruating.
What this shows is that, in humans, both physical male development and masculinisation of the brain are driven by the action of male hormones. Without these hormones, you'll develop as female rather than male, irrespective of what your genes might say.
In both Swyers syndrome and CAIS, the male hormones fail to act throughout the entire period of prenatal development. But what happens if the male hormones are produced normally to start with, and then something happens partway through the pregnancy to block their production? I think you end up with people like us, people who look male but are psychologically female (or in my case, partly male and partly female!).
I wasn't able to find anything in the medical literature dealing with what happens if fetal testosterone production is interrupted partway though the pregnancy. However, I did discover that quite a bit of research was conducted in the 1970s on sheep (and on birds, rodents and monkeys), in which external testosterone was used to create the reverse situation (genetically female animals that had partially developed as male).
Depending on the timing and duration of the exposure, you could give exposed female offspring male genitals, cause their part of their brain that controls hormones (the hypothalamus) to behave as if it were male rather than female, or you could change part or all of the courtship and mating behaviour of the animal from female to male. I'm not making this up, here's links to some of the sheep research, in which all of those things took place:
http://dev.biologists.org/content/36/1/87.long"Effects of testosterone implants in pregnant ewes on their female offspring", August 1976 J Embryol Exp Morphol 36, 87-99.
http://www.reproduction-online.org/content/49/2/311.long"The sexual behaviour of prenatally androgenized ewes observed in the field", J Reprod Fertil. 1977 Mar;49(2):311-5
http://press.endocrine.org/doi/full/10.1210/en.2002-220965"Prenatal Programming of Reproductive Neuroendocrine Function: Fetal Androgen Exposure Produces Progressive Disruption of Reproductive Cycles in Sheep", Endocrinology 2003 144:4, 1426-1434
You might wonder what relevance this has to human beings, since doctors don't typically administer testosterone to pregnant women. What they do quite commonly do though, is administer feminising hormones (estrogens and progestins) during pregnancy, often in doses that would completely suppress testosterone production in an adult man if he were to be given the same.
This practice started around 1940 with the artificial estrogen DES. DES lost it's FDA approval in 1971, and, while doctors continued to prescribe it off label for several years after that, very few people born post-1980 should have been exposed to DES (or other estrogens). However, there's a second class of feminising hormones called progestins that never lost their approval, and continue to be used during pregnancies even now. Just as with DES, progestins are highly effective at suppressing testosterone production (spironolactone and androcur are both progestins). I've been looking primarily at the effects of DES on male development, but I think the same likely applies to other estrogens and to progestins too.
If you look at the CDC website, the official line is that the "DES sons", the male-born children of mothers given DES, came through their exposure virtually unscathed. That's completely contrary to what I've seen. Based on the personal stories I've read, DES sons appear to experience effects that are basically the mirror image of what happened in the sheep experiments. Where the exposure started relatively early in the pregnancy, you end up with genital abnormalities, somewhat later, you develop problems with fertility and hormone regulation, later still and the predominant effects are psychological. We're quite a bit more socially complex than sheep, and rather than producing obvious opposite sexed behaviour, you end up with a person suffering from gender dysphoria, whose life experiencess appear to be no different from those of any other MTF gender variant or trans identified person. The rates of MTF transsexuality among male-assigned DES babies appear to be hundreds of times higher than for the unexposed male population.
Although DES is a thing of the past, if one synthetic hormone can produce these effects, the likelihood is that others can too, and that doctors are continuing to create people who are at high risk of being gender variant or trans identified later in life. For the last year I've been trying to get trans people, mainstream media and doctors to look at what happened with DES, but (apart from getting articles published on a couple of websites) so far without much visible success. This seemed like a suitable next place to try!
