I have a feeling of being partly a man and partly a woman, to the point where at times it feels a lot like I'm made up of a separate male and female identity. My perception of myself is that I have a tendency to veer between a more masculine and more feminine presentation too.
In my case I'm fairly sure that I know what happened: I was exposed to a high dose of synthetic female hormones partway through the second trimester of my mother's pregnancy with me, that temporarily suppressed my testosterone production and caused the early stages of the process of "wiring up" the permanent structure of my brain to go down the female pathway instead of the male one. Although I'll probably never know for sure what happened, my mother suffered a great deal from depression when I was younger, and it has all the hallmarks of a failed attempt to end the pregnancy by taking an overdose of something (probably birth control pills).
Irrespective of what caused it, my theory is that the period of very low testosterone caused some of my brain regions to be "wired up" as female while other parts (that developed later in the pregnancy) are male, and one effect of this is that it's created enough of a division so that the male and female parts of my brain have each acquired their own separate, self-aware identities. There's the male part which has logic, reasoning and the use of language (and is the part writing this), however there's another, female, part of me who has complex movement, instinct and emotion. It's quite a tricky situation, since each part of me wants completely different things. During my childhood the differences between us weren't so great and we worked quite well together as a team, but all hell broke loose when I hit my teens, and throughout my adult life (until recently) we've basically been at war with each other. That's the theory I've come up with anyway.
The known facts are that I'm suffering from secondary hypogonadism, and have signs of having had below normal male levels of testosterone all my life. The way arousal and orgasm works in me is also a lot more like what you typically see in women rather than men too - I need foreplay, and have to gradually build up to having an orgasm via a series of peaks and troughs of arousal, rather than just continuously becoming more aroused until climax occurs (as seems to happen in most men). Although my instinct is to seek out casual sex, I've never been able to "let go" enough during sex with a stranger to actually achieve orgasm, rendering the whole exercise rather pointless. My body language is feminine to the point where, throughout my adult life, most people seem to have assumed I must be gay; and I think my instinctive behaviour in most social situations is more like that of a woman's than a man's too. However there are other parts of me that seem to be much the same as what you typically see in men, and in fact I score as quite strongly male in the brain sex tests I've tried.
In the course of trying to figure myself out, I've discovered that there is a large, hidden population of MAAB people who've ended up intersexed and/or suffering from gender dysphoria as a result of prenatal exposure to the synthetic estrogen DES. Many of their life experiences seem to closely parallel my own, which makes me fairly certain that I also was prenatally exposed to synthetic hormones. Going on what I've seen with DES, there must be literally millions of male-assigned people alive today who've had their prenatal sexual development messed up by exposure to synthetic hormones, and I've been trying to get some kind of acknowledgement that there is a problem with these drugs (so far without much success unfortunately).
There's a thread here at Susans's about DES:
https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,84224.0.htmlThere's also a forum for bigender people at:
http://www.bigender.net/forum/index.php
