Quote from: Satinjoy on September 03, 2014, 03:55:33 PM
It is rumored that many of us DES exposed get left half way to the transition path, without going down it, always torn between a go or no go, and fairly miserable with our dysphoria. However, that may not be true. We bantered back and forth a bit offline, and as I have publically stated many times in Susans, I believe it altered my bone structure, endocrine receptor and central nervous system, resulting in the seeds that would eventually create the perfect storm of hitting the wall. However with the so called higher brain functions not being converted, it leaves me with this multiple gender identity. I do know that my physical wiring is very female, in terms of how the body perceives the stimuli of touch.
What you end up with varies quite a bit I think. Most of the DES "babes" I've been chatting to on facebook are living as women and seem to fully identify that way, whereas in the DES sons yahoo group it was a lot more mixed, and there were some there who seemed quite happy living as male. It had actually split into 2 groups, a "DES sons" group for the male-identifying ones, and a "DES trans" one for those wo identified as women. Unfortunately someone changed the permissions on the DES sons one so you can't post to it or read posts, and I was never a member of DES trans so I don't know what happened to that one.
I think probably most of us are actually, to some degree at least, a mixture of the two sexes psychologically as well as physically, however with everyone around us being either male or female, there's a very strong pressure for us to belong fully to either one category or the other too, so that's what most of us end up trying to do without even being consciously aware of it.
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HughE is amazing with the science of it all, they are intersex. I think. But I remember the hormone commonality in a post he put out a number of months ago, and it reminds me of you.
Well, basically I'm suffering from secondary hypogonadism, and I've got a number of body markers (known collectively as a "eunuchoid habitus"), which mean it's something I must have had from a very young age. Also, I've got feminine body language; the way my physical process of arousal and orgasm works is much more like what you usually see in women rather than men; and, as a teenager, I had the same pattern of very shy, socially withdrawn behaviour that was often seen in teenaged DES sons. I think my emotions are partially female too: in social situations they're more like those of a woman, whereas in non social situations (like driving or working on a computer) they're more like a man's. I score fairly well in most tests of spatial awareness (such as 3D shape rotation and parking a car) which is a male-typical trait; however I've got a terrible sense of direction, which is a female-typical trait.
Most men have a kind of "joy of sport" where they get all enthusiastic and their faces light up when they're watching games such as cricket or football, whereas, even though I've tried to share that feeling, there's nothing there. To me it's just a pointless, meaningless activity that I can't get enthusiastic about. That's a femine trait as well I suspect. I go all gooey inside whenever I see a baby too, another female-typical trait. However, in tests of empathising vs systematising I tend to score as more male, my inclination has always been very much towards sciences rather than languages (a male typical trait); I have an urge to seek out casual sex (male typical), even though I can't "let go" enough to have an orgasm until I've become emotionally attached to the person I'm having sex with (a female typical trait that renders the whole idea of casual sex rather pointless!). I'm gynephilic rather than androphilic, although I tend to be attracted to women who are quite androgynous in both the way they look and behave, so it's a bit of a mixed bag there too.
The other thing is that there are times when I have a feeling of being made up of two identities. If I see an attractive woman, then there's one part of me that wants to have sex with her, but at the same time there's another part of me that sees her hair and her breasts, and wishes she could have those things. It's mainly the hair, the breasts, the way women carry themselves, and the overall shape of their bodies. I've never had any great urge to cross dress though, and I'd feel quite dysphoric wearing womens clothes and presenting as female. There have been times in the past where I've had the dual identity thing a lot more strongly than I do now, to the point where (back in the days when I was trying to be fully male), my left leg used to do things of its own accord - usually kicking my right leg, or making the foot drop when I wasn't expecting it so I'd fall over. I used to think it was just clumsiness, however it began happening in my teens at around the same time the bullying at school had forced me to bury my female side and try to act more like a man. Since I let my hair grow out and started dancing (in private - I'd be way too embarrassed to do it in front of other people!), it's no longer been happening. So I do wonder whether there's an actual physical basis for it in the structure of my brain, i.e. a male domain and a female domain that each have their own identities, so that I'm not just part-man and part-woman, but part-brother and part-sister too.
