Does it make sense that the transsexual brain develops in the womb?

[noah732]

Just wondering...
Does it really make sense to say that the transsexual brain and gender identity form within the womb?

Just after birth, babies know little more than how to cry, sleep, drink, etc. Would an infant really need a gender identity? So why would it develop before birth, before it can even be expressed?

Does it not make more sense to say that gender identity, the internal consciousness of being male or female, probably develops later on? Do babies even have consciousness at all?

Thanks

[Jill F]

I had basically a female-wired brain since I was a fetus, but I had no internal awareness of gender until I was about 4.

[Devlyn]

Great question! You'll probably do better in the Health forum than the News area, though.

Hugs, Devlyn

[suzifrommd]

People display gender differences in behavior before they even can speak. Gender differences start appearing in the brain before birth.

[Edge]

Yes, brains in general mostly develop in the womb.

[Jill F]

Yes, brains in general mostly develop in the womb.

And deteriorate when watching TV.   A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

[Marcellow]

Hence the whole environment in the womb affecting gender identity is very plausible.

[Eva Marie]

I was clearly born with a female brain so I absolutely believe it all starts in the womb. I didn't discover it until much later though.

I was born back in the stone age and we didn't have the interweb (heck, color tvs were still a new concept back then!). I lived a large part of my life in a very trans-ignorant part of the US so I had no way to find out that transgender was a thing until I was in my 40s. Once I stumbled across it I knew immediately that it explained everything - the feelings I was having and the disconnection I had felt and all of the trouble I had experienced all of my life with trying to fit into a guy's world as a non-guy.

Back then the pharmaceutical industry was playing fast and loose with drugs with no government supervision; drugs like diethylstilbestrol and thalidomide were sprung on the unsuspecting public and it was only years later that the damage those drugs did became apparent. There is no telling what I was exposed to in the womb and what that exposure did to me. However, one only has to look at the mounting evidence of what endocrine disruptors do to a fetus in the womb to grasp what I think happened to me, and what I think happened to a lot of other people from that era.

[Susan522]

I was clearly born with a female brain so I absolutely believe it all starts in the womb. I didn't discover it until much later though....

....Back then the pharmaceutical industry was playing fast and loose with drugs with no government supervision ( they still are ); drugs like diethylstilbestrol and thalidomide were sprung on the unsuspecting public and it was only years later that the damage those drugs did became apparent. There is no telling what I was exposed to in the womb and what that exposure did to me. However, one only has to look at the mounting evidence of what endocrine disruptors do to a fetus in the womb to grasp what I think happened to me, and what I think happened to a lot of other people from that era.

You are actually quite correct in your assessment.  One has only to 'Google' "EDC's" or endocrine disrupting chemicals to be horrified and astounded at the amount of damage these EDC's are still causing.

In a nutshell what happens is that these EDC's interfere, (disrupt/interfere with the normal bonding processes of/) with the androgen receptors in/on the cells of the developing brain in the fetus.  This prevents the normal masculinization of the brain coded into and normally triggered (programed into), by the genetic instructions on the Y chromosome.

This is why the M/F chromosomal, XX vs. XY argument is such a hoax perpetrated on the ignorant.  All the chromosome does is carry a huge variation of genes, (millions/billions(?), each with their own set if discreet instructions or chemical triggers.  If something like and EDC or nutritional deficiency interferes with those 'instructions' then all bets are off.  Anything can and often does happen.

Now I am no biologist and I am hoping someone with a greater understanding of these biochemical mechanisms can do a better job of explaining this than I have just attempted to do.

This also begs the question as to how these mechanisms work in the cases of FtM.  Could it be that the instructions on the xx are somehow corrupted and if so, how?

[Alexmakenoise]

I've had a male identity since I was 2.  I don't think being trans is a choice; I think it's biological (not speaking for all but for many of us).  I'm looking forward to more research on this because I think it will help with acceptance.

[ImagineKate]

I'm surprised this is still being debated. A lot, dare I say the majority of transsexuals knew from early on.

[peky]

Just wondering...
Does it really make sense to say that the transsexual brain and gender identity form within the womb?

Just after birth, babies know little more than how to cry, sleep, drink, etc. Would an infant really need a gender identity? So why would it develop before birth, before it can even be expressed?

Does it not make more sense to say that gender identity, the internal consciousness of being male or female, probably develops later on? Do babies even have consciousness at all?

Thanks

It is the brain structures and connections that would determine your gender identity that develop along a male to female axis during the fetal stage.

and yes, a level of consciousness develops as early as 6 weeks of development

[HughE]

Just wondering...
Does it really make sense to say that the transsexual brain and gender identity form within the womb?

Yes. There's abundant evidence to show that there are physical differences in the structure of men's and women's brains that affect things such as behaviour, spatial awareness, aptitude for languages etc, and that these differences arise before birth, during the second and third trimester of your prenatal development. Gender identity appears to be part of those differences too.

Just after birth, babies know little more than how to cry, sleep, drink, etc. Would an infant really need a gender identity? So why would it develop before birth, before it can even be expressed?

Does it not make more sense to say that gender identity, the internal consciousness of being male or female, probably develops later on? Do babies even have consciousness at all?

Thanks

For a long time, the prevailing theory was that babies are born "gender neutral", and people could be made to identify as either sex depending on how the parents treat them during their first 3 or 4 years of life. According to that theory, if a baby is born intersex then they can be surgically assigned male or female depending on which is easiest for the doctors and the parents, and either way they'll grow up happily adjusted to their assigned sex without knowing any different. Thousands of intersex babies ended up being butchered with unnecessary cosmetic surgery on their genitals as a result, surgery which has often gone horribly wrong and left them with chronic health problems, loss of sensation or genital pain that means they can't achieve orgasm, and genitals that don't match the gender they identify as. Under that theory, transness was also regarded as a mental illness, the result of improper socialisation during the formative years.

The gender neutrality theory has since been shown to be a complete load of rubbish, initially through an infamous failed experiment (the "John/Joan" case):

http://web.archive.org/web/20090331071817/http://www.infocirc.org/rollston.htm

and subsequently through follow up studies of other babies who were reassigned to the wrong sex.

As far as transness is concerned, there is research showing physical similarities between the brains of trans women and cis women, even where the trans women haven't had HRT. If you look through some of the posts in this forum, you'll find that many of us (myself included) have a type of body structure that's commonly associated with intersex conditions, and often other symptoms of being intersexed too. So there's plenty of evidence that transness is a kind of intersex condition, except one where the main thing that's been affected is the brain rather than the genitals.

One thing I've been trying to make people here (and on other trans forums) aware of, is that medical hormones could be causing a lot of cases of transsexuality. There's one drug in particular, called DES, that has a very strong association with MTF transsexuality, e.g. see:

https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,157142.0.html
and
https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,84224.0.html

DES was withdrawn from use 40 years ago, however if one hormone treatment can cause large numbers of people to end up trans without anyone realising what's happened, then it's very likely that other hormone treatments are doing it too.

[FriendsCallMeChris]

RE: FtMs According to one of my therapists, most of her FtMs are either one of twins or adopted or were high  risk pregnancies when progesterone was given to prevent miscarriage.  She's getting her doctor's degree in human sexuality so she's all into the studies, too.   According to her research, gender identity is developed in the first and last  trimesters.
I'm in the adopted class.
For twins, just like w/ nutrients, the hormones are not equally shared, so one twin gets more than the other.
In high stress pregnancies particularly in the last trimester, (ie in adoption decisions) the mother's adrenal glands kick in overtime, which dumps massive amounts of testosterone.
My knowledge of progesterone is fuzzy here, so someone else will have to explain the effects of that one better than me.

So, that made enough sense to me that I'm okay with that explanation.
Chris

[Marcellow]

RE: FtMs According to one of my therapists, most of her FtMs are either one of twins or adopted or were high  risk pregnancies when progesterone was given to prevent miscarriage.  She's getting her doctor's degree in human sexuality so she's all into the studies, too.   According to her research, gender identity is developed in the first and last  trimesters.
I'm in the adopted class.
For twins, just like w/ nutrients, the hormones are not equally shared, so one twin gets more than the other.
In high stress pregnancies particularly in the last trimester, (ie in adoption decisions) the mother's adrenal glands kick in overtime, which dumps massive amounts of testosterone.
My knowledge of progesterone is fuzzy here, so someone else will have to explain the effects of that one better than me.

So, that made enough sense to me that I'm okay with that explanation.
Chris

I see. My mom had two miscarriages before (both males) having me so I tend to wonder if she was given progesterone to prevent a 3rd miscarriage. And she was in labor for several hours with me too so I wonder if that stress and pain caused my body-brain mismatch. Hmm, I should ask.

[Contravene]

RE: FtMs According to one of my therapists, most of her FtMs are either one of twins or adopted or were high  risk pregnancies when progesterone was given to prevent miscarriage.  She's getting her doctor's degree in human sexuality so she's all into the studies, too.   According to her research, gender identity is developed in the first and last  trimesters.
I'm in the adopted class.
For twins, just like w/ nutrients, the hormones are not equally shared, so one twin gets more than the other.
In high stress pregnancies particularly in the last trimester, (ie in adoption decisions) the mother's adrenal glands kick in overtime, which dumps massive amounts of testosterone.
My knowledge of progesterone is fuzzy here, so someone else will have to explain the effects of that one better than me.

So, that made enough sense to me that I'm okay with that explanation.
Chris

Wow, that's really interesting. My mom just revealed to me a couple days ago that she was given progesterone when she was pregnant with me. I also had a very difficult birth. Maybe I should bring this up to her.

[HughE]

Wow, that's really interesting. My mom just revealed to me a couple days ago that she was given progesterone when she was pregnant with me. I also had a very difficult birth. Maybe I should bring this up to her.

This is very interesting from my point of view too, because, ever since I found out about the link between DES and MTF transsexuality, I've had a suspicion that progestins could be causing FTM transsexuality.

Doctors don't usually administer progesterone itself to pregnant women, because it has a relatively short biological half life and so has to be given more or less every day. Instead, they usually prescribe one of a range of synthetic hormones called progestins, which are designed to target the same hormone receptors that progesterone does. However, one of the problems with progestins is that most of them cross react with androgen receptors and, to a greater or lesser extent, mimic some of the effects of testosterone (the first generation of progestins were actually derivatives of testosterone!). Although I've mainly just been looking at the effects of DES, it certainly seems very reasonable to me that exposure to progestins could cause FTM transsexuality.

There's actually a known problem of progestin induced virilization, in which baby girls were born with intersexed or sometimes completely male genitals after their mothers were given treatment with progestins:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progestin-induced_virilisation

That article talks mainly about danazol, and makes out that exposure to medically prescribed androgenizing hormones is a rare thing, however a lot of women (probably in the millions) were given androgenizing progestins between about 1950 and the mid 1970s, when the fact that they were causing male development in female fetuses was finally spotted. Since progestins were often co-prescribed with DES, in most cases exposure to these drugs is likely to have followed a similar pattern to DES, and taken place too late in the pregnancy to have much effect on genital development, but right in the middle of the critical time when sexually dimorphic brain development is taking place.

According to one of my therapists, most of her FtMs are either one of twins or adopted or were high  risk pregnancies when progesterone was given to prevent miscarriage.  She's getting her doctor's degree in human sexuality so she's all into the studies, too.   According to her research, gender identity is developed in the first and last  trimesters.

The research on sheep and monkeys shows that the critical period for sexually dimorphic brain development doesn't start until after genital development has finished. If the same applies to humans, that means it can't start until at least 13 weeks after conception, which rules out the first trimester. I'm fairly sure that the exposure in my case was during the second trimester only, and I had normal male development during the first and third trimesters. While I don't identify as a woman, I have a gender identity that's kind of a mixture of male and female. So I think the brain development responsible for gender identity later in life must take place throughout the second and third trimesters, and gender identity must be the summation of lots and lots of little differences between the sexes that are built into the structure of the brain during that time (rather than being due to any one specific thing the brain does).

[cathyrains]

There's a big difference between gender identity and sexual dimorphism.
Unless you want to make an argument for biological essentialism with regards to gender, no  a foetus does not develop a "gender identity" in the womb.

[Edge]

There's a big difference between gender identity and sexual dimorphism.

What is that difference and can you link the studies to back up your claim?

[cathyrains]

What is that difference and can you link the studies to back up your claim?

The difference is one of definition. I would think that was obvious from a transsexual PoV.  Perhaps you have a different understanding of their meaning in which case I can neither agree nor disagree with your PoV.