Quote from: sororcaeli on October 18, 2014, 12:55:25 AM
If I could afford it I'd like to know the exact medical details of my genetic makeup. All I can do is speculate based on what is typical for someone XXY (mosaic). I have androgen insensitivity in most of my body except head and face, although my facial hair is sparse and lighter than my top hair; I have wide hips; I have the 2D:4D digit ratio thing; I have a slight case of gynecomastia; I look younger than my age; I was also born with Asperger's, and there's a pretty good chance I'm infertile.
Klinefelter's Syndrome is often observed in extreme cases, so mosaic ones seem to go under the radar. What makes me curious is that even though being XXY is unconnected to trans* identity it seems to be comorbid, anyway. Not in all cases, but many. But then genetics aren't so easy to pigeon-hole as one thing or another. I'm sure there are things that do connect the two that just aren't determinable yet.
The way Klinefelters produces intersexed development is by causing primary hypogonadism, i.e. it interferes with testicular development so that your testicles don't grow to full size during your prenatal development, and are unable to produce the full male quota of testosterone. They do generally produce enough so that you end up with male genitals, however it seems that a fair number of XXY's end up with a brain that isn't fully male. Amongst those with KS I've chatted to, nearly all of them seem to have a gender identity that isn't properly male. On a KS message board I was hanging out on a fair bit a year or so ago, some of the people there have transitioned, and I'm pretty sure that being XXY does make it more likely that you'll be trans (although I don't know of any studies showing this off the top of my head).
The thing about XY/XXY mosaic is that it can only affect your sexual development if the XXY cells get into your germ cell line and go on to affect your testicular development. Otherwise you'll develop fully as male, and there'll be no indication that you're in any way different from ordinary males unless the mosaicism gets into your skin or hair (in which case you might have patches with a slightly different coloration). The sex you develop as is entirely hormone driven, and depends on whether you have testicles churning out testosterone or not during your prenatal development.
There is a condition called tetragammetic chimerism in which nonidentical twin embryos fuse together to form a singe embryo early in prenatal development, and 50 percent of the time this happens, the twins are brother and sister. Nonetheless, people with the condition usually aren't intersexed at all, instead they end up developing fully as whichever sex the cell type that went on to form the germ cell line happened to be. The only time it can be a cause of intersex is if both male and female cells get into the germ cell line. Usually that doesn't happen though, and most of the people with the condition are just ordinary men or women who live their entire lives never knowing that they're actually made up of a mixture of male and female cells. This is what I initially thought must have happened to me, because I have a very strong internal sense of being partly male and partly female. As it turns out, that's not what happens at all with mosaicism, usually you end up with a person who is fully male or fully female.
It's highly counterintuitive, but the sex you develop as is entirely determined by what hormones are present during your prenatal development, not on whether you have a Y chromosome or not. I don't know whether you've read any of the stuff I've been posting on here over the last year about medical hormones as a cause of transsexuality, but this is why I think it's a really bad idea to be giving pregnant women hormones, and why I think the problem of transness caused by hormones in pregnancy is likely to go well beyond just DES.
I've got the same thing you have of having a feminine body structure. It's something that occurs because you've been producing below normal male levels of testosterone ever since you were born. Klinefelters is one thing that can cause this, but so can just about any other cause of intersex.
If you've had a full set of lab work done prior to starting on hormones, you can actually gain a fair idea of whether you have Klinefelter's or not from it. See my comment here:
https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php/topic,175351.msg1543641.html#msg1543641Primary hypogonadism (e.g. Klinefelters):
Total and free testosterone low, LH and FSH high
Secondary hypogonadism (e.g. Kallman's; DES):
Total and free T low, LH and FSH low
Androgen insensitivity:
Total and free T normal to high, LH and FSH normal to high
I'd better mention that the average total T in healthy 20 to 40 year old men is about 700 ng/dl, however, most doctors are likely to tell you that even testosterone levels far below that are "normal". I think the problem is that there are millions upon millions of men now approaching middle age who were exposed to drugs such as DES in the womb. One of the things that can go wrong when you're exposed to these drugs is that you end up trans, however, I think a much more common side effect is that you end up identifying as male but have low testosterone, and your T levels continue to fall as you get older until it starts to seriously impact your health by the time you reach middle age. I think doctors must now be seeing a lot of these patients, but nobody wants to admit that a massive disaster has taken place with these drugs, so they've set the limits of what counts as "normal" very wide.
