Quote from: bibilinda on February 09, 2015, 05:23:15 PM
MANY of the US trans women with great physical results, who started after their puberty was over, are so successful because they were born intersex. ... Every single time I read about somebody mentioning a great breast size for a trans woman, such as anything above a B cup without being overweight or having breast implants, or somebody having a natural soft-looking face and a great hip to shoulder ratio, smaller bone structure including hands and feet, actually having already small breasts etc. BEFORE EVEN STARTING HRT, it invariably leads to this person being an intersex individual of any variation, but most of these women don't mention their condition on every post they make, until maybe a friend of theirs mentions it in another response "hey girl, you should mention that you were born intersex, so others know why you have such great results from your HRT"...Now, why are there so many intersex individuals in the US going for transitioning as females?
If you're talking about MTF trans folk aged over 40, a big part of the reason has to be DES. Like a lot of medicine-related things, it was used more extensively in the US than anywhere else in the world.
In her book "DES Voices: from Anger to Action", DES mother and author Pat Cody estimates that DES was used in 4.8 million pregnancies within the US, most of which resulted in a live birth (I've been told that it was used in an approximately equal number of pregnancies in countries outside the US too, although exact figures aren't available).
In short, there's over 2 million US-born male assigned DES babies out there somewhere.
If you look at some of the stuff I've posted recently in this thread:
https://www.susans.org/forums/index.php?topic=84224.100You'll see that I've obtained copies of three follow up studies involving a group of people (the "Dieckmann cohort"), who originally participated in a study carried out in the 1950s, which revealed that DES was worthless as a treatment for preventing miscarriages (that didn't stop the FDA from promoting it for a further 20 years though!).
One striking difference emerged between the sons of the women given DES and the unexposed controls: the "DES sons" produced, on average, only about half as much sperm as the control group. My reasoning is that if sperm production was halved, then production of that other thing the testicles make - testosterone - was probably halved too. That would explain why I, along with probably the majority of DES "sons" I've chatted to, have a type of body structure that 's commonly associated with intersex conditions, and other signs of having had below normal male testosterone levels all our lives.
Unfortunately, in the hormone tests they did in those 3 papers, they've left out 2 key measurements (estradiol and SHBG), which means you can't tell whether testosterone production in the DES sons group was lower, but I think if those results had been included it would have shown T production about half normal male, and E2 and SHBG probably about double what you normally get in a man (in other words, hormone levels partway between a man's and a woman's).
As you can see from some of the other stuff I've posted in that thread, the entire medical establishment seem to be running in full damage limitation mode when it comes to DES (which isn't surprising, considering what the likely public reaction would be, if word got out that they've inadvertently caused several million people to be born who are biologically male, but partly developed as female instead of male). What few studies have been carried out since 1980 appear to have had the express aim of downplaying the effects as far as possible.
In those 3 studies on the Dieckmann cohort, the participants were in their early 20s. No one's done any equivalent studies of us now we're in our 40s or older, but, based on my experiences and what I've heard others say, a lot of us start to develop health problems caused by chronic low testosterone once we hit our 40s (which I think could be the underlying factor that leads to a lot of late transitioners finally taking the plunge).
Having had lifelong below normal male T levels does undoubtedly make it a lot easier to pass as a woman post-transition, since, for starters, our bodily proportions are often more like a woman's than a man's (and it probably affects other things like how strongly our bodies respond to female hormones too).
