Quote from: Jasper93 on August 22, 2015, 03:13:07 AM
And that's the thing -- attending the GLBT-receptive powerhouse that I do, one would think that I'd run into a lot of trans girls, especially considering that I live in their learning community designed specifically for transgender/gender-queer people. But I'm the only mtf here that I've heard about in the learning community, and one of three that I've heard about across campus (47k people). For every trans woman, there seems to be three or so trans men. For every trans man, there's like 2 gender-queer people.
Why in the world are there so few trans women, pretty much anywhere, who are in their late-teens early-20s??? I encounter many who started in their 40s, but I'm feeling pretty lonely unless I'm searching pretty hardcore on Tumblr.
At least part of the reason has got to be because of an artificial estrogen called DES, that was at one time the standard treatment in pregnancies where the mother was thought to be at risk of having a miscarriage or giving birth prematurely. During its heyday in the 1950s and 60s, some doctors were giving it to all their pregnant patients, and it was even being added to pregnancy vitamins. Between 1940 and about 1980 (by which time it had largely been withdrawn from use), DES was used in an estimated 4.8 million pregnancies within the US, and (I've been told) a roughly equal number of pregnancies elsewhere. So, roughly 10 million pregnancies in total, most of which resulted in live births, and half of which presumably involved genetically male babies.
Under the standard dosing schedule, the doses used were absolutely colossal, the cumulative dose over the course of a typical DES pregnancy being about 11 grams (roughly the same amount of artificial estrogen as is contained in half a million birth control pills), with by far the heaviest exposure occurring during the second half of the pregnancy (which is when the brain development responsible for gender identity later in life is thought to take place).
While the "DES daughters" who were exposed to this treatment in the womb are acknowledged to have abnormalities of their internal reproductive organs, and high rates of infertility and several kinds of cancer, the official line has always been that the "DES sons" came through their exposure virtually unscathed - no increased risk of cancer, infertility or anything else, apart from a modestly higher rate of "noncancerous epididymal cysts". However, from what I've seen, the male assigned people who were exposed to DES were in fact profoundly affected by their exposure. It's just that what happened to them is so awful that nobody wants to admit to it, and the medical and pharmaceutical industry people who know about it have all closed ranks to keep the public in the dark about it.
Basically, in a male fetus, DES causes whatever development is taking place during the time the exposure is going on, to take place as female instead of male. Because the exposure during the first trimester was usually relatively light, most of those exposed have come out with male genitals (albeit often with intersex-related abnormalities such as undescended testes or hypospadias). Instead, their brain development has been the main thing affected. The usual outcome seems to be that you end up with someone who looks male but whose brain has predominantly developed as female. Not surprisingly, the people who've had this happen to them often end up with a strong inner sense of being a woman, despite having a male body.
A fair number of those I've chatted to have physical intersex-related abnormalities too, and it seems to be very common for those of us who've had these hormone exposures to end up with chronically abnormal hormones later in life. But the main thing for most of us seems to be that it's messed up our gender identity (in my case, it's kind of a mixture of male and female rather than being fully female). Considering how widely it was used, and that not many people know what drugs they were exposed to before birth, I think DES could well be the main cause of MTF transsexuality in the over 40s age group.
