Quote from: Rachael on December 15, 2007, 06:34:22 AM
its all estrogen? socialisation? i heavily disagreee... that removes all gender hardwireing you want to claim to not feel like you chose to change physical sex...
I think socialisation has very little to do with this, and its simply an excuse tbh... there are enough cases of teen, and infant transitions showing it CANT be socialisation, what have they had? yet they already behave one way?
there are enough transpeople who literally cant cope/function as thier raised sex to prove its simply not ALL learned or chemical...
R 
I would like nothing more than to know that I am not a product of either my environment nor my biology. But, that would make me something no one else is. The factors of socialization and bio-chemical fact do not invalidate anything or anyone. They make each of us what we are. Part of humanity. But a part is not All. How we live out our lives given certain human limitations is a much larger part.
Where exactly do you know of 'infant' transitions? Please cite references because that would, indeed, change the entire perspective I have anyhow. Like you, perhaps, I felt early on that there was something very different about me. I was not a 'typical boy.' In seeing my sons live their lives I begin to have some inkling of how we are different. They have no doubts, no reservations, about 'who they are.' I am absolutely grateful for that, because I would not have them struggle the ways that I have had to do.
My oldest told me a few years ago that he felt that I was born this way "because you can deal with it, Mom. Others cannot." That is a comforting thought. One I do so wish a lot of others would get about themselves. I think that it would be a great pain-alleviator.
As for socialization of humans, it begins immediately we are born and continues throughout the lifespan. Socialization is born into us and our kind. Humans ARE social creatures. No one lives outside a family, clan tribe, or culture and those facts affect us each one. We are not somehow radically 'free.' Much as we might like to think so. We are all contingent on where we are to help make us who we are.
Since the 1930s and 1940s the uses of estrogenic and steroidal hormones for increasing vegetable and animal productivity have become endemic. It doesn't require a lot of contortions to think that a syndrome, possibly rather rare before, has become something we see on a more frequent order than it was seen in human history. Just over the past decade or so the entire 'organic' movement has begun to take off. People are beginning to recognize that the things we invent to make things better have often made things worse in some respects. The endemic use of hormones may well be one of those items.
Have there always been transsexuals? Well, I think yes. I do think that environmental factors whereby the increase in estrogens, particularly, has become endemic rather than particular to specific locales and times has increased the incidence of transsexualism. For instance, after three miscarriages prior to my birth, I am aware that my mother was given diethylstilbestrol (DES) to promote what was thought to be a way to prevent miscarriages. This procedure was very typical in miscarriage-prone women from the 1940s through the very early 1970s when its use was discontinued.
Although it has not been linked definitely to TS incidence, there is some evidence that tends to thinking that, for some of us, it may have been a causal factor. It has certainly been linked to cancers forming in babies, and in adults, whose mothers were given the compound.
Whatever causes/d us to be is really not the important thing here. That we are is the important item we need to focus on. If I require an absence of socialization/bio-chemical or other environmental factors in order to feel 'validated,' well, maybe that is something I need to delve into for myself.
The fact that "I am," period, is what seems salient to me. That is the fact that I have to live with.
There are people who "cant cope or function" in any number of areas, but they are not even nearly all TSes.
I don't require an 'excuse' for who I am. The entire discussion, in that light, seems moot to me. It's how I deal with who I am that is the important factoid that gets left out in these discussions. The hows and whys are just thought-experiments.
