I am a DES son. My mother was on Diethylstilbestrol to help prevent a miscarriage. That drug can have a lot of effects on a male fetus. If you google it, you will find more info on it. 
I have wondered just how far the effects of DES go?
I have had and have spermatocele's, vericoceles, as well as a small meatus (opening of the penis) and fathered 4 failed pregnancies more than likely to poor sperm quality.
Body wise, I am built like a female. My bone structure, is that of a small boned female. I am 5' 6" tall @ 135lbs. I have low muscle mass as well. My women's clothing size is a 2-4. My shoe size is 6 to 6.5 W (men's) depending on the brand. My hands are 3\4 of an inch smaller than the average male. I have a more feminine digit ratio as well. My ring size is 8.5.
My mentality, is that of a female as well. I am into and do most of the things women do. I also have always had good motherhood instinct. I mother hen my friends kids really bad. Lol Not in a bad way though. If one of her kids is in the grocery cart at the store, I can't be any further than 3 ft. from it. Lol
Pretty much the only things that are physically male about me is my sexual gender and effects of male puberty.
The only things I have in common with men, is my sexuality (only interested in women) and I am mechanically inclined, which can be a female thing as well.
So basically I feel that I am a female physically and mentally, with male genitals and effects of male puberty.
So is it possible that I am a result of what I would call "incomplete male fetal development syndrome" aka IMFDS? Lol
Is anyone else on here the same way? Do any of you have the smaller than normal body size and such?

My mother told me she took DES with me.

Physically it didn't do much to me that I know of.  My face is in between and was told as a child I had feminine eyes but my body was male-normal.  Maybe adding upper body muscle mass was harder than for others but otherwise I was fairly athletic.

My physical traits:
6' tall (now 5'11")
180 to 200 lbs
Feet size 10
Sparse body hair
No hair loss

My mechanical skills are abysmal LOL.

With all that, I've known I was TS since I was 11.

When I had my blood tested for HRT my testosterone was way above average for my age and my estrogen was above the normal male range.  I thought that was kind of odd.


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My mom passed away 8 years ago, long before I began questioning my gender. I wish there were some way to find out whether she took DES, but anyone who might have known is gone.

People within the transgender community as a whole should know that there's an episode in the recent history of medicine, during which millions of pregnant women were given very high doses of a powerful artificial estrogen called DES, and that it appears to have caused very high rates of transsexuality in those exposed. The doses used were absolutely colossal. DES has similar pharmacological properties and potency to ethinylestradiol, the estrogen that's used in birth control pills. Modern combined oral contraceptive pills typically contain between 15 and 50 micrograms of ethinylestradiol. Under the standard "Smith and Smith" dosing schedule,

(taken from the 1953 "Physician's Desk Reference", a guide for doctors containing the manufacturer's recommendations for how to prescribe pharmaceuticals)

the cumulative dose over the course of a pregnancy was (if the dosing schedule was followed to the letter) 11,718 milligrams, or 11.7 million micrograms (an equivalent amount of artificial estrogen to that contained in several hundred thousand birth control pills!). The official line is that the biologically male children exposed to that treatment suffered virtually no ill effects as a result of their exposure. However, even small doses of manmade estrogens have since been shown to be capable of massively disrupting the process of male development in animals.

(the estrogen here was ethinylestradiol, a manmade estrogen with similar potency and pharmacological properties to DES)

From what I've seen, manmade estrogens have the same effect on human beings as they do on fish. It's just that,  due to the way DES was prescribed in progressively increasing doses, the exposure during the first trimester (when development of the physical sexual attributes of the fetus takes place) was relatively light, whereas the exposure during the second and third trimester (when the main thing still ongoing is brain development) was far heavier. As a result, the usual outcome for most of us is that we've ended up with a relatively normal looking male body (albeit often with genital abnormalities and subtle signs of feminization), but with a brain that has predominantly developed as female instead of male.

At first glance, we generally don't look too different from ordinary men, but very often we seem to have a subtle feminine cast to our appearance (more noticeable during our teens and twenties), and a type of body structure known as "eunuchoid habitus", that makes you look a bit like a cross between a man and a woman, and is something that's usually associated with intersex conditions. It's my opinion that these things would have been readily apparent to the doctors tasked with investigating the aftermath of the DES disaster, and they do have a fair idea of what's happened to us. However, rather than admit that they inadvertently caused several million people to be born who are biologically male but have partially developed as female instead of male, the guilty parties have instead opted to cover the whole thing up (aided no doubt by the level of shame and secrecy that surrounds intersex conditions, and anything people perceive as being mental illness).

There was a parallel disaster that took place over a similar time frame to DES, involving hormones with androgenic properties (anabolic steroids such as danazol, and first generation androgenizing progestins), that I think is likely to have produced people with the reverse situation of what happened with DES - biologically female people who look like women but have male brains. Considering how widely DES and the other gender bending hormones were used, I think they could well be the main cause of transsexuality in the over 40s age group. At the very least, there appears to be a very strong association between DES exposure and MTF transsexuality in people born prior to 1980 (by which time DES had largely been withdrawn from use).

There are now strict warnings in place against using estrogens, antiandrogens and hormones with overt androgenic properties during pregnancy. However, there are plenty of other hormones still in use that don't fall into those categories, but nonetheless have feminizing effects on adult men (e.g. corticosteroids and hydroxyprogesterone caproate). I haven't yet found anything that adequately explains why there's so many younger FTMs, but, given their past history, I suspect pharmaceutical hormones could well be the culprit there too.

My mother is 82 and her mind is going.  I was born 8 weeks premature in the early 1960's due to a detached placenta.  When I asked mom, she would not admit to specifically taking DES.  But she did admit to taking "pregnancy vitamins" which she called "horse pills."  My understanding is that back then, those "vitamins" did contain DES.

My situation is aggravated by my premature birth.  I am told that the brain selects for gender during the last ten weeks of pregnancy, and that testosterone levels are highest in little boys during that last ten weeks.  I guess I missed out on a lot of testosterone.

My mother is 90 so there is good chance that she took DES. When I had my first endocrinologist appointment during the the physical exam he asked me on three separate points during the exam if I had ever been on HRT before , I never had been.  When I was younger I wondered why I felt the way I do and it may have given me some comfort to know the cause, but at this point  knowing the cause will not change the way I am and what I have to do about it.

I'm a DES "son" as well.   Never muscular, small in stature and weight, no body hair and minimal facial hair, spontaneous breast growth, under-developed male genitals, and on and on. 

I functioned relatively well as a male for 60 years.  That's a qualified statement: there is so much about being a man that I never understood or never attempted.   I knew it wasn't who I was,  it was an approximation.

So, 5 years ago, I transitioned.   I knew early in transition that it would be an approximation too, that it was difficult to say that I'm more feminine than masculine.   But I do enjoy a good level of acceptance, and I seem to fit in society better as female than as male.    I did have SRS, and am at more peace with my body now than before.

I'm past blaming DES for who I am.  I know that I'm in gender neverland and have found peace with that.   And, really, all I want is to have peace with the world when I'm out in it.   I'm accepted better as female than as male, it's comfortable, even if not perfect.

 

From what I am seeing on my post and another post about DES, is my description of my body type and such is common among us.
I was reading about other physical things, such as carry angle and other things, which fit me as well. My bone structure is off the male charts. As I said before, I am in the small framed bracket for a woman. Elbow breadth 2.25.
Another weird thing is, that I periodically have symptoms of ovulation. Strange but true. Lol I had an ultrasound and a CT and "nothing shows up". Not sure what that is about. :0\
Some people may think of the whole DES thing as a bad thing; (which yes it was) but in a way, I think of it as a gift.
I am sooooo glad to NOT be like the "average male".
I am not really physically gender dysphoric, because I like sex with woman. Plus I am happy to have the feminine body I have. I am proud to be able to wear a size 4; almost a 2. (the 2 is just around the corner, in a healthy way)

I was born 4 weeks premature,I've always had a girls body with one exception mr penis. I stand 6,was 6'2",I never fit mens size clothes they hang on me,I've always been a woman size,women's clothes fit better.I grew breasts at 14,I'm a b cup,ring size is a 11,I wear a size 13 shoe in both mens and women's. Right now I weigh 248 and wear a size 16-18 in women's clothing which is easy too find. My middle sis was more of a boy then I was,and she isn't transgender.

I'd like to ask, I was not born before the 80's, I was born between the late 80's and the early 2000's (I know my age but don't wish to give it away), my question is, how likely is it for my mother to have been taking DES while pregnant with me? She and I have lived in the US our whole lives and I've never heard any stories of her or me traveling outside of the US. Someone below said the DES stuff was mostly withdrawn by the 80's so hoping someone knows.

My guess is that it's probably pretty unlikely.  However, DES does what it does because it's an endocrine disrupter for the baby in that it masks testosterone during fetal development.  There are other medications given to women after DES was withdrawn that can also act as endocrine disruptors. 

Maybe Hugh can elaborate on this as he has done a ton of research on the subject.


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Quote from: Shana-chan on October 31, 2015, 02:27:43 PM
I'd like to ask, I was not born before the 80's, I was born between the late 80's and the early 2000's (I know my age but don't wish to give it away), my question is, how likely is it for my mother to have been taking DES while pregnant with me? She and I have lived in the US our whole lives and I've never heard any stories of her or me traveling outside of the US. Someone below said the DES stuff was mostly withdrawn by the 80's so hoping someone knows.

If you were born after about 1980, it's unlikely to be DES. As far as I've been able to discover, the last country in Europe to withdraw it from use was Spain in 1982, and most doctors in the US (other than military doctors, who continued using it for several more years), had stopped prescribing it by the mid 1970s. However, DES was just one hormone with potentially gender bending properties to have seen use during pregnancy. There are others, and that may well include some hormone treatments still in use. In fact, if I'm right that DES interferes with male development in humans by blocking testosterone production rather than by acting as an estrogen, then any medicine that interferes with testosterone production (or prevents testosterone from acting) could potentially do the same thing.

I've found one pregnancy hormone treatment that involves high doses of a hormone with feminizing properties (called hydroxyprogesterone caproate), that certainly looks like it has the potential to interfere with normal male brain development and potentially produce MTF trans people. Under the prescribing guidelines, treatment with it doesn't commence until at least 16 weeks after conception, by which time genital development has already finished. So there's very little chance of it interfering with male genital development (unlike with DES, when the treatment was usually started earlier and some exposure often did occur during the time genital development was still taking place). However, there's heavy exposure throughout the second half of the pregnancy (which is when the differences between male and female brains appear to arise), and it's a hormone that looks like it would have strong testosterone-suppressing effects in adult men at the doses being used. So I think it's a very good candidate for a treatment that's continuing to produce MTF trans people. It's still quite widely used, and in the US is currently marketed under the brand name Makena:

http://www.makena.com/

It's given in the form of an intramuscular injection (normally weekly I think), so if your mother was given injections while pregnant with you, that could well be what it was.

Thanks, I'm not intersex (To my knowledge) but I have always looked girlish (Which is fine with me) and I was just wondering if meds were the reason I was born transgender or if it occurred normally. Looks like there's no way to really tell especially when you aren't entirely sure for ones besides DES. That said, based on what was just said, it couldn't have been DES if it was stopped in the 70's in the US.