Quote from: WolfNightV4X1 on March 29, 2018, 11:54:45 PM
I've always been a major biology nerd, so I started learning about sex differences in middle school, you know genitals, chromosomes, secondary sex traits. As we all know males are XY and females are XX.
There's a commonly held, but incorrect, belief, that X and Y chromosomes determine your sex. In fact, all being XX or XY does is determine whether you develop ovaries or testicles, everything from that point onwards is driven by hormones. This is why it's possible to have XX men (De La Chappelle syndrome) and XY women (Swyer's syndrome, Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome), as well as intersex and transgender people. Because the sex you develop as depends on what hormones were present at the time, and hormone levels aren't binary but exist on a spectrum, sex itself isn't binary but exists on a continuous spectrum ranging all the way from fully male to fully female.
Unfortunately, the notion that sex is determined by X and Y chromosomes is so deeply rooted in public consciousness that even most doctors assume it to be true. As a result, they've seen no problem with administering hormones to pregnant women, and there are literally millions of people alive today who were exposed to gender bending hormones during their prenatal development. From reading through case reports and chatting with other hormone exposed people online, exposure to these drugs can certainly be a cause of physical intersex-related abnormalities, however for most of us, the thing most affected seems to be the brain. If you look through some of the topics on this website, many of us older MTF and transfeminine people were prenatally exposed to an artificial estrogen called DES. Although I haven't seen it discussed here, elsewhere I've talked to AFAB people who were prenatally exposed to two other manmade hormones that were commonly prescribed during the 1950s and 60s, ethisterone and norethisterone, who either have masculinised personalities or are fully male-identified. Considering how hardly any of the people who were exposed to these drugs know anything about it, probably quite a big chunk of the transgender population are actually trans because of pharmaceutical hormones administered during pregnancy.
The worst offenders, DES, ethinylestradiol, ethisterone, norethisterone, danazol, had all been withdrawn from use during pregnancy by about 1980. The hormones now in use supposedly don't affect sexual development in the fetus. However, considering that the link between the earlier hormones and intersex and transgender in the exposed children has remained completely hidden from the public, who's to say that some of the hormones still in use aren't continuing to do the same thing?
Anyway, going back to the topic of this thread. I'm reasonably comfortable with my body as it is. I had a very unhappy time during my teens, and I think part of the reason was that, at a subconscious level, I was expecting to go through a female puberty rather than a male one. Having said that, if I had a fully female body, part of me would be fine with that, but another part of me wouldn't, and I think I'd have still experienced dysphoria. The thing that seems to work best for me is being androgynous, which is kind of how my body is now, so I'm fairly happy with that.