- hey, I thought this was interesting, idk if you have seen it or not
20 minutes ago
Marié-Louise Dippenaar- I haven't seen that, actually. Thanks for sending it.
Here are my thoughts.
This is pretty decent media for an uneducated ear. The presentation is logical and concise and, in terms of presentation, appropriate to people that have never thought about it before. But if I'm to regard the video as an intellectual, the whole first half of the video is strangely evasive of the topic of GD... if it were more scholarly I'd call it transphobic, but there's only so much you can put into a video like this, and I understand the family might not have been comfortable with a full-blown gender analysis if the kid had not yet come to any conclusions himself. But if the kid is displaying "severe gender nonconformity," he's not just likely to turn out gay, he's likely to be trans (sure, often straight, but that's statistically probable). I can't say from the video whether it's a valid diagnosis to say the boy has gender dysphoria, but I can definitely say that there tends to be a very dangerous false correlation-causation thing between gender presentation and sexuality.
Yes, obviously, quite obviously, effeminate men are vastly more likely to be gay than masculine men. But that's not because being feminine turns you gay, it's because the same hormones that affect gender also seem to affect the degree of homosexuality of the kid exposed. I haven't done the research myself, and quite frankly I can't guarantee the credibility of the people that originally inspired this idea in my mind. But I have done a lot of reading about embryology and the brain both about and independent of orientation, and this is what seemed most probable.
So, just to establish a base I'm not sure you've covered in terms of biology, there are three basic sex hormones relevant to embryonic development: estrogen, testosterone, and androgen. They've got lots of different roles - it's really complicated, and I don't remember everything - but for the purposes of this discussion, what's relevant is that obviously estrogen is feminizing, testosterone is masculinizing, and androgens affect anatomical differentiation in embryos. Sex develops during weeks 4-8, and it can develop to differing degrees based on the presence of androgen. The way androgen causes the gonads to form then affects testosterone/estrogen production in the future, which has the affect of feminizing/masculinizing the child. But after this early sexual development, there are external hormones that impact the brain and later gender development in the third trimester. Hormone levels in the amniotic fluid can spike, gonadal development can be other than typical, etc. Sometimes it's literally that the gonads develop differently from chromosomes and brain (so a female child with male parts or vice versa); sometimes it's that amniotic hormone levels were such while the brain was developing that dimorphic regions for gender were affected; sometimes only dimorphic sex regions are affected. A number of explanations have been presented for these spikes: maternal diet, maternal regulation in terms of how much estrogen/testosterone actually reaches the fetus (whether via amniotic fluid or directly into the bloodstream), etc.
I did a presentation in Anatomy last semester (which I titled "'Tween the Ears, Not the Legs") on the regions of the brain that are dimorphic between genders: the Splenium (the part of the Corpus callosum that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) is typically larger in women, explaining the tendency for women to be able to think about more things at once...(FTMs have overwhelmingly masculine measurements, and MTFs feminine). The sexually-dimorphic nucleus in the Hypothalamus is responsible for sexual desire, and its development is caused by hormone levels .... nothing fancy. It's rather unclear if that happens in utero or growing up, but if hormone levels change and certain parts of the nucleus grows and atrophies etc, it makes sense that sexual attraction can shift over time. It's interesting how the biological correlates work; surprisingly enough, gay men are found to have very similar measurements in the hypothalamic dimorphic nucleus to straight women, and gay women to straight men. There's another region of the brain (I'll just abbreviate and call it the BSTc) that affects gender perception... It goes on and on.
And it's all hormones, really. I mean, environment affects hormone secretion, and it seems entirely possible to me that factors like family life could lead to psychological processes that affect those areas of the brain and trigger activation/deactivation of certain areas of the brain, affecting growth and atrophy. If the anatomy's being activated and deactivated and sometimes even growing/shrinking, if hormone levels are fluctuating, there's no reason it shouldn't be able to change GIVEN that there ARE in fact a bunch of funky things happening biologically. If it's changing, there's got to be some kind of biological correlate. We live in our brains, after all.
Check out these links for more reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_hormones_and_sexual_orientation
http://www.shb-info.org/sexbrain.html
http://www.genderpsychology.org/psychology/BSTc.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexually_dimorphic_nucleus
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