Where Is Sex?

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by wolf

I may have missed a class ... but you are still biologically male, even if you are cosmetically and ideologically a female. You do not have the equipment to manufacture natural female hormones.

So, if you had an oophorectomy you would no longer be biologically female?

I'm in the same situation as a born woman post hysterectomy/oophoectomy. I suppose you could call my HRT 'mones "artificial", but they're definatey not synthetic; and it's the same Premarin millions of other women are taking. It's OK for me to take it without progesterone because cervical cancer isn't a factor.

A genotype "screening test" might show me as being XY. Or might not; It's never been done and I don't know. There's any number of other possibilities.

[wolf]

Originally Posted by MaggieL

So, if you had an oophorectomy you would no longer be biologically female?

Perhaps not the best analogy, but if you put a Toyota engine into a Ford, does that make it a Japanese car?

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by wolf

Perhaps not the best analogy, but if you put a Toyota engine into a Ford, does that make it a Japanese car?

You're evading my direct question by posing a bad analogy? :-)

My thoughts regarding the etiology of transsexuality are that even starting with a purely male genotype, exposure to environmental estrogens during fetal develoment can cause development of an essentially female brain. When my mom was carrying me the family lived in the shadow of the oil refineries in South Philly. Furthermore, while Mom denies it to my face, a doctor who treated her in those days told me she'd been getting hormone treatments of some kind, although he was vague about the details.


Zhou, Gooren and Swaab have done several studies on brain sex differences in transsexuals. These are still working with sparse data since the techniques require postmortem exminations of the brain, and identifying transsexual cohorts is a tricky business.

But to follow your flawed analogy, if you started building a car from scratch from Ford blueprints but switched over to Toyota plans while building the engine, would the car run more like a Japanese car? Even if it was "Body by Fisher"? :-)

[Griff]

How about an operating system / application analogy? As you were...

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Griff

How about an operating system / application analogy? As you were...

Computing operating systems and applications are designed with a single, (mostly) clean separation at the API level, so that the application and the OS can evolve independantly because of tight encapsulation.

Biological systems and subsystems don't break down that way. Having evolved together, they're more holistically interdependant.