I was wondering if any of the professionals here know anything about cases where female hormones were used on male children at a very early age; say, starting about one year old? I am looking for development of the wider pevlic bones, shoulder structure, and the seemingly more flexible ligament structure of a genetic female.
It is part of a story idea that is growing in the dirt in a dark place in the basement of my mind.
I only have personal knowlege of a little boy that was castrated by his parents, and then given what I assume to be massive doses of estrogen. His parents were dopers, so I doubt that they had any expertise at all in endocrinology.:[
When I met himher, they did not identify as any gender, and had a companion that looked similar to himher. The partner may have once been the sister. I know that there are special terms the GBLT community use for those individuals and I am NOT using them on purpose because I want to drum into the reader the depth of the outrageous assault committed against himher.
Heshe seemed to be lucid but very close to tears all the time. They seemed to almost be linked at the hip, not in a sexual sense but emotionally. They way they acted, I doubt that one of them would ever go some place with out the other. I will say that the one that had been castrated did not seem OK with what had happened.
I am mainly just interested in the potential developmental prognosis of such an individual because I really want what I eventually write to be extremely credible, and not simply fantasy smoke and mirrors. Inshallah, when I return to Portland, I will make contact with them again.
So, if any of you professionals who really have seen or heard of this sort of thing, I'd really appreciate your input.
Much peace
Khadijah
Comments
HRT
Estrogen is a puberty drug. Before I continue, I will let you know that I am 'not' a medical professional, but have done a lot of research into the subject, including actual medical journals and talking with medical professionals.
Basically, the sooner you begin HRT, the sooner that puberty begins. If the body is physically not ready, then you get some conflicting growth signals. It will begin menses in girls, and start generating some secondary sex characteristics.
Overall, the child will still look like a child, but they will have breasts, though those will likely be under-developed.
Estrogen is a growth inhibitor as well. So, the longer that HRT is run during the years when the child should be growing, the smaller they will be in relation to others their age.
Now, with all of this out of the way, a genetic male beginning HRT at 10-12 would go through a more normal female puberty, without many of the more destructive side effects.
Now, as is always possible when I'm relaying information second hand, I may have missed something important, or I might simply be completely off my rocker.
He entered the hall to get warm. She left it two hundred years later.
Faeriemage
He entered the hall to get warm. She left it two hundred years later.
Faeriemage
Pre-adolescent castration and hormones
Well, I am primarily interested in skeletal development in the pelvic and shoulder region, but I am also looking for the origin of the flexibility and grace that I have not seen in any male or Tgirl. Below is a youtube video of precisely what I am talking about. She appears to be about 10 years old, and while my own grand daughter started her mense at 8 years old, I am told that is still considered to be extremely precocious. So, I am wondering if the XX chromosomes start a little something going on well before puberty.
Most women will tell you that girl babies carry differently and act differently even in the womb. Of course me being intersexed to a still unknown degree was first evidenced in moms womb, because she used to complain that I had carried like a girl.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vprdbH91Oew
...
well, early hip-widening and early growth-plate calcification doesn't sound like a recipe for physical grace tbh (think: dwarfism, if not full then redolent of); the grace you perceived may just emanate from the personality rather than the anatomy.
Or from early and heavy behavioural conditioning from the parents. We already know they're into forced genital mutilation and chemical modification, I certainly wouldn't put behavioural conditioning beyond them.
Is this child still a child? If so you should be calling the police, not working up story ideas...
Police were too late.
I did not meet heshe until age 20 or so. But like I said, subject was only about 5'2" and about 100lbs; had butch hair cut. I do not know if subject was capable of sex, but I think subject may have much need for intimacy and that would be met by companion. The subject seemed boyish and did not seem to have hip development, though I do not know when the castration occured.
Grace
I have seen football players who carried themselves with grace off the football field. I know women who tromp over their own feet.
I don't think inborn grace is gender related. Yes, there is some loosening of the ligaments during pregnancy, but that is a temporary thing. In fact in high school and the army I was more limber than 90% of the natural born girls in my social groups.
Flexibility is primarily genetic, but can be worked on, and improved, as well. It is a function of muscle connections and length. Stretching helps to lengthen the relaxed muscle group.
Basically, from what I understand, you are looking for a child born genetically male, that carries themselves with grace and poise. That is training and mindset.
He entered the hall to get warm. She left it two hundred years later.
Faeriemage
He entered the hall to get warm. She left it two hundred years later.
Faeriemage
that sounds very messed up
And you may substitute a more eloquent word for 'messed' there at your discretion. I hope the parents are in prison. Or Hell if you believe in such things.
As for the development; I am also not an endocrinologist so caution, but pulling a few threads together from some reading around done for a story idea of my own a while back (but nothing like this):
A significant dose of sex hormones given at an early age, before puberty, would trigger an early puberty regardless of the child's sex. Yes there'd be breast growth, development of secondary sexual characteristics in general; and on a female child, an early start to periods too. Check out Wikipedia on Precocious Puberty for a few pointers.
It'll affect growth too: The 'growth plates' (epiphyseal plates) of the long bones are calcified by the action of sex hormones by the end of normal puberty, which is why we stop growing and why some intersexed people (and castrates who *aren't* then plied with sex hormones) don't, properly, and can have problems with elongated limbs. For a counter-example, consider the case of 'Ashley X' aka the Pillow Angel; who was, controversially at the time, treated with a high dose of estrogen specifically to close off her growth plates and thus keep her the size of a child, so that she'd remain easier for her parents to handle into the long term future.
My guess is a castrated boy given adult doses of estrogen all his life will not reach normal adult height. And that will be one drop in a sea of problems he'll have. As you rightly point out, this is no material for a happy fantasy.
Hormone-treated boy
Part of what I tried to cover in my "Sweat and Tears" story. Not nice.
Anti-Grace
From the medical literature, the main problem with your premise is what happens to the "long bones" when a child is exposed to gonadal hormones. They stop growing. It induces a form of dwarfism with short arms and legs. This is a particular problem for adult males with hypogonadism who elect to use transdermal hormone replacement and who have children in the household. They must be scrupulously conscientious to avoid any contact which could transfer hormones to the child's skin. Estrogenic analogues in the child's environment, such as bisphenol-a ("BPA"), which leaches out of the plastics used in teething rings and acrylic bottles, amongst other things, can cause similar problems.
So, no. If you want a tall, graceful child, by no means subject them to pubertal hormones. If anything, find a way to suppress them for a while.
How far can gender reasignment go?
So, assuming that one were able to duplicate feminine endocrinology from say, 2 years old, I wonder what would be posible? Or, more correctly, I wonder when pelvis and shoulder growth become identifiable as femiinine? I wonder how much of it comes from the brain? In pre-adolescent development, pre pubescent children are definitely male or female according to their anatomy, except in the case of the physically transgendered child.
So then, I am thinking about GID 10 or 20 years in the future. Perhaps by then, it can be detected in the womb in the later stages of pregnancy at least, or shortly after birth, whether by blood chemistry, Kariotype, or by a simple brain MRI. So then, knowing that GID is a certainty for the subject in the future, what sorts of early intervention could be developed?
In my case, I think that a sizeable part of it was that the males around me were asses; one of them being a near homicidal ass. So, when it came time to do my Oedepus stuff, and other things, perhaps I thought, "be one of those mean basterds, hardly? So even were I not GID at all, with those males, and the early conditioning as a girl by mom from Birth to about 4 years of age, maybe I was not a true GID case. Of course, that is all imaterial because I likes my present state very much.
So, with early detection and treatmen, there would be no more of those juicy boy to girl stories perhaps? And, along with early detection, perhaps by then it would be posible to implant and grow a complete suite of female organs as in one recent story.
Much peace
Khadijah
actually i wrote a story about this
It's on this site somewhere; correctable developmental anomaly i think; predicated on the idea that transsexualism can be detected and corrected in the womb, and routinely is.
If it happens, and this was my main point, then ... well, for good and ill the cultural existence of transsexuals comes to an end. There won't be people like us in the future. It'll just be fixed and the children grow up normally as the sex that matches their gender and the idea that anything else was ever possible is forgotten except as a footnote in the historical record. No-one outside of a few history professors would even know we existed.
I think for a transsexual to wish for such a thing is nihilistic and self-hating. I think we're worth more to our culture than that.
I have directed your
I have directed your attention to the case of "John/Joan" before. It is the best and so far only case of early hormone and sex change surgery on a very young person, and it ended in tragedy for everyone, except the bastard that initiated it as a social experiment to prove his theories of gender development. He lied about his results in journals and in meeting presentations, and when the true results became known, he just dropped it and experienced no great professional consequences for the wreck he made of a family's lives. He actually lived to an active professional life of 80 years. So much for the results of ethics in the social sciences.
Below I have listed some references. Go to "John/Joan Case" on your search engine for a LOT more, most the result of newspaper stories though. The ones in the Journal of Biological Science (Dr. Milton Diamond mostly) and in the American Psychiatric Journal are not available online, so you will have to go to a good library to find those if you are so inclined.
Coapinto, John
2000 "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl". Usually available for cheap in used book stores.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/12/us/david-reimer-38-subject...
Also look up D.R. Dantz and view her power point presentation on Gender and Sexual Orientation. Takes some time, about 45 minutes, but it presents a LOT of information that is well researched and you can go back and forth to get your thoughts straight.
Those are references that are most easily available.
If you want to write accurately about the effects of both early surgery and early hormone administration as it is known in the literature rather than wish fulfillment fiction, read these.
If all you want is a strange forced femme story, forget the references.
As far as the effects of early administration of hormones, the photos in the book in the first reference can give you some examples, as David grew into a more slender kid than his brother (without testosterone at puberty and early estrogen), and was more gracile (thats gracile, not graceful -- big difference -- look it up).
IIRC, Dr. Money had his parents take the kid to a doc and get hormones started at about 2 years of age along with an orchiotomy and GRS. He grew to the general appearance of a young intersexed person (Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome), which one might expect given genetics and hormonal influences. No increase in the flexibility that you are hoping for was reported, other than what might be expected from a more slender individual. Training in gymnastics from an early age and ballet could increase it, but the width of the pelvis would not be changed much, and would not be reshaped.
What you need to understand, is that there is every evidence that gender is inborn, not the result of some damn social decision of how to raise someone. Forced femme of a kid would not be very satisfactory, as the mental gender would will out, likely as severe GID as experienced by David Reimer. GID seems to be the inevitable result of such social experiments- and usually suicide - following a great deal of emotional pain, and the effects of negative social disapproval and bullying by peers of both genders and by his teachers. In Riemer's case, he was dead by his own hand by 38; his brother predeceased him by 4 years, after going through mental illness that only showed up after the big reveal of his brother's true history. 5AR--five alpha reductase deficiency -- is an intersexed condition that becomes apparent at puberty, making an apparent girl into an apparent male, has a better outcome most of the time due to cultural acceptance in the small village in Mexico it where it seems most frequent. However, not all five alpha kids select to be male, and many continue in a female role despite physical changes.
CaroL
CaroL
The same sort of problem is rampant in Palestine.
And, though poorly reported, I think it could be wide spread in the Middle East where people sometimes marry cousins.
K
Talking about GID in 10 or 20 years.
One of the earliest diseases that man learned to cure was Leprosy. Once it was a huge stigma now it can be arrested in as little as two weeks of treatment. Over the centuries, scores of diseases have either been eradicated or greatly reduced. Cancer is one of the last Diseases that needs to be cured.
I'd rather have been aborted than to face the solution they have to GID right now.
Confusion here?
In the comments I read above as well as the original question it seems to me everyone is getting confused, or perhaps the references they quote point to confused people.
What I mean is, the cases quoted indicate people who were prepared to physically modify the subject's body in order to make them grow up as a particular gender.
However, we here all know that 'gender' is as much in the mind as it is in the body: all the people I mention above obviously think that the mind and the body are one, whereas we know different, don't we?
What we all would prefer is that our bodies would get changed to match what our brains think we are. The quacks mentioned above think it's going to happen the other way round. Bong. Wrong.
Some of us are purely female in the mind, some of us are partly female in the body as well. Most of the population - including most medical practitioners - don't understand any of this. All they see is the surface, or what they think the surface ought to be.
Penny
Yes, I was speaking only of physiology
Being one who has dubiously been gifted with such a brain/body mismatch, I understand what you are saying perfectly. Perhaps I should have stated my parameters more specifically.
There simply is not enough known yet about the brain, though some people are doing some really good work. And, in my case, perhaps my GID is not that at all but a venemous rejection of my birth gender simply because I used to see males as such barbarians; totally undeserving of the oxygen they consume; and should have rightfully been burning in the fires of hell. I can not state my hatred of males strongly enough, though I did give it a go. Then to add insult to injury, I was one. Talk about self loathing !
As I tried to state in my initial entry, my interest was primarily in Pelvis and shoulder development. To the casual observer, one pelvis is like another until we have a male and female pelvis side by side. I had always assumed that the birth canal in the female pelvis was just big enough, but then I find that the connective tissue in the front of the pelvis stretches during birth, making it much bigger. I can not even imagine such a thing.
:)
Khadijah
Pelvis development
This happens primarily during puberty. HRT around the time of puberty would likely result in the proper "female" pelvis.
Shoulder width is guided more by DNA, but should be less broad if HRT is applied at the time stated before.
Depending on when HRT is started, you might simply get a pelvis growth somewhere in between a man or a woman, but there should be at least some expansion if started soon enough, and by that I mean 11 years old or up to a couple of years later.
He entered the hall to get warm. She left it two hundred years later.
Faeriemage
He entered the hall to get warm. She left it two hundred years later.
Faeriemage
Pelvis, shoulders
I'm not sure whether I count as purely mental GID or partly physical as well. Although I never realised it, my shoulders were always very narrow until my mid twenties. It was only when I had to clear out a wardrobe and tried on the suit I had specially made for my wedding that I discovered I couldn't get into the jacket: the shoulders were too narrow.
I had bulked out by then since I had spent some time almost rebuilding an old Victorian house (floors, ceilings, rewiring, plumbing). Almost all of the extra shoulder width is floating, the connective tissue between the shoulder blades is too weak to hold them in place. The only thing that holds them on is the (narrow) collar-bones. If I wear a shoulder brace they go back all the way.
Added to that my chest is narrow and my hips are large and you can see where I'm going with this. I can't get comfortable trousers at all, I have to buy much larger than I need and then pull in with a belt. My natural waist is ridiculously high, too. Oh, I can buy trousers that fit but I would never be able to sit down in them. I can't wear men's underpants either. They just don't make any that I find comfortable. For the last 25 years I have worn Sloggi Maxi-briefs except when visiting the Hospital ;)
I have underbust 34", waist 32" and hips 40" - there's a pot but not much. The pelvis, unfortunately, is a male configuration, not female, but it lets me look natural wearing skirts. I guess that the instructions were there but my body didn't hear them right. No wonder I was crap at sports, although there was no wish to do them anyway.
Men? I just have zero interest in them. I don't hate them, I'm just not interested.
Penny