GenderLife Forum: The Information Exchange

From the UK Telegraph :



Sounds like a Type II, the most common variety. All other cases of "Idiopathic Partial Sex Reversal" (that's not the official name, it doesn't have one yet) have had female gender identities. There's only been just over a dozen recorded, including my own. (Type III - the quick one)

This guy has just acquired instant FtoM transsexuality.

Not Good. Very Not Good.

I saw before and after pics of this man on the news. What a scam.

This person has willingly changed their hair style and eyebrows and is wearing lipstip in the picture.

They also claimed in the news story that I read that they have lost their facial hair. HA! Tell that to all the TS's that have spent thousands of har earned dollars on hair removal.

Seems to me that this person was either self medicating or even getting hormones through another source and has now decided to reverse their transition. The news story I read said that the doctors were "baffled". Any doctor who is baffled by this should turn in their medical license and become a tabloid reporter instead.

Umm, i have a feeling that "idiopathic partial sex reversal" will never have an official name, because it's generally more like ageing, or general diversity between the sexes that accounts for what is seen as "cross gendered" "feminine" or "masculine" stereotypes.

I am certain, based on my reading in the biological sciences, that among all the genes in the human genome, some of them are identical with genes from amphibians.

Of course, they generally do not act in the same manner as they do in amphibians. There are other genetic material that affects the timing of the gene action.

Amphibians are known for having sex reversals in response to altered conditions (a fictional version of this is in Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton).

It is entirely possible for the same phenomenom to occur in humans. However, I do believe it is a rare phenomenom in human adults.

Given that he's under the care of Professor Ross of Sheffield University, I think you're probably wrong.

But then, the same kind of thing happened to me in 2005, and I faced the same degree of scepticism, and even hostility, here at Callie's. Elsewhere too. Others who have had it have had the same experience.

The people who have FtoM natural transitions due to 5ARD or 17BHDD don't face nearly the same problems. They're far more common, maybe 1 in 70,000 in the USA. So their conditions have been well studied. Almost 5000 in the USA alone vs less than 20 worldwide for us.

From "Gender change in 46,XY persons with 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency and 17beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-3 deficiency". by Cohen-Ketternis:

Weirder stuff happens than most people are aware of.

Well I can tell you that the pictures you posted and the time frames you attached to them never seemed valid to me. Maybe I was wrong but hair doesn't grow as quickly as those time lines portrayed in my opinion.

Whatever each of us is or has ever been isn't really the point though. I think skepticism is healthy and doesn't necessarily conflict with acceptance. To me its simply a matter of love others as yourself. Strive to also know thyself and encourage others to do the same.

I would not be surprised if the reporters made him up just for the interview. But yeah, the first thing that came to my mind was that he was taking hormones and lying about it.

Also, baldness in men has been linked to high amounts of estrogen in men. But baldness on the face? Seems unlikely.

Here's that photo.

http://www.nowpublic.com/strange/she-man-0

I always hate it when mysterious ailments make me tweeze my eyebrows...

Doubtless, the eyebrows fell out too and now he is forced to draw then on with eyebrow pencil.

Isn't this the perfect technique to get away with transitioning without telling your family? Take hormones, get electro on your whole head so you have to wear a wig and makeup, pretend you are going to the doctor to get treated for it, and when the newspapers show up for the story, say "I just want to go back to being a normal man!"

Glad you see the ruse. That makes you an Atty. - LOL.

I wore a wig when I started going fulltime (oddly enough), and ditched it 6 months later.

Yes, and keeping the normally male testosterone levels is a neat trick too. Maybe be injected just before each blood test, then went back on the anti-androgens?
Or doesn't taking HRT suppress T levels any more?

Then there's being able to fool not just the local medics, but expert endos too. Maybe because no endo has ever seen anyone taking HRT on the sly before, so can't recognise it when they see it.

Had it not been for the Telegraph - not the Sun tabloid - doing the investigative journalist work, and finding out the names of his medical team, I would have been more sceptical too.

It is my understanding that moderate estrogen doesn't put much of a ding in testosterone production, hence the anti-androgen component as well.

I'll admit I'm not that up to speed on this, since various t-blockers and anti-androgens were not a component of hormone therapy back when I went through the process.

No offense intended Zoe. Even my skepticism is just speculation, and mostly for humors sake.

I suspect we will hear more of this story. It could be very real, partly real or a total lie. I also suspect we shall never know the complete story though.

umm...normally I like to keep silent about it but a few people here know about it soo..

During my 5 year physical while in the US Navy I disclosed to the medic doing it that I had some issues growing up. He was a bit of a..a...well he was a bigoted a-hole. We were stationed in Key West and this guy was a rabid evangelical Christian. He was insistent that I needed to get a double radical mastectomy to be 'happy' and to stay in the navy because it wasn't natural for a 'guy' to have breasts.

I was shocked, but said that I would think about it. (half heartedly I admit and I think he read that from what he did later) I mean, I had gynocomastica when I joined and they didn’t tell me that I needed to be butchered to join and everything I’d heard up to then was that navy plastic surgeons were the worst of the worst and shouldn’t be allowed to even call themselves veterinarians let alone doctors.

So he ran tests instead, more specifically a set of hormone panels and drug screenings.

I was ordered back to medical when the results came back and was confronted by this jerk (and I’m being nice here). He called me into an exam room and accused me of taking hormones and stuff and was going to get me kicked out of the navy. The only thing that saved me was the fact that he was only a Chief and although he could do all kinds of paperwork it takes an officer (and in this case a medical officer) to sign off on the paperwork.

So he took me and the results to my squadron’s new flight surgeon.

The new flight surgeon was a nice guy who said that the results could be wrong (680 nm per dl estrogen/ low 200m, per dl testosterone) that the lab could have made a mistake or switched something around and that it would be prudent to redo the labs before starting any paperwork like report chits or actual charges. So the labs were re-drawn and I got to pee in cup.

I didn’t know it, but a feud had just started between the Chief and the Flight Surgeon. (the main feud between them wasn’t me, I was a side issue. It was the fact that the Chief was an evangelical Christian who thought god had put him in Key West to bring god into the heathen gay’s lives. The new squadron flight surgeon was not just good but a great doctor and real nice guy. He came up from the ranks himself and was a Vietnam Vet who was a devil doc at Da-Nang during the height of the conflict. In other words he was the best squadron flight surgeon I ever had the privilege of serving with. Oh, and I think it rankled the Chief that the Doc came from NS Alameda with his boyfriend….hey, doctors are not a dime a dozen, especially combat experienced ones.

The results came back similar as before and again labs were done with similar results. I was told to stop eating and drinking anything at work or in the barracks and to avoid the people I worked with (there was no galley (chow hall) on the base, the termites ate it up. So we all had to fend for ourselves by eating at cheap places or making sandwiches and having cold cans of beans. I wasn’t very popular with a lot of senior personnel, too ‘girly’ as some would put it.

About 5 or 6 sets of labs were drawn. The levels stayed around high 500’s to 700’s nm per dl of estrogen (wicked high) and low 200’s to high 300’s nm per dl of testosterone.

Eventually he gave up and said that I was just weird, that those levels were normal for me. But, not before giving me a huge scare. These labs were drawn over about a 3 month period and about half way through that period he actually gave me pre-natal vitamins “just in case”.
So yeah, it’s possible for a ‘guy’ to have abnormal hormone level s naturally. It’s also possible for those levels to change dramatically. Form me it happened at 40 when (hey, unless you got another name for it) I went through menopause and my hormone levels over a 8 month period swung from the old levels to 120 nm per dl falling to low 80’s of estrogen and mid-600’s nm per dl claiming to 1800 of testosterone.

With the flight surgeon at the time going “well, that’s normal” (idiot).

For 8 months I felt like crap until I got used to the new levels. I only felt a little bit better until I started HRT and now my hormone levels are a bit closer to the older labs. I’m in much better shape, during my ‘menopausal period’ a lipid lab disclosed the fact that I had cholesterol levels through the roof with a combined level of nearly 900 almost all of it the bad kind and triglycerides of over 600. They actually put me in a program for those who’ve had heart attacks . Haven’t had one yet… , my last lipid lab was 120 combined 80 high density and 40 low density cholesterol with triglycerides of 80…maybe they swapped the labs? I feel good.

So yeah, it’s possible for someone to have some seriously skewed hormone levels and not be on anything.

Yes, I know that it is possible.

However, hormone levels, no matter how skewed, don't pluck eyebrows or apply lipstick all by themselves, all while the person with the skewed levels protests "I just want to be a normal man!" If he just wanted to be a normal man he'd have been calling a surgeon, screaming "Get these moobs off of me!"