From the UK Times 19 March 2018

Transgender men and women may carry genetic variants that influence their gender identity, a study suggests.

It is the first time researchers have identified a panel of genes, including DNA involved in the development of nerve cells and the manufacture of sex hormones, that could provide a biological basis for gender dysphoria. The findings add to the growing evidence that transgender people have fundamental differences in their brains and biochemistry that may help to explain why they feel at odds with their birth sex. “It lends legitimacy, if that needs to be added, that transgender is not a choice but a way of being,” Ricki Lewis, a geneticist and author of textbooks, said. “I think people will be excited by this.”

There are thought to be between 300,000 and 500,000 trans men and women in the UK, a very small minority of whom have undergone gender reassignment surgery. Other estimates for the prevalence of transgenderism vary hugely, from 0.3 to 5 per cent of the population.

Trans rights campaigners and their allies have long argued that being transgender is not a lifestyle choice but rather the resolution of a deep-rooted conflict between mind and body.

The new study, led by John Theisen at Augusta University in Georgia, may be the strongest vindication of this argument to date. The scientists sequenced the DNA of 14 female-to-male and 16 male-to-female transgender people and looked for genetic variants that were common in these groups but turned up in fewer than one in 10,000 people in the wider population. They found 30 such variants, nine of which were in genes known to be implicated in the growth of brain cells or the production of sex hormones such as oestrogen and testosterone.

Dr Theisen stressed that his team’s research was in its early days, with a relatively small number of subjects involved and no proof as yet that any individual variant was involved in gender dysphoria.

The study, which was presented this month at a meeting of the Society for Reproductive Investigation in San Diego, California, has yet to go through peer review and some of its findings may be down to chance. Nevertheless, its preliminary results tally with more than half a dozen other papers that suggest there is something distinctive about the neurobiology of transgender people.

MRI scans carried out by several groups of neuroscientists suggest that some structures and mechanisms in trans people’s brains resemble those of the gender with which they identify more closely than those of their birth sex. Others indicate that the areas of the brain implicated in the perception of self are less well connected to regions that process the perception of the body in trans men and women than in cisgender people, who identify with their birth sex.

Ten years ago a team led by Vincent Harley, a molecular geneticist at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research in Victoria, Australia, found that male-to-female transgender people were much more likely to have a particular variant in the CYP19 testosterone receptor gene than cisgender men. Professor Harley said that it would be exciting if the new findings could be confirmed in a larger study.

What a relief to be back. For the second time, I disappeared from Flickr - no idea why or who pulled the switch. Chose 'phoenix' to celebrate, but mis-spelled it.

Sooooooooooooo looking forward to finding all my old friends again.

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A brief history of Debra (lifted from original page)

Yes, it began at the age of four. To my memory, that is, but maybe earlier because when I was four years old my mother took me to a neurologist – there were no child psys in Britain then. He gave me an encephalogram and a lecture about growing up to be a soldier and obeying orders swiftly OR ELSE YOU’LL BE IN TROUBLE WITH THE SERGEANT MAJOR!!!!!!!!! Oh, they were subtle in those days.

He could not have said worse. Little boys of my age in the middle of WW2 knew what happened to soldiers and I didn’t want to grow up, just to lie down dead in some corner of a foreign field. Although my mother never spoke about that little adventure afterwards, she must have understood something of the gender confusion inside my head, to drag me all the way to that particular neurologist in London in the middle of the Blitz.

Since then, it has gone on for seventy years. There have been intervals when dressing was not possible and I had to abstain, but my depression cycle always kicked in; the two years in uniform were hell, with some near-suicidal moments. Afterwards, I thought that marriage and regular sex might cure me. You’re supposed to guess the answer to that! Salvation of a sort came with a creative job that left me little time or energy for dressing and exploring my inner self, but I was not a very happy bunny.

Then I met Wife No 2 – the woman who gave both of me a new lease of life. Poking into my psyche on our second or third all-night date, she immediately said, ‘We must get you a proper wardrobe and some wigs.’ Ten words like a key letting you out of a prison. Having been in one during the Cold War, I do not use the simile lightly. Five-ten in my stockinged feet, with broad shoulders and a thick neck that a dress with roll-over collar disguises quite well, plus a voice that’s too deep, I confess to only going out accompanied by her, and then in very busy places like London’s Oxford Street, cruising the shops, taking in the odd restaurant. But since my professional work is done at home, nobody is going to ask me what I wear when I’m doing it. Actually, I do recommend a corset to anyone who, like me, spends hours each day at a keyboard. No back ache!

A little philosophy

Why do we need so desperately to dress in women’s clothes and spend hours or days, not as women, but as close as we can be? My rationale is this. The perfect form of any mammalian animal is the female. In French, ‘mammal’ is translated as 'mammifère' meaning literally ‘breast-bearing’. The male of any mammalian species, including homo sapiens, is a modified female. The foetus always begins female, but tiny doses of hormones from the mother trigger modifications during development of a future male child. The most obvious are the stitching-up (and it’s so crude, isn’t it?) of the vulva slit from anus to tip of penis. Thus stitched together in the womb, it forms a sac from the labia into which the testicles must descend from the gonad position in the abdomen, where ovaries remain. ‘Scrotum’ just means a purse or pouch in Latin. Cooler suspended therein than at body temperature, testicles fulfill their purpose of making sperm, which is not possible at body temperature.

And what about the penis? You don’t have to be Muslim to be one of millions of men who are so proud they’ve got one, believing it proves they are superior to women. News for them: it’s nothing more than a deformed and overgrown clitoris, extended and pierced by the urethra, not for peeing – women manage perfectly well without one – but to convey sperm as far as possible into a vagina. A real woman has a clitoris for pleasure, a urethra for urinating and a vagina (Latin again – means a sheath) for copulating. We have to make do with one compromised organ for all three purposes.

And the breasts and nipples? We still have them, betraying our female origin. Some of us genetic men have more breast tissue than others, indeed more than some women. I was tormented about this by boys during gym periods at school and sports lessons until I decided at the age of thirteen to forge a medical alibi for never stripping off in front of other boys again. Didn’t help me in the forces where, in conditions of near-zero privacy, I endured the same mockery again.

But the bonus is that I can fill a b cup without prostheses or hormones! Oh, a little help from an under-breast corset from Les Trois Suisses, which pushes them up and a traditional corselette from M and S, which pulls everything together nicely.

Conclusion

Really, we’re not invading a woman’s world, as some have hypothesized here. It is women who have invaded most formerly male activities since being drafted into the factories in two world wars. No, reversing the ‘forced feminisation’ fantasies, we’re just getting back to what we originally were: little girls who were forced by family or social convention to be boys for a while. Isn’t it fun?

Oh, I do hope my favourites don't shock. None of them is what I consider porno, but breasts, beautiful breasts, are my obsession - on nubile girls, older women and those TG sisters who are going further along the road. They don't have to be firm and pert. In fact heavy breasts that flop down without a bra are an especial favourite.