Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => Physiology & Medicine => Topic started by: thedoc on 16/09/2015 20:50:01
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Paul asked the Naked Scientists:
There are folk who think they are in the wrong body and go to Thailand,etc to have sex change operations. Why is it body following mind and not mind following body? In other words, if a chap thinks he is a woman, instead of taking medication to change his body to be more feminine, why doesn't he take medication to make him think he is a male? Surely it is easier to change the software rather than the hardware?
What do you think?
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Say Paul,
Have you, by any chance read this...?
Failed experiment: boy raised as girl dies in tragic suicide
The heartbreaking story of a baby boy whose parents were persuaded by an academic to raise him as a girl ended in deep depression and his eventual suicide. [1.]
Here is the BBC story on "Health Check" if, as I suspect, reading may not be your long suit.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00bxqfg
If that doesn't put you off diddling (without being asked to do so ) with a person's hormones to make them your version of "normal" -- perhaps you might consider moving to Arkansas where you should meet many persons who are agreeable to you.
NB: When driving through Arkansas, thoughtful people generally find it wise to head north and drive through Missouri instead.
[1.] http://www.christian.org.uk/news/failed-experiment-boy-raised-as-girl-dies-in-tragic-suicide/
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Paul asked the Naked Scientists:
There are folk who think they are in the wrong body and go to Thailand,etc to have sex change operations. Why is it body following mind and not mind following body? In other words, if a chap thinks he is a woman, instead of taking medication to change his body to be more feminine, why doesn't he take medication to make him think he is a male? Surely it is easier to change the software rather than the hardware?
What do you think?
Part of the reason is that we understand the body a whole lot better than we understand the mind.
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Since 2005 I have been looking at studies related to sexual preference. I have concluded from my studies that it is the amygdule that is hard wired to express the preference. There are two amygdule in everyone's brain. Science news had an article where it was discussing the fear reaction difference between men and women. This was the first clue where it was stated that men only use the right amygdule and women only use the left. The second clue was a report on Japanese couples wanting only male offspring. Since it is known the male choses the sex their scientists created a dye for the male sperm. Blue for male sperm and red for female sperm. On average there were 40% male 40% female and 10% had both pink and blue dye. they were separated by centrifuge.
Considering there is suspected to be 10% gay in any population we can surmise the body type being chosen differently than the male and female single sperm. Some have both sides working being the most interesting individuals because they can see both sides of an argument and be in the shoes of the other.
So being hard wired for attraction by the Amygdule has a good potential for the cause of being attracted to one sex or the other.
I have since read the actual experiment done and verification by a persons verbal choice of the sex for which they were attracted.
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Since 2005 I have been looking at studies related to sexual preference. I have concluded from my studies that it is the amygdule that is hard wired to express the preference. There are two amygdule in everyone's brain.
Amygdala (http://biology.about.com/od/anatomy/p/Amygdala.htm). After ten years study you should be able to spell it - and be able to distinguish between sexual preference and gender identity (the OP was about gender identity).
The size & connectivity of the amygdala does vary according to sexual orientation, and it's mainly involved with emotional response, so it's plausible that it has some involvement in both sexual preference and gender identity, but many other areas are also involved.
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Thanks for the spelling lesson. When you consider only the amygdala on one side or the other lights up as being used for heterosexuals, depending on there body type vs. gender identity the pathway to be crossed becomes clear when data mining. Yes other parts of the brain are involved but is that because of the crossed hard wired attraction. This remains a hypothesis but my money is on attraction (gender identity) being hard wired in the amygdala.
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I believe that sex change operations are driven by those who are selling products by capitalizing on disorientated minds, in the light of huge Government giveaways. We should not be catering to pathology, even if this will create jobs, make certain people rich and allow campaign contributions to politicians.
As an example, say I sincerely believe I was a bird, in a human body. My mind has said that I can fly, since I was a small boy, when I ran around the house pretending to fly. How would you react to this, if I still believe I could fly as an adult? Unless you are a mother who always sees her child as a child and who loves unconditionally, most would say that my body, via DNA, has a natural form and function. This has made me a human and therefore a land animal. This feeling that I am a bird is all in my imagination, because it does not jive with the cause and effect of my body or else I would have wings. There are people who eat rocks, with their body unable to process this, because their imagination has reconnected from the body.
Say a lab finds a way to add wings, through a surgical procedure. The new procedure can alter me into a cyborg, using artificial attachments and drugs, none of which is natural. This may satisfy the needs of my imagination and feelings, and may even allows others to accept see me as a flying man, because now this is physically possible to do. But now I am a cyborg and not a natural creature. My imagination was not natural because it needed an artificial bridge to interface my natural mind and body. For those who like to eat rocks, the lab developed metal teeth and a stomach attachment so they can do this.
This lab will push for these addenda to be socially acceptable, since both procedures will mean big bucks. If you can get the tax payer to pay or force the insurance companies to pay, their industry can grow. In terms of the propaganda to get the system to pay, there are enough people who reason by emotions and therefore can't reason properly, via science, who can be led to draw an emotional conclusion irrational enough to call the cyborg, natural. Now the way has been paved for this industry to grow, with campaign kickbacks going to politicians who helped the marketing spin.
Another example is, say a girl or boy wants to be the prima in the Moscow Ballet. In their imagination they see themselves dancing up a storm and leading the ballet. They really what to do this, but their DNA and body is not coordinated enough to do this. Is the first thing you will do is look for a cyborg lab, because their mind and imagination is saying prima? The answer is no, because no industry has yet formed that can drive the supply side, so they can cater ballet wannabes, who have disconnected from natural reality in favor of an artificial reality that needs cyborg attachments.
Abortion is another example of a sup side driven disconnect, where a lucrative industry has formed. This industry has convinced women that an unborn baby is a disease that should be treated through a medical procedure. This disease can give stretch marks, drive away new boyfriends or be a parasite to the wallet. This imaginary world is not natural, but is artificially disconnected for maternal instinct. It is driven by an industry that kicks back to political campaigns; corny capitalism.
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Homosexual are a norm of reality of roughly 10% in our population. It is also the norm in other species specifically observed in dolphins. While it is not the average emotional response stimuli in life it appears to be a wiring issue in the brain. There is no logical reason for life, only emotional reasons to continue life. Homosexuals have the same emotions with their attraction mechanism switched in the brain. Try walking in their shoes and consider your desires remaining the same with a switch in physical gender.
It is the discrimination factor that films try to mitigate. They are not trying to make you one of them so quit trying to make them one of you!
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Homosexual are a norm of reality of roughly 10% in our population. ... Homosexuals have the same emotions with their attraction mechanism switched in the brain. Try walking in their shoes and consider your desires remaining the same with a switch in physical gender.
As already mentioned, sexual preference, hard-wired or otherwise, is unrelated to gender identity.
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As Bored Chemist said, probably because we do understand the rest of the body better than the brain so far. On a certain level, it's hard to say what is "hardware or software" in a brain, and the analogy with computers may have its limits.
In one of his books, VS Ramachandran discusses phantom limbs, alien hand syndrome, and apotemnophilia , and he speculates that trangenderedness may be related to the way the body is mapped in the brain. He says that soldiers who have missing genitalia because of traumatic injury often have phantom limb sensations similar to what people who lose an arm or a leg experience, but that people who have sexual reassignment surgery don't. Critics have said that this might just be related to the different nature of surgery vs trauma and the preservation of certain nerves, but it's still an interesting lead.