Cowabungaa said:
Nope, because I just don't like men. Yes, I know they appear to be women, sometimes in many assets, but in the end they're still men; they have the genes of a man, started out with the reproductive organs of a man and can't get babies as a result.
And no I don't think that's shallow. I don't count not being gay as being shallow. And see it like this; more transgenders for everyone else!
This is actually incorrect, and the result of a lack of education and awareness on Gender Dysporia and other trans-related conditions. The trans community is very varied, but let's make this easy and stick with transsexuals, since transgendered individuals can cover people who live full time in the opposite gender, but remain their birth sex, and also include transvestites, and a whole range of variants.
Firstly, to understand growth and development, you need to understand the roles of genes and hormones. MtF transsexuals are women, because they have the female hormonal profile, and therefore grow and develop like women. Genes code proteins, which guide growth through organ development and hormonal distribution, which is normally sexed.
The development of genitalia occurs in two main phases - pre-natal foetal development from stem-cells, and puberty. Also, at puberty, the secondary function of genitalia activates, which is to produce sex hormones to further direct growth. This results in a positive feedback cycle - that is, from a stem cell, you start male, and become increasingly male, or you start female, and become increasingly female. The genes in the original stem cells normally code for the right hormones to trigger the right hormones.
However, this can be interrupted fairly easily. The foetus shares the hormonal environment of it's mother, and an hormonal imbalance can result in the foetus developing the wrong genitalia and thus throwing out the system entirely. A female can become male, simply because of too much testosterone in the mother at a critical point during pregnancy. During puberty, when the male genitalia activates, it just increases the issues, because while the genes are coding for female, the hormones from the testes is coding male.
It should be remembered that the key driver of puberty is the pituitary gland, which is virtually the same in males and females, but codes relevant to genes, and provides a supplementary amount of hormones compared to the genitals, once activated.
Out of interest, testosterone is actually converted into oestrogen in both males and females, but females are able to convert much more. Any issues converting testosterone to oestrogen can also be another cause of transsexuality, and is why there are more MtF transsexuals than FtM (besides the success rate and sociological factors) when purely biological conditions are considered.
Finally, if anyone has actually looked at the anatomy of the vagina, you will actually realise that the construct of the clitoris is, in fact, the construct of the penis and testies. This is because, before sexualization of the foetus starts, it actually grows as a female. It is very small, and within only a few weeks, when sexualization starts, and this is when the sexual characteristics will start to emerge and you can actually begin to tell the sex of the foetus.
Vaginoplasty for MtF transsexuals doesn't really work because it basically creates a wound in the abdomen, and then turns the head of the penis into an engorged clitoris. Unfortunately, despite hormones, the head of the penis is still often about ten times the size of the female clitoris, and that isn't always pretty.
FtMs have it worse, because they essentially take the clitoris, and then use arm muscle to create the shaft of a penis, but even if a lot of testosterone, the enlarged clitoris simply does not grow big enough to work, and the arm muscle does not have the tensile strength for full penetration. Interesting fact - the muscle strength and thickness of the penis increases by 80% during puberty. If that actually happened to other muscles like arm muscles, we wouldn't actually be able to move our arm - but would be able to punch through brick walls and solid steel sheets.
It's likely that only advances in stem cell research, which will allow for the creation of new organs, including sex organs, will actually solve these issues. More importantly, this will also solve the issue of reproduction. What you are basically looking at is the process of genital transplants, which will become a fundamental aspect of medical research within the next 50 years.
When this does happen, and it will, unless you would reject someone because they've had a heart transplant, there will be no way to know whether or not the person you are with was born male or female, and whether that is relevant.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people here on the Escapist would go with a genetically engineered space alien if they were happy and getting laid at the end of it all. That's what it comes down to - judging and prejudice is for n00bs!
