What causes a person to need a sex change?

submitted by zyxzevn from self.AskScience

I tried some hypotheses myself:

Psychological

  1. The person has a disturbed personality or hates his/her current body. Likely caused by traumatic past.

  2. Weaker personality. The person is influenced easier. And tries to adapt to the role that he/she have with his/her friends or family.

  3. Constant and strong influence of people telling him/her that he/she needs to change.
    More like gaslighting

  4. The person is sexually a gay. Wants to be attractive to the same sex. ("Gay with tits")

  5. The person is sexually a freak. Wants to be in the same room with women.

Biological

  1. A person has XXY or other weird chromosomes. Or has a rare dual sex condition, Hermaphrodite like a worm.

  2. A person had exposure to sex-changing chemicals. Or like Alex Jones said: "They are making the frogs gay".
    These chemicals can be in water, in medicine. Even overuse of etheric lavender-oil caused breast-forming on a boy.

  3. A person has exposure to chemicals that has psychiatric side-effects.
    This may give a person a different feeling about his/her body. It could be for treatment of something else, like ADHD or certain vaccines.

  4. Diseases with psychological side-effects.

Social pressure

  1. The person is not allowed to be normal.

  2. The person needs to change to "succeed", like in sports.

Please discuss or add any other points.

Thumb: https://i.imgur.com/bVRo6zO.png

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[–]C_Mot 7 insightful - 1 fun7 insightful - 0 fun8 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Insecurity and grooming from the trans community

[–][deleted] 5 insightful - 1 fun5 insightful - 0 fun6 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Insanity and grooming from the trans community.

Insanity in the form of no sense of identity, which is the "door wide open" for all kinds of psychoses. The trans kind is just the easiest for young people to "catch".

You know, there used to be this thing called "bad thoughts" or "thoughts inspired by" evil/satan/whatever. And people would push back on such thoughts, acknowledging their foreign, troublesome and ultimately destructive origins.

But now people self-identify to thought, which nothing has ever demonstrated originates from the being itself. It could all be a huge telepathic prank played by extradimensional beings and we would never know it. Actually, we might, given that the current social freakshow is starting to make it look like precisely that.

[–]Newmug 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Nobody "needs" a sex change. Since when did changing someones genitalia ever have an impact on how much food and water they need to survive?

[–]v3r3na 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Just a few more theories from my impressions:

  • They have a set of character traits atypical for their sex and don't want to belong to a group that seems to made up mainly of people with traits they dislike. Instead of just accepting that they have unusual interests and preferences compared to people of their sex, they choose to deny that they are female/male.
  • I've seen many photos of transwomen who use tons of makeup and dress like an exaggerated caricature of a woman. I don't think this is only overcompensation. With their flamboyance they seem to have a very strong desire to be seen by other people. Maybe that's also why some are so insistent on other people to address them by specific pronouns: they care too much how others see them.

[–]AnotherClosetAtheist 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Total hypothesis by me below. I do have to admit that I do have a gene-centric bias as influenced by the arguments in The Selfish Gene. Not all of these bullets come from that book, but are influenced by it.

  • Genes are replicating entities whose sole purpose is to make copies of themselves.

  • Genes use multiple tactics [I apologize for personifying them, it's just handy to employ the language] to outcompete other genes in a resource-constricted environment. Some of these tactics include creating bodies to carry them, and combining with other genes, etc.

  • As far as mammals are concerned, we typically have a female part of the species that makes large, immobile, nutritive eggs, and a male part of the species that makes multiple, mobile, non-nutritive sperm.

  • Mammals create their sperm and eggs through recombination of each copy of the DNA they inherited from their parents.

  • There are multiple regions of the brain, each developed by natural selection

  • There is a region of the brain where our consciousness is "located." Whether that consciousness only resides on one section, a few, or is the result of the interplay of them all is another debate entirely. For now, I will only say that we have consciousness, that it is a function of our brain, which again is the result of natural selection.

  • Animal bodies are driven by natural selection. The body is not the true unit of selection, but rather the genetic variations and recombinations that make that body. These genes' ability to make a body for the purpose of replicating themselves is how they are selected.

  • There has been observed in the wild, and described in evolutionary terms, certain runaway feedback loops in mate attraction. Specifically, the story of the peacock's plumage and other exaggerated, and seemingly-unnecessary bodyparts on other animals, is one of these stories. There is a balance that peacocks must strike between attracting a mate and not getting eaten before they can. Large tails inhibit their ability to avoid predation, but the off-set occurs with how often they get to mate. Peacock genes which produce very large peacock tails tend to replicate themselves more genes that make small peacock tails, even though those peacocks may not get eaten as often.

Okay, let me synthesize those bullets.

Genes control your body, what you look like. Genes control what you are attracted to. Genes recombine as well.

As far as being attracted to one sex or another, genes for being attracted to males may only exist in female genes, and genes for being attracted to females may only exist in male genes. However, there may exist a mechanism where those genes for attraction get flipped in the recombination process for making eggs and sperm. Or perhaps it could be the result of a mutation. This could account for both the existence of homosexuality, and why it is in a minority of cases.

As far as identifying as one gender or another, I'd reference my bullets on consciousness, because my gut tends to trend that direction -- that genes control the development of the brain hardware, and consciousness and the concept of identity and social interaction might be manifestations of firmware or software.

I think that genes still are the dominating force in self-identity. Most people just "feel" it rather than "learn" it.

[–]Newmug 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Great post!