What Makes Us FTM (trans men)?

What Makes Us FTM?

There are a variety of theories about what makes us FTM. It’s my belief that it starts in the womb, when the brain is masculinized but the body is feminized, due to a mistake in the sequence of hormonal “baths” that the fetus is exposed to. Interestingly, it has in fact been proven by scientists that one can deliberately create FTM monkeys by manipulating prenatal hormones.

Robert Goy and his co-researchers in the mid 1980s showed that it was possible to masculinize female monkeys by exposing them to the male hormone androgen prior to birth. This resulted in the birth of biologically female monkeys that behaved exactly like male monkeys throughout their lives. The researchers argued that this could be an explanation for the human phenomenon of transsexualism. Another prominent researcher and theorist in this field, Dr. Milton Diamond, put it this way:

The brain and the genitals can be differentiated and develop independently … [I]t’s conclusive for monkeys. And I happen to think, with this matter, that we can extrapolate to humans. (Kotula, 53)

Similar conditions to those that the researchers artificially set up occur naturally when pregnant humans are exposed to stress, and it has been noted that many of the babies that were in vitro during the London Blitz subsequently turned out to be transgendered.

This theory fits the way I have experienced my life. My body was unequivocally female, but my brain has always been entirely convinced that I am male. This conviction remained absolutely intact despite decades of social pressure from my family and my society. This amount of societal pressure should have been irresistible, yet I resisted it.

This seems to be the common thread with FTMs: we believe that we have a male gender (mind) but a female sex (body), and therefore we are usually uncomfortable with being classified as members of the female gender. And no amount of social pressure can convince us otherwise.

Is this the way you experienced your gender?

The above post is excerpted from my book, How I Changed my Gender from Female to Male. You can look inside this book and see the table of contents by clicking on the Amazon link below.

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