Just curious. Don’t need answer fast. I watched a Netflix movie tonight with a M to F transsexual part.
When females become pubescent they start to develop breasts due to hormonal changes. Some develop large breasts very early on. Some females never develop large breasts. That seems to indicate that the size of the breasts has little to do with hormones and more to do with genetics. Otherwise, females that want larger breasts would just be getting hormone treatments, not implants.
When a male decides to become a transsexual they undergo hormonal treatment. They take doses of female hormones. It’s my understanding that it promotes development of the breasts.
So, to the question . . . do some males who transition to being a female develop extremely large breasts? Does it ever get to the point where they would elect breast reduction surgery? If not, why not?
The problem for most MtF transexuals now is that they weren’t allowed to transition before or at puberty. So they had the physical effects of testosterone happen to their bodies. This includes a broadening of the shoulders and chest, and a deepening of the chest cavity if you measure from front to back. That’s not reversible to modern medicine. Even when you later take drugs to block testosterone and female hormones to develop the breast tissue, you’re still going to end up with developed breasts on a broad, deep chest. That makes some women unhappy with the visual results, because they don’t look like breasts that were developed at puberty. They may be large, but they’re too far apart.
If you’re one of those people who didn’t get a real broad, deep chest when you went through puberty, it’s not so noticeable. And those women are the ones you probably don’t know are transexuals when you see them at the office or on the bus, and their breasts are like any other woman’s.
Now that we’re beginning to treat transexual children and teenagers, it may someday be a problem of the past.
It depends on genetics heavily, but very much on the age at which a transwoman takes hormones. Those who are “blocker babies” and take hormones at puberty will develop pretty much normally as if they were XX. The older you get, the smaller you get, especially relative to having a broader chest.
The latest statistics I found (from 2011) claim that 60% of transsexuals have breast augmentation, and another 20% are planning on doing such but prevented by cost, fear of surgery, etc.
It’s exceedingly rare for a transwoman to develop over-large breasts on hormones alone. I will hazard a guess from the research I’ve done (and believe me, I’ve done it…) and estimate that probably 70% of transwomen will reach an A-cup, about 25% a B-cup, and most of the balance a C-cup, with some very small number going to a D or higher.
I’m an intersex transwoman. I grew an A-cup at 14, which led to unimaginable tortures in Junior High School, FTR…but I digress. Starting full hormones in my 40’s has done very little to change that, sadly. Thankfully, due to my intersex condition I also never developed a “male” chest, sort of something in-between for my height, so I’ve been told my A is somewhat attractive by my girlfriends who have seen me topless. That being said, I am getting augmentation to a B at some point.
The trans community is also rife with urban legends about breast growth. Do not take for gospel with many transwomen post or write about in their blogs. I spend a lot of time getting into internet slapfights with fellow intersex and transwomen who tout all sorts of pseudo and non-scientific nostrums about breast growth. The most amusing was an insistence by one woman that you should go to sleep every night with small pyramids fashioned out of paper on your nipples, and only sleep on your back. It’s like arguing with a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap.
I don’t know anything about genetics so forgive me if this is a dumb question. Let’s say a male was transitioning and started taking hormones, let’s say at or before puberty. Would his body shape tend to come to resemble his female relatives? I know there are always siblings that don’t look anything like each other and kids that don’t resemble thier parents but (as an example) if his mother and sisters were all shortish with big boobs and booties, would his transitioned female form be likely to resemble them? Like his father’s mother and sisters? No connection?
I know that you’re a medical professional, and I’ve always considered your posts in general to be both rational and intelligent, but do you really have enough faith in those who deal with gender identity issues, and their fields, to be able to accurately determine whether adolescents and teenagers really should be undergoing such a drastic, and based on my understanding, largely irreversible, change at such an early age? Not being critical, just curious, as this topic seems to be popping up more frequently in the media recently and I (albeit as a layman) have always been skeptical that someone at that age could be self aware enough that diagnosis of a gender identity disorder, and the subsequent transition, should be considered responsible medicine. Thanks.
It would not be the same, but her body shape would develop very different than if she had had only testosterone. Since each person is a unique case, and because per-puberty blockers and switching is by no means the norm, we do not have a lot of hard data on the subject.
Height is one thing which seems to not be impacted as much in this case. The child should develop wider hips, not develop a large chest, and should have a better chance of developing normally-sized and shaped breasts. Nearly every case I’ve seen of a transwoman who started hormones at puberty looks so very female that there is no way anyone would know they were not XX with no attendant medical problems.
I’m not whynot but I see a certain confusion cropping up over this “treating transsexual children” question.
There are two ways to treat transsexuals in this context: you either give hormones, or you block hormones. For minors the hormones are blocked. All that does is delay puberty, it does nothing irreversible. All it does is postpone the irreversible changes until the child is legally an adult, i.e. 18 which is still within the range of normal age for puberty. As opposed to, say, going through puberty between 10-12 as I did (fortunately for me I’m not a transsexual with all the attendant issues).
When the person is psychologically mature enough to make such a decision THEN the irreversible changes caused by hormones and surgery allowed to come into play.
And, in fact, transsexuality is NOT something that arises in adulthood. Transsexuals are transsexuals even as toddlers. It not just about sex or genitals, it’s about what you perceive yourself to be.
(Note: if I got anything wrong I trust our transsexual members will set me straight)
No. I have faith that *children *and their families, working in *conjunction *with their doctors and nurses to deal with gender identity issues can accurately determine that. The reason I have this faith is that the vast majority of transsexual adults report knowing their self-identified gender when they were very very young, and never wavering in that. Only a small fraction of cisgendered people report ever having a “phase” where they believed they were the gender they’re not. It just doesn’t happen much. Pretend happens, boys trying on Mommy’s high heels and girls copying Daddy shaving happens, but persistent claims of being the other gender and the emotional pain don’t, unless they’re true. And the majority of transsexual adults say they wish they had been able to transition earlier, and only a minority of adulults who transitioned ever end up regretting transitioning -less than 1% in female-to-males and 1–1.5% in male-to-females.
It’s just a numbers game. If a kid says he’s a boy, chances are very good he’s right. Gender is not a game for kids. They’re serious as shit about gender and gender specific behavior. Not being the gender everyone thinks you are and treats you as is agonizing for children. Think about 5 year olds on the playground. If you tell a little girl she has to play with the boys, that can cause a whole lot of stress. That stress is present in little girls born with penises, too. They know they’re not boys, but their peers and teachers make them play with the boys,as a boy, and boys have cooties, man! It’s just wrong, and that feeling of wrongness can be quite painful.
And no, I don’t think I’d agree that it’s “largely irreversible”. To the best of my knowledge, no one’s doing genital surgeries on kids unless they have obviously ambiguous genitals - and even then, it’s often delayed until the child takes on a gender identity when possible. When we talk about allowing teens to begin transitioning, they’re talking hormones, or hormone blockers, and you can certainly stop those. Will some of the changes that have already happened not fully go away? Yes, if you’re giving them hormones. But they’d not be any worse off than a transexual in the other direction. And if you’re only giving hormone blockers, when you stop those, masculinization begins. It’s just delayed. But again, it hardly ever happens that someone begins the process and changes their mind.
Through what, puberty? Ask any number of former female gymnasts or other women whose puberty was delayed through insufficient body fat. For my classmate who was in the second case, it was like doing it at 12, only with better beforehand knowledge and a slew of classmates who’d already gotten into the habit of always carrying pads or tampons.
Back in the past, before the 20th Century, gong through puberty between 16-20 was the norm. Puberty used to occur later on average. Our current situation, where puberty happens before mental maturity, is a modern aberration that most people can’t see because they aren’t familiar with the facts and history.
Isn’t there the potential for a kind of survivorship bias to play a role here? Meaning, does this data population include the responses of those who do not identify as transsexual but who may have felt as though they were at one point?
It seems like you’re only including those that decided that they are in fact trans, which, to me, would skew your evidence.
It shouldn’t be “what percentage of cisgendered people had a phase”; it should be “what percentage of people who have phases are cisgender as compared to transgender.”
You could, theoretically, have a very high percentage of phases belong to those of cisgender even if a very low percentage of cisgenders have phases.
There ARE people out there who have, for lack of a better term, gender identity issues other than transsexuality. The point of delaying puberty in a suspected transsexual child is, in fact, to give more time/counseling/support to such a child to be certain said child is in fact transsexual prior to performing irreversible treatments. All this concern about “can we be sure? can this person be sure?” is already being addressed. No one walks into a doctor’s office at 9 am, says “I’m in the wrong body”, and gets their plumbing re-arranged by 2 pm. It just does not happen. Even at the fastest it’s a multi-month/multi-year process. Even more so for children who, no matter how certain, are not subjected to irreversible treatments until they are of age to give consent and even then after considerable counseling and questioning.
Those who have gender issues aside from transsexuality are, presumably, discovered through all this questioning and counseling and are steered down other paths (I hope).
Well, those “regret” stats (1 to 1.5%) may include some of those people. It also includes people who regret transitioning not because they were mistaken, but because transitioning is difficult and can carry immense social, emotional, and physical side effects, and they’d rather, in hindsight, have lived with their body of birth, despite the struggle that caused. So the number of “mistaken” cisgender people who have gone through transition and then realize they’re cisgendered after all is somewhere less than 1.5%
If I ever hear a report of someone who says, “You know, when I was 5, I honestly thought I was a boy, and then I grew out of it,” then I’ll worry about that. I’ve never, ever heard that. I only hear people who are worried about the issue of regret on behalf of other people, which while perhaps touching, is also quite presumptuous.
If the type of research you’re looking for has been done, I don’t know of it. Perhaps another Doper does. I’m guessing that most kids who have a “phase” (if they exist) are never brought to the attention of their doctors for tallying. Again, I’m not talking about children who experiment with gender rules and norms. That does happen, for sure, and is pretty common by my observation and experience with lots of children. But those kids are not confused about *their *gender, they’re just confused about why “boys can’t play with dolls”.
And, what **Broomstick **said. This isn’t a one and done. The question posed to me was if I trust medical people to be able to accurately determine whether a child is transgendered. And I do with the caveat given, because it’s a lengthy process which ideally takes a child seriously and provides appropriate screening and support for those who are not.