Men who are transgendered into women, that is.
Just wondering about the incidence of prostate cancer in women who were formerly men.
Yes. A former Doper mentioned this as she was a transwoman. IIRC it would be too much trouble to remove the prostate. Plus, it would likely lead to urinary difficulties.
Also, if you wish to avoid offending people, it’s not proper to say some one was ‘made into a woman’ or ‘used to be a man’. A transwoman was born a woman, despite penis, testes and XY chromosomes. The surgery does not ‘make them women’. It simply corrects a birth defect.
I’m afraid to ask (and not because I’m afraid of offending anyone), but how about a cite? 
So as not to hijack the thread, the incidence of prostate cancer should remain the same for the physically transgendered since that part of their anatomy wasn’t altered, correct?
That cite does not prove your claim.
For one thing, it’s not clear that what was being measured was the entire gamut of brain differences between men and women. And even if it were, whether to call the “defect” in the brain or the genitals is completely indeterminate. And lastly, the sample size seems particularly small, especially WRT measuring the impact of hormone treatment on neurons.
Wouldn’t the large doses of estrogen lower the risk?
It would almost certainly be less if she takes estrogen to promote feminization.
Could you explain your reasoning/logic for the folks without a medical background?
I’d think high levels of estrogen would increase the risk of cancer since the prostate is being forced to act in an unusual manner. That level of estrogen and a developed prostate (in normal, unmodified biology) arise from mutually exclusive conditions. Also, since prostate development is triggered by exposure to testosterone, exposing it to high* levels of estrogen would likely increase the risk of abnormal cell development.
*levels high enough to counteract the effect of testosterone in other parts of the body.
No, because the prostate of a transwoman is not subject to as much male hormone over a lifetime as a cisman’s prostate. Exposure to high levels of testosterone is a risk factor for that cancer, and one treatment for prostate cancer is castration, to reduce the level of male hormones, which can reduce the aggressiveness and rate of growth of such cancer.
Transwoman should be at substantially lower risk of prostate cancer, and the younger they have hormone treatment and/or surgery the lower the lifetime risk.
Transwomen are not (normally) given levels of estrogen sufficient to “overwhelm” testosterone, they’re given drugs to block production of testosterone int he first place, and during surgery have their testes removed which drops their testosterone down to levels normal for women, or even lower.
Many of us take finasteride in a 2.5 or 5mg daily dose as part of the anti-androgen regime, which also helps reduce the prostate and the chance of prostate cancer. Statistically, my records show a very low but non-zero incidence of prostate cancer, so DREs on occasion are needed, as is monitoring of symptoms.
Most transgender women report that their physicians claim their prostate is very small and in some cases almost impossible to find. I’ve spoken with a urologist who has confirmed this.
After being on estrogen+antiandrogens for some time, one can often greatly reduce the antiandrogen dose. Some women can eliminate them entirely after several years and remain solely on estrogen, even with the testes physically intact, and yet show almost no testosterone production. The mechanisms behind this effect are highly variable in magnitude.
Yes, the prostate is typically maintained after SRS. Dr. Marcie Bowers claims that is helps serve as an “anchor point” for the neovagina, but I confess I do not have a diagram of the specifics in front of me.
Doc Cathode, my advice is don’t engage Fotheringay-Phipps on that side subject. The last time this was discussed no evidence presented was good enough for him, so you’re just not going to win this argument.
There was a thread on here some time ago where men and women were jokingly arguing about wheher a gynecological exam or a prostate exam is worse. A transgendered woman won the thread when she explained that she had to do both.
You are apparently confusing me with someone else (unless you’re just making stuff up).
But now that you raise the issue, I’ll note that I find your implication that you have an open mind on this issue somewhat amusing.
What my last Transgender friendly nursing class taught was that transwomen are at a greater risk than ciswomen of prostate cancer (duh) but a lesser risk than cismen. The implication being that we should continue to ask about urinary symptoms of BPH or other prostate trouble, and that the occasional DRE might be indicated. It was brought up as an example of why “knowing their status” was important. They may be women in all the ways that matter, but they’re women with prostates, and we can’t ignore the organ while treating the rest of the person.
Probably confusing. If so, I unreservedly apologize.
No, I didn’t imply such. I no longer have an open mind on the issue because I believe the evidence is convincing.
Objectively speaking, perhaps. But most people consider their identity to be more central to who and what they are than specific physical traits. Which is pretty much tautological, isn’t it? Why should we limit ourselves to an objective ambiguity when there is a perfectly good subjective resolution?
Anyone can do whatever they want. The argument to use physical aspects is that it’s more (if incompletely) binary, well defined, and permanent. But of course anyone can group things and make distinctions however they want.
I had little problem with DocCathode’s initial post in which he said that “if you wish to avoid offending people, it’s not proper to say […]”. It was only when he later attempted to prove that this was some sort of objective reality that I objected.
I do believe that buddha_david has had buddha_david’s question answered (can’t be too careful with gender pronouns in a thread like this), so I will make this observation :
Wow. Somebody certainly was spot-on in somebody’s assessment, wasn’t somebody?
The trouble is that it’s either entirely superfluous or pretty much useless in most real-life situations.
For cisgender people, those whose self-identified gender matches the gender assigned to their genitalia, it doesn’t matter which of those aspects you use to define “gender”. A cisgender person with male genitalia, for example, considers his whole self to be male, not just his genitals: but since his genitals happen to match his gender identity, it’s basically irrelevant which of them you mean when you call him “male”.
For transgender people, on the other hand, classifying them according to their originally assigned anatomical gender is not only confusing but doesn’t accomplish anything (except for medical-treatment purposes, as WhyNot pointed out).
In the vast majority of life situations, when I’m interacting with another person (assuming I need to know anything about their gender at all), I need to know what gender they identify as for social purposes, rather than the anatomical details of what’s in their underwear.
It’s pretty much guaranteed to be none of my business what’s in their underwear. What is my business is whether I should refer to them as “he” or “she”, and so forth. And the way I can figure that out is by knowing whether they self-identify as male or as female.
Sorry, I lost track of this thread so never saw your question.
Even if we accept your statement that estrogen “force(s) the prostate to act in an unusual manner”, that doesn’t mean that the chance of the prostate becoming cancerous would be increased. “Unusual manner” does not equal “cancer causing”.
More to the point, though, there are several reasons why I’m pretty confident that estrogen use in men would decrease the chance of prostate cancer:
[ul]
[li]if a man is taking estrogen, it turns off his production of testosterone (I can explain why if you/anyone else wants to know) [/li]
[li]since testosterone promotes prostate ‘growth’, when it is absent (or at a low level) there is nothing stimulating the prostate anymore. So, neither normal prostate nor prostate cancer cells are being stimulated; the prostate shrinks[/li]
[li]estrogen increases men’s (and women’s) level of a binding protein that attaches to testosterone thereby rendering it unavailable to stimulate prostate growth. Hence, even if a man still has some testosterone around, if he is also taking estrogen, the testosterone that he has will be ‘unavailable’[/li]
[*]maybe most important is that if one actually looks at the effect of estrogen in men with prostate cancer, it becomes clear that their prostate cancers generally regress (in fact estrogen used to be used as the primary therapy to treat men with prostate cancer but the practice was abandoned due to serious side effects like blood clots and the advent of other, safer therapies[/ul]