Crossdressing a lifestyle choice or genetic?

[Satrana]

Babies are not all clones. They have variations in all dimensions and variations of brain weight and brain size. So no, those brains are all built on rough guidelines with individual variation.

Indeed I was not saying they were clones but rather all brains are built to the same design. If we all compared our hands they are all essentially the same shape and size and are capable of performing the same functions. Brains are no different. The guidelines are not rough but actually quite concise. And remember we are talking about fetuses here when the bodies are only a few months old so there is no epigenetic modifications to take into account.

And the FMRI and autopsy studies found that often some parts of gay brains are closer to female brains than male ones....

Observing spatial differences between brains and claiming they mean something is a tricky and questionable analysis. Size and function in the brain are not directly correlated with each other otherwise we would observe noticeable differences between small people and large people. The Victorians were found of measuring the skull circumference because the bigger the brain the greater the intelligence. Makes sense but it turns out to be completely wrong.

Leaving aside the questionable nature of measuring the size of brain components, even if it were true this does not shine any light on the cause because all studies were done on adults, and in the case of the transsexuals they were all already on female hormones for years. The brain is like any body part, the more you exercise it the more it grows. So was the brain part already large due to genetics which caused a behavior or was the person's personality exercising that part of the brain to cause it to grow larger?

Quaint notion but rather special pleading to support your hypothesis. The likelihood that 90% of women all lay down on the same side is more than unlikely.

Not if 90% of women were right-handed themselves. Once a behavior becomes prevalent it can create conditions to allow the prevalence state to continue.

What if whether a person sees themselves as male or female or needs to temporarily do so comes from a gender-identity of biological basis but that the roles of male and female being culturally determined.

But what would be the biological basis for a person to view themselves as male or female? From a biological viewpoint we would stick to our physical gender and act accordingly to in order to procreate. In a natural setting this is the goal of life.

What biological process creates men who want to behave as women and women who want to behave as men? And considering how men and women are supposed to behave is determined by ever-changing social values, how can this be accounted for by biological means?

After all we have a host of unconcious biological mechanisms for keeping time, for identifying faces and voices.

Do we have a biological clock? The time we know - hours and minutes - is purely artificial. Our biological clock responds only to daily and monthly cycles. Yet we all learn to instinctively measure time by the artificial construct of hours and minutes. As for identifying faces, we have a brain program to search out patterns which we use to analyze all visual objects. It is not specific to faces but simply the way our brains analyze and segregate visual signals.

How are we sure on that?

If this statement were not true then we would have different strains of humans. I am not aware anyone believes this. Indeed our genetics show we are all related cousins of each other to no more than the seventh order and we all stem from a single female who survived the supervolcano event 75,000 years ago.

Why would there be a clear undeniable connection? Plenty of things in nature just increase the odds.

Agreed but I am countering the argument that "I was born a CD" whereas if there is any biological variation involved it is only as a side effect of altering your thought processes which may then in turn lead you to become transgendered.

Ah, I see your error. Firstly individual genes rarely encode for a function alone. It often involves several genes to each function.

That depends on what the functions are. They are plenty of single function genes which do determine particular aspects of our bodies such as eye color. Then more complicated body functions require more gene instructions. The question is how does this impact on gender. Since gender is a mix of personality traits that exist in different parts of the brain then in order for genetic variations to be a cause of transgenderness this would require wholesale changes which would create many other observable behavioral changes rather than just a desire to live as the opposite gender.

And then genes are not just 'on' or 'off', they also switch due to environmental factors and the switched on or off gene can then be inherited in that state! so with 4 genes you could have on-off-on-on and then during childhood diet or stress switches one gene so it becomes on-off-on-off and then the children of that person inherit the genes like that!

If this were true then there would be enormous genetic changes in the human genome in every generation. I have never heard of people being able to change their dna due to stress or diet. Your body functions may change due to changes in your biological balance, signals can be blocked etc but these events cannot be passed onto your offspring. The copy of your DNA code inside your sperm remains unaltered due to stress or diet. DNA variations in the human genome happen in the womb.

That would match the evidence better if it was the case more frequently.

I fail to see the logic. The frequency of an event has got nothing to do with the original state. Coins lying on their edges roll off a table. 99.99% of the time they will come to rest on their sides, very rarely one may come to rest upright. What does this prove?

This suggests an interaction between nature AND nurture. That my brain is hardwired for ambidexterity

Or your brain was not wired for either hand. There is a difference.