I lost my father when I was very young, too young to really remember him. My mother remarried within a few years, but my step-father often worked night shift. So I fit into the "absent father" category. And I had 3 sisters & no brothers, so I was often surrounded by females at home.

However, I don't believe that these things caused my TG tendencies. I believe that it's a combination of genes & the hormone interaction in the womb that creates the TG potential. The environment I grew up in certainly provided influences that shaped my gender identity, triggered my TG development and affected the form of my TG feelings & activities. But environmental influences cannot affect the core gender identity.

The main evidence for this view comes from the intersex community. For several decades, intersex births in the Western world were treated as a medical emergency, as if the baby had a life-threatening condition. Specialists would be rushed in, and often babies were subjected to immediate genital alteration. They could be put on a course of hormones for life, and possibly subjected to further surgical procedures. They would rarely be told that they were born intersex.

The most modern approach to intersex births is to wait & see, using surgery &/or hormones when and as necessary to help the individual develop in the direction they want to go. Unfortunately, in many places the old attitudes & methods still prevail.

Sometimes, a little surgery is all that's required to make ambiguous genitalia less ambiguous. But since a functional penis is a lot harder to construct than a vagina, in many cases these babies are made into girls. Sometimes this works, but there have been many cases where it has been a dismal failure. Even with hormonal assistance, you can't force a person into a gender which doesn't match their core gender identity.

There have also been cases of non-intersex & non-TG boys being turned into girls after bad penis accidents. The most famous case is Brenda/David Reimer, who I gave links about earlier in this thread. His parents tried their best to treat Brenda like a girl, but it never really worked. At his core he was always a boy. Even though he had no memory of having a boy's body, he never felt comfortable as a girl, and clearly had gender identification issues throughout childhood.

So environment can't make someone TG who wasn't born with the potential, or vice versa, but it will certainly affect how a TG person feels about gender. If we grow up in a supportive environment, then surely we will come to accept ourselves a lot faster than if we grow up in fear, shame & guilt.



Robin