{"id":233,"date":"2019-11-13T22:12:10","date_gmt":"2019-11-13T22:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/?p=233"},"modified":"2020-06-30T21:25:21","modified_gmt":"2020-06-30T21:25:21","slug":"intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sinceriously.fyi\/intersex-brains-and-conceptual-warfare\/","title":{"rendered":"Intersex Brains And Conceptual Warfare"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Content warning: life of this trans woman. Not safe for life<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So there’s these things, “sexual dimorphisms”, where males and females are different. Different junk, for example. There is a system with many parts that sorts these operations of biological software into bodies with a particular set of strong correlations. Known ways this system can break<\/a> include unusual sets of chromosomes, unusual critical content of chromosomes, missing chemicals that are part of multi-step reactions which produce hormones, broken hormone receptors… (Basically all dimorphisms in mammals are downstream of a state of a bistable hormonal feedback loop during prenatal development triggered by the SRY gene on the Y chromosome.) Depending on which ones you call “intersex”, ones that cause differences in “physical” (as in besides the brain) differences in the grown human are allegedly around 2% of the population<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some dimorphisms are in the brain. You can observe them with neuroimaging and dissection<\/a>. One brain dimorphism is being “sexual orientation”. It’s quite common for this one to be intersexed<\/a>. Remember that, culture being what it is, it’s much more likely in those surveys for someone to falsely say they are straight than to falsely say they are gay. I boringly expect overall human development mixes up dimorphisms in the brain in probably about single digit percentages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Being attracted to humans with noncomplementary reproductive stuff is close to the least evolutionarily fit thing, and evolution still failed to stop it. Just like it seemingly failed to stop all those physical dimorphism anomalies. (I don’t find the “gay uncle hypothesis<\/a>” remotely plausible; there’s no way that path should produce as much evolutionary fitness evolutionarily successful as just having kids of your own. Besides, if the straight sibling of a “gay uncle” doesn’t have genes contributing to homosexuality, helping those kin doesn’t help those genes<\/a>. I don’t find the “sneaky fucker<\/a>” hypothesis probable either.) The simplest explanation which fits the data (including nonbrain intersex conditions) is that sexual differentiation is a fragile rube goldberg machine, prone to random breakage. I speculate that humans have intersex brains so often because of evolution pulling out all stops for large brains and breaking things as a side effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those things which are correlated with flipped dimorphisms are probably also flipped dimorphisms or downstream of them (i.e. participating in a Pride parade is correlated with flipped dimorphisms, but is probably not what you’d mean by a flipped dimorphism itself.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although being a BDSM sub seems to me to involve a sort of (ubiquitous, given our world of vampires<\/a>) psychological damage<\/a>, there’s an underlying “orientation”, maybe downstream of something like “top vs bottom” orientation. Note that gay men mostly prefer the “sub” role (I can’t find the study I got this from, if I remember correctly (though it was years ago) it was a survey of 18 gay men, 17 of whom preferred the sub role, and one of whom preferred the dom role, but only because his partner preferred the sub role or something like that). (Here’s another one<\/a> I found with less data<\/a>, same trend. (It’s from a folder of saved papers with my old research, I’m not bothering to review it further than looking for the table right now.))<\/p>\n\n\n\nDimorphisms<\/h6>\n\n\n\n