[bryony]

"Chicken and egg" question again I think.
I believe there is a lot in Vitale's theory and on that basis, my brain has been programmed to expect female hormones.I have always had a need to express my female side. I want breasts because that is the ultimate outward sign if 'femaleness'. To grow breasts I need female hormones be they synthetic or phyto-. However my body is male and being realistic there is nothing anyone can do about that. My 'magic pill' would simply bring body and brain in line with each other, but the reason I would go female rather than male, given a choice is that the brain is in charge and the brain is programmed to want oestrogens.

OTOH, if the question is actually "If you could go back to your time in your mothers womb and alter her hormonal balance at the critical point, to give your brain a male slant, would you?" Then yes I would do that because I believe my brain was brainwashed into being different to the body it inhabits.

Exactly! Pretty much what I said back in post #5 link

The problem is not "being in the wrong body", it's the dissonance between what your brain expects and what the body is. There are a whole group of unfortunate individuals having limbs amputated because they suffer from a brain disorder that tells them that it is somehow "wrong" to have a particular arm or leg.

Are they living in the "wrong body"? Of course not. It would be ludicrous to try to explain the way their brain thinks as correct and their body is "wrong".

However there are strident political activists who are trying to say that gender dysphoria is not a mental illness and that they are, indeed, "in the wrong body". (See Dysmorphia - it really isn't too different from Gender Dysphoria)

Once you see the analogy between the two, it isn't a very great step to see that homosexuality is, as was once accepted, a mental disorder.

To be sure it is a problem that has to be lived with, and not persecuted, as indeed our problem is, but I find it very troubling that not only have activists succeeded in removing it from that category, they are also trying to do the same with our problem. (The main reason why they are finding it harder to succeed is because of the medical intervention required, whereas "all" homosexuality required was changes in law, cultural conditioning and moral relativism.)

These are troubling times, when science is bending under the will of political pressure. Just because all the scientists in the world suddenly decide to agree a consensus that the moon is made of green cheese, it would not make it so.

Yet now, to utter scientific theories that do not meet with "social approval" means being branded as a heretic every bit as much as Galileo was, with the twitterati taking the place of the Catholic Church. (Hence my non-avatar "label")

A good modern example of such wrong-headed scientific orthodoxy/heresy in Stalin's Russia can be found here:-Lysenkoism when the "heretics" were geneticists, who suffered and sometimes died for their theories!

[gloom on]

For someone of my age, who read Orwell and Huxley, and regarded their work as troubling science fiction written by people of long ago, the whole business of thought crime coming into being is an alarming harbinger of a weird new form of totalitariansim, frighteningly similar to Stalin's Russia.

[gloom off]