Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously (2019)

> No, one is a form of natural experiment (changing the hormone profile of a single person who can compare the causal effects).

But this is subject to placebo effect, as the OP said, so you can't directly infer a casual influence on behaviour.

> The other is an assumption that someone's observed characteristics are caused by one particular hormone level, with no evidence to support that.

The OP did not say the lack of maternal instincts was caused by lower than normal testosterone, they simply noted that she had both characteristics.

>Norah Vincent wasn't transgender

That's what I said. "Women going incognito".

>Please back up your statements with evidence.

Spend a few days in online circles reading experiences of transmen, then do yourself another solid and spend another few days wading through online circles for men specifically. It's not too hard to see a few transitioners go "well X kinda sucked as a woman but Y definitely sucks now that I am a man".

>The fact that you liken HRT to "picking your poison" is ignorant and disingenuous

What's disingenuous is your extremely uncharitable interpretation, and I would urge you to take a step back and read with a little more favor towards the writer.

Think for a moment by bringing it back to its basis. As a woman with gender dysphoria, you have to pick between undergoing HRT and potentially having disastrous effects on your psyche, or suffering harsher consequences from your dysphoria for living as a woman.

To claim there are 'no downsides' when even the people for who the procedure exists have to pick between the lesser of two evils rather than a straight up boost, is completely off the mark. Vincent's example at least suggests women without dysphoria can't just 'live as a man for a bit' without it having downsides. Transitioners experiencing the same despite a net gain due to their unique circumstances would confirm it, more than deny it.

You fail to see that the laser focus on trans people is exactly why GP's comment doesn't mesh for the average person, as 'people who seriously desire to do this' are not necessarily people who feel uncomfortable or less comfortable with their own gender.

So please, stop making this seem like an attack on trans people. It isn't. It is merely a rebuttal against the idea that men living as women and women living as men, no further qualifiers given, only out of some 'desire to try it', has no downsides.

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That won't help you understand the mechanism. The reason the first digit of a binary number is 1 is just the anthropic principle. ("You can only observe things that exist.") That same observation will tell you that, just as the first nonzero digit of a binary number is zero 0% of the time, the first nonzero digit of a decimal number is zero 0% of the time. That is what it means to be a nonzero digit! But it won't tell you anything about why one possible digit might be more or less frequent than another possible digit.

The mechanism is just multiplication. Suppose you have a quantity that increases by 20% every period. (Doesn't matter what the period is.) Let's start the quantity at 4 times 10 to the power of irrelevant. We'll consider the leading digit every period:

  4
  4
  5
  6
  8
  9
  1
  1
  1
  2
  2
  2
  3
  4
  5
  6
  7
  8
  1
  1
  1
  1
  2
  2
  3
  3
  ...

As you can see, we spend a lot more time with the amount of stuff we have being led by a 1 than we do with it being led by any other digit. Having our growth rate be less than one makes this easy to see by causing similar leading digits to occur next to each other, but the result will be the same for any growth rate.

(You can see that it will be the same for any growth rate by considering that you can always match the observations of a system with the same observation period and a different growth rate by instead imagining a system with the same growth rate and a different observation period. But varying the observation period doesn't change the amount of time spent in any given quantity range.)

I've done a ton of reading and personal experimentation on this topic and I think your account was fairly spot on honestly.

Higher levels of estrogen do generally make emotions feel more intense and lower levels of testosterone generally would make someone less likely to engage in a conflict.

Hormones don't really change your core personality though. I dbout someone would become less interested in something like tech because of a change in hormone levels. However, you might be more likely to pursue emotionally fulfilling careers and hobbies in the future, and I think in arrogate this could be what accounts for some of the sex differences we see in male / female career paths. As you mentioned, estrogen make emotions more intense and it seems likely to me that this might in part explain why women seem to enjoy social careers more - perhaps because they provide more emotional stimulus.

Neonatal levels of hormones probably have a larger role in shaping our core personalities though. One example of this would autism spectrum disorders which tends to make people more interested in "things". There is now some evidence that autism is a product of irregular hormones levels during development.