@Wanderingwomb
actually I think brain cell death is more to do with experience...
During childhood and throughout adult life that's true, however, during prenatal development, there's a period of time while the brain is developing, where large numbers of excess neurons are removed through a process of programmed cell death. I was speculating that which cells die might partly be determined by whether testosterone is present during the time it's happening, and maybe that partly accounts for the differences between adult male and female brains.
my OH is like you about sport and babies. I know he's a man because he impregnated me a few times.
I have two children, and I've looked at my sperm under a microscope. There are (or were last time I looked) still viable sperm cells swimming around there, even though my ejaculate volume is much smaller than it used to be before I got sick with the symptoms of hypogonadism. Under normal circumstances, men produce so many sperm cells that it takes a very large reduction in their fertility before they start to have trouble getting women pregnant.
It's quite a bit more than just sport and babies. I have female "courtship behaviour", a female pattern of arousal and orgasm, and feminine body language too.
Like most animal species that form long term pair bonds, people have a “courtship ritual”. We're much more socially complex than most animals, and our courtship ritual is much more varied and free form than the very rigid patterns of courtship behaviour you see in birds, for instance. Nonetheless, it works in a similar way: the male does stuff to demonstrate his fitness and suitability as a mate to the female. If she's sufficiently wowed, she'll hang around with him, they'll get closer to each other, and in due course they'll enter a long term relationship. In general, the way it should work is that the man should lead the way, and the woman, if she's suitably impressed, follows. He's the one who goes up to her and tries to chat her up with corny chat up lines. He's the one who asks her out on their first date, and generally keeps things moving along as they get to know each other better. The man is the seducer, the woman the one seduced (yes I know there are exceptions, but that's how things generally work in the majority of cases).
The thought that occurred to me is that I have the female version of this behaviour. In the days when I was young and single, I'd make eye contact with women to signal my interest, but then I was expecting them to come over to me to do the chatting up and asking out. Obviously, seeing what I was doing wrong, in the same situation now, I could make myself take a more active role, but if I did, I'd be creating fake behaviour, it wouldn't be what my instinct tells me to do. Getting the courtship process right is absolutely critical to reproductive success, and it's not something you'd expect nature to make mistakes with.
I'd have dismissed the whole thing as just “being shy” or a quirk of my personality, but then another thought occurred to me. My process of arousal and orgasm is a lot more like what normally happens in women rather than men. Having had sexual encounters with people of both sexes, the way it seems to typically work in men is that once they get started, they get continuously more aroused until they climax, a process that generally takes no more than a few minutes. In my case it's more an ebb and flow. I build to a peak of arousal, then the feelings ebb away before starting to build again to a (hopefully higher) peak a few minutes later. And so it continues, until eventually I'll hit a peak high enough to tip me over the edge into orgasm maybe 30 minutes or so later. It's the same whether I'm masturbating or having sex with someone. This struck me as being very similar to what normally happens in women, not men.
Then I remembered my first relationship, which turned sexual the first night. Despite trying and trying, I was completely unable to climax. Nor was I able to the next few times we got together. After we'd been going out for several weeks, I could tell she had developed feelings for me and was no longer just using me for sex, and it was like a block had been lifted. Suddenly I could climax with her without difficulty. The was the same with my subsequent relationships too, and I realised that I've never been able to “let go” enough to achieve orgasm with a stranger. Once again, I seemed to be doing the female thing, not the male one. Rape is an important secondary mating strategy for men, and it shouldn't be necessary for me to be emotionally bonded to sexual partners before I can achieve orgasm with them.
As far as nature and genetics are concerned, if you don't reproduce, you might as well be dead, so nature never normally gets anything to do with reproductive success wrong. Yet something appears to have gone drastically wrong in my case.
I tried videoing myself, and realised that I have quite feminine body language too (which is probably why, when I was younger, gay men kept approaching me; I'm guessing they'd see a feminine-looking man with female body language, and assume I must be gay).
Then I thought about how I can't get enthusiastic about competitive sports, and how men who are watching them seem to be experiencing something that I can't experience. Putting all those things together is what originally gave me the idea that perhaps somehow some of my brain development occurred as female instead of male.
The following year (2011), when I was in a position to investigate further, I discovered that I'd developed symptoms of acute hypogonadism, and things like my body structure and digit ratio show that it's been present at a subclinical level all my life.
As part of my investigations, I obtained a copy of a book, "Brain Sex", and in it I found the following passage, in a section talking about a study of teenaged boys whose mothers had been given treatment during pregnancy with an artificial estrogen called diethylstilbestrol (or DES).
Like most of the group, Jim is shy, unassertive and has a comparatively low self esteem. He ranks himself in the bottom 25 percent of his class when it comes to popularity, influence, sporting and physical prowess... In the course of the survey, Jim's mother made a spontaneous comparison between Jim, and her older son, Larry. While pregnant with Larry, she had not taken any of the hormone treatment. She commented that her younger son was an extremely poor athlete, was regarded as a "sissy" by the other boys, would never fight back, and never developed an interest in electronic devices or chemical sets as his older brother had done.
Aside from the bit about chemistry sets, it was a more or less perfect match for my own teenage years.
Shortly after that, I joined an online group for DES sons, and discovered I have enough in common with them to know I must have had some kind of exposure to artificial female hormones. The main difference is that most of the people I've talked to seem to have undergone more female brain development than I have. With me, it's very much a case of having some parts of who I am female and other parts male, whereas the majority of people I've talked to are female identified (even if for personal reasons they're having to stay in the closet about it).