This is going to be the last post in this string for a while, and is really more of an afterword of things I couldn’t or didn’t include in the others.
There is one more potential hormonal influence on my development, though I can’t verify how much of an effect it had on me, if any.
I was an accident. Not that my parents didn’t eventually want kids: they did. But I came a bit earlier than they had planned for, and it wasn’t because of a broken condom.
My mother was on birth control when I was conceived. I don’t know the name of the pill, and I honestly don’t know for how long afterwards, but I would guess it was no more than a month, and likely only a few weeks.
Of course, if you know genetics, you know that biological sex is determined upon conception, as the sperm carries either an X or a Y chromosome (generally). So I was immediately genetically male. But birth control, from my understanding, is typically made up of estrogen and progestin.
What effect did this influx of estrogen have on my fetal development? I can’t say, but I have read that this was more of an issue in the 50s-70s than it was in the 80s and 90s. So maybe nothing, but something worth including nonetheless.
I’ll end by saying after I learned what I did about my hormones, I often joked that it was fine, because I was “basically a girl anyway.” People typically ignored it or laughed politely, either not noticing or not wanting to notice.
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