LUST
LUST may be the most complicated of Jaak Panksepp’s seven primal affects. It begins in the womb with the XX chromosome endowment for females and XY for males. Were gender that simple. But it is not. What makes it complex is that gender of the mind and gender of the body develop somewhat independently.
Contrast makes the face female Richard Russell Image
LUST
LUST urges come from both the body and brain/mind. That is a major reason for all the categories of gender, Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, and statistically normal cisgender. The relatively independent development of the mind and body starts to take place in the embryo. The brains of fetuses may have a gender identity that may not match their bodily sexual organs.
Biologically, we define females as those born with an XX chromosome and males as those who are chromosomally XY. Usually, a female-type brain circuitry comes with the XX body-type chromosome. And the same for males, usually, a male-type brain circuitry comes with the XY body-type chromosome. When this is not the case, when XY body comes with female circuitry or XX body comes with male circuitry, you get a male brain in a female body or a female brain in a male body.
But that is just the start. As the child grows up the biological side confronts culture and society, so there are cross-currents at many levels, from biology to culture, and from primary – deep in the brain – to tertiary –cortical levels of MindBrain organization.
In short, the sex hormones that determine the sex-specific organization of the brain during prenatal development are different from those that help specify the appearance of the genital apparatus of males and females.
Gender Identity
If those fetal brain chemistries unfold atypically, a developing organism’s brain-gender identity can be shifted at the primary-process level. This can occur for any of a large number of reasons, including extreme psychological stress that mothers may experience during pregnancy, as well as hormonal medical treatments, and even exposure to chemicals in our polluted environments that act like sex hormones (Some amphibians are becoming reproductively compromised). An infant can be born with a male-typical brain in a female-type body or a female-typical brain in a male body, as well as abundant gradations between.
A female brain in the male body will result in a person who feels like a woman in the body of a male, and a male brain in a female body produces a person who feels like a man in the body of a woman. This is a basic scientific definition of the state of being transgendered. Clearly, the biology of the brain has profound implications for one’s sexual identity and destiny. We can be confident that the little boys who keep insisting they have girls inside want to come out, and little girls who feel their minds are more like those of boys, are often reflecting a biological wisdom that parents should listen to with courage and sensitivity, rather than denial.
Identity is Is not simply learned during maturation. At the same time, obviously all self-identity issues are partly molded by learning and culture. But in their raw form, mail-and female-type brains contain important constitutional differences. And they need not match visually evident maleness and femaleness of the body.
When a child is born the body of one sex and the brain of another, social pressures will only make matters worse, because the childs innate gender identity cannot be altered by persuasion. It is regrettable that some countries, which consider themselves civilized, do not yet offer transgendered people equal rights and opportunities for happiness in the world. Hopefully, education will eventually change the hearts of those who would discriminate against nature (which is what Spinoza considered God to be). These neurobiological facts are concordant with social practices that many American Indian tribes traditionally followed: At times, nature ordains that a female sexual identity should flower with in the brain of a biological male, and a masculine temperament should flourish within a biological female. The wisdom of some of our ancestors regularly excepted the psychosexual variety that Nature bestowed on vertebrates–a continuum of maleness and femaleness–that many in our culture have learned to scorn. But such variations also abound in other animals, and the underlying principles are very similar. Jaak Panksepp
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
