The PBS series Secrets of the Dead reported on the East Germany sports doping program that was the most systematic and aggressive of any program of anabolic steroid use. The story focused on the women who were in the quest for gold, some of whom got gold medals and some who didn't succeed because their bodies just couldn't handle the drugs.

One of the women they covered in depth in the program looked like an old balding man, sounded like an old working man, and had ended up marrying a fellow team member who looked like a woman after concluding the only way to go through life was by living as a man.

She like many others got some some form of testosterone starting before she started puberty, although they didn't know what they were getting.

I just happened to be watching a PBS educational program on biology that is covering the Brazilian Maria Pateno who is chromosomally male but has a genetic defect that prevents her from responding to testosterone, so she is fully developed as female, and she looks more female than the East German athletes who are genetically and developmentally female.

I've been interested in genetics because it is at the intersection of so many interesting fields of study: evolution, population migration, sex determination, computer science and informatics, and others. What has struck me is how much complexity there is in the genetic code and the mechanism that converts genes into the target animal. In humans, the dozens of sexual aspects of the individual is determined by a really bizzare Rube Goldberg machine where the presence or absence of a SrY gene that is about 25 base pairs kicks off a series of several dozen steps that transforms the bisexual fetus into a classic male, assuming that all the steps go according to plan. If one of the steps malfunctions, then you don't end up with a classic male, and in some cases you end up with a person that is almost a female.

And as I know of no training program that instructs parents on how to teach their children on how to be female or how to be male, and I certainly don't recall anything in my upbringing where my parents or teachers told me how to think about myself, how to define my gender, and who to be attracted to, so clearly somethings in our minds are switch to be either more male or more female. As genetics is still decades away from fulling explaining how a zygote is transformed into something that looks physically like a male or female, it is likely to be longer still before it is understood how the mind is imprinted with the male or female attributes. And even when driven by genetics, its clear that the commonly used performance drugs screw it all up.