How twins are made : watch it happen!

Watch these eggs, they have much to teach us!

Identical twins come first....



And then the fraternal (dizygotic) twins.....



But what if you are not sure?

These twin sisters never knew if they were identical or not... till they had a DNA test!



Identical twins don't have to be exactly the same. One can be considerably weaker than the other and may not even make it to birth, leaving a lonely MZ womb twin survivor, carrying a lifelong imprint of an important little person, always somewhere near at hand.

The womb twin survivor in literature : "Twin Bred"

A new book by Karen A Wyle published yesterday, 15th October as a paperback and an ebook.

 TWIN-BRED

Humans have lived on Tofarn for seventy years, but the Tofa remain an enigma -- from their featureless faces to their shifting number of arms. Misunderstandings breed conflict, and conflict could bring war. Scientist Mara Cadell's radical proposal: that host mothers carry fraternal twins, human and Tofa, who might provide a breakthrough in inter-species understanding. Mara's own twin, Levi, died in utero -- but Mara has secretly kept him alive in her mind as companion and collaborator.

The Tofa agree to Mara's project -- but they have their own agenda. And so does one member of the human Council, who believes that the human colonists should have exterminated the Tofa on arrival. Mara must shepherd the Twin-Bred project through dangers that even the canny Levi could not foresee. Will the Twin-Bred bring peace, war, or something else entirely?

A novel by Karen A. Wyle

A fascinating idea.  The mere fact of being a womb twin survivor is such a wonderful gift, being mainly the gift of empathy towards others.  I read it as an ebook, which increased the sense of other- worldliness.  The story is tense and fascinating, as we are taken through the intricacies of plot and counter-plot, but for me there are occasional moments when the great gifts of being a womb twin survivor  are demonstrated to the reader in a completely new way. (A great twist at the end, which I won't reveal!)

Levi, Mara's fantasy twin brother, is evidently very much alive in her life.  The project is to create a whole population of twins, to change the world. A bold idea, which may capture the imagination of many people, but in particular womb twin survivors will enjoy the moments of insight when the world realises what twins have to offer, simply because they learned to live with others who are very different, long before birth.

Karen, I salute you.  We need more positive stories like this about womb twin survivors. It's not all about death and loss, it's also about gratitude, love and personal responsibility.

Is pre-natal psychology a load of nonsense? Willam Emerson speaks out

In celebration of 25 years of APPAH, the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and health, the current president, William Emerson, wrote the story of how the loss of his twin sister 12 hours after birth compelled him to study the physical and psychological aspects of pregnancy in great detail, and to work hard over many years to help babies to enter this world with the minimum of trauma.

Many womb twin survivors are attracted towards pregnancy and birth as an area of study, but in a man that seems counter intuitive, as one would imagine that such subjects would be of more interest to a woman. However that little dose of oestrogen, that he would have received before birth, would have  helped him to feel comfortable in an organisation dominated by women.

DZ survivors : a surrogate twin

For a DZ survivor, the best surrogate twin is someone of the same sex as the twin who died, and someone of similar age.  A parent of the same sex may do very well in infancy or early child hood, but quickly, by the age of 3 or 4, the need is for someone of a similar age, and that means a Best Friend.

Many womb twin survivors try to make their parents into their best friend (and vice versa), particularly if either or both parents are also womb twin survivors. Then the child may act very mature while the parents acts very immature, so that can meet on common ground.

The upshot of this attempt to keep the Dream of the Womb  alive is that no one is being their authentic self and in particular, no one acts their age - and no one finds what they are looking for.

DZ survivors - yearning.

The life of the DZ womb twin survivor is driven by yearning for Something, but there is no way to know what that is.  The yearning is the energy behind the search, and it took me thirty long years until I found out what it was.  What follows describes where I was in 2002, when the idea of a lost twin brother first came to me and I was just beginning to recognise what it was I had always been yearning for:

DZ survivors - a fear of abandonment

Experts (who do not know about womb twin survivors) have given a name to the complex of psychological effects that characterise womb twin survivors, the name is "Borderline personality disorder" and the commonest effect is a fear of abandonment.  (See full description here)

(It surely does not have to be said here, that this group of psychological effects if not a "disorder" of any kind but a perfectly normal response to a rather unusual pre-birth situation - the lost of a twin before birth. )

Opposite-sex DZ survivors and gender dysphoria

It can happen, when there is a blood connection of some kind between two DZ twins who are of opposite sexes, that the hormones from one may pass into the other.

The sole survivor may carry some trace of the hormones of the opposite sex.

The girls are tomboys

















The boys are sissys
.


The women are manly,

the men are feminized.

 

If there is a massive transfusion of bloods between the twins, the sole survivor may feel as if  he or she is in the "wrong body" and may want to  change sex. This feeling is known as "gender dysphoria".

Read about it here.



Now I wonder: how many of the people who write about gender dysphoria think about womb twin survivors?   I decided to find out.

 

It took two minutes.

Gender dysphoria in a child with true hermaphroditism.  1987

This case report describes the psychosexual development of a child with true hermaphroditism who was assigned to the male sex at birth, but reassigned to the female sex at age two months. Given this child's excessive exposure to male sex hormone in utero, relative to physically normal females, one would predict a biological predisposition to behave in a masculine manner. This has occurred since two years of age. In addition, this child has had periodic episodes of gender disturbance, dysphoria, and ambivalence. In contrast, a physically normal fraternal twin sister has been conventionally feminine. A number of psychosocial factors appeared to have exacerbated the biologic predisposition to behave in a masculine manner, and thus may have been responsible for "pushing" this child into varying degrees of gender identity conflict. These included a closer father-daughter than mother-daughter relationship, parental tolerance of cross-gender behavior, and a mother who has been psychologically disturbed since the birth of her children. The heuristic value of this case will be discussed in relation to contemporary models of psychosexual development which emphasize the interaction of biological and psychosocial factors.

In 1987 there was no attempt to explain why this little girl  has been exposed to male hormones when her twin sister was not.

I was unable to find a single scholarly article that related gender dysphoria to the lost of a twin in utero.  An oblique and tentative one sentence reference to the unborn twin on a transgender therapy site in 2000 here. Thats all I found today, anyway.

So. You heard it first here, everyone!