Are You a Mammal or a Reptile?

Mammal brains have a structure entirely lacking in the brains of reptiles: the limbic brain. That's what makes us human.

While both mammals and reptiles are both animals (as opposed to plants or rocks), there are some major differences between them.

A few of the differences are:

Mammals have hair or fur; reptiles have scales.

Mammals have self-regulating temperature control systems (warm blooded); reptiles use the sun and shade to maintain a healthy temperature (cold blooded).

Mammals give birth to live babies; reptiles lay eggs. Mammals are heavily invested in the care of their offspring as they will not survive without this. Reptiles may or may not spend any time ensuring the survival of their young.

Mammal babies are fed by milk produced by their mothers; every species has milk tailored to their needs. Reptile babies find their own food following hatching.

Mammals enjoy play (activities for pleasure that are not related to reproduction or survival); reptiles do not engage in play at all.

Mammals will defend their young against danger, even at the cost of their own lives; reptiles look on indifferently as their young are eaten by predators.

The biggest difference is in brain composition. Mammal brains have a structure entirely lacking in the brains of reptiles: the limbic brain. First described by a French surgeon in 1879 and derived from the Latin limbus, meaning edge, margin or border, this name was amazingly appropriate as it also marks an evolutionary diversion between mammals and reptiles.

Only mammals have the green bit

Needless to say, brains are very complicated both structurally and functionally, so this is not a post on the intricacies of brains. However, understanding what the limbic system does is crucial to understanding why it is so important to mammals (and also explains why its absence means that reptiles are so different from us).

The limbic brain has three main functions:

- It facilitates memory storage and retrieval. If the limbic section of the brain is damaged, new memories are unable to be formed and old ones may not be remembered.

- It is responsible for establishing emotional states (which is glaringly obvious to those who have dealt with two-year-olds, whose limbic system is just coming ‘online’).

- It links the conscious, intellectual functions of the cerebral cortex with the unconscious, autonomic functions of the brain stem, making it responsible for the states of flight, fright, freeze or fawn. Most of us no longer have to run from big cat predators, but the same physiological response can be had from the teacher suddenly demanding that you stand up in front of the class to answer a question or your boss requiring you to do a public speaking gig.

In other words, the limbic system is vital to our humanity, our relationships and our place in the world.

As social mammals, humans are interdependent for limbic regulation. The limbic system is dependent on the active intervention of others for normal development. Many people are familiar with the Harlow monkey experiments that were done in the 1950s - 1960s. These experiments were done for the purpose of figuring out the importance of attachment in humans, specifically the attachment of babies to their mothers. Did babies respond to their mothers solely for food or were other factors in play? To discover the answer to this question infant rhesus monkeys were removed from their mothers immediately after birth and held in cages with inanimate mother substitutes. The bare wood and wire “mothers” had food available (bottles with milk were incorporated into the body design), while the other “mothers” had no food, but did have foam and soft cloth bodies that the babies could cling to.

Several iterations of the same experiment were conducted, and the results were always the same. If during the critical period of infancy, baby monkeys had no real mother or mother substitutes to relate to, they never developed normally and could not adjust to life with other monkeys at any point later in their lives. Just having a ‘soft’ mother substitute and being fed adequately was not enough to foster normal development.

About thirty years later, a similar “experiment” occurred in the many orphanages in Romania. Due to the policies of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, both birth control and abortion were banned, and rewards were given to women who had many children. Unfortunately, due to country wide poverty, once he was deposed families could not feed and care for many of these children and thousands of babies ended up in orphanages and hospitals, abandoned by their families.

For the most part, these babies were fed and had their basic bodily needs attended to, but that was it. They grew up in an atmosphere totally devoid of any sort of actual care and with no love from an adult. Love, and the lack of it, change the young brain forever and in ways that can’t be ‘fixed’ later on. Missing out on this crucial period of attachment to a loving caregiver leads to lifelong anxiety, depression and an inability to interact appropriately with other people.

Attachment is physiology

Because limbic regulation between parent and child directs neurodevelopment, social contact is necessary for evolving pieces of behavior to assemble into a functional animal. Without parental guidance, neurochemical disjunctions accumulate, and budding behaviors conglomerate into a mess. Isolation-rearing in rhesus monkeys produces a nightmarish head-banging, eye-gouging mutant with scant resemblance to a healthy, coherent organism. Rhesus monkeys must be mothered to even eat or drink in the normal simian style.

Babies need love to develop normally and rely on an arsenal of enticement to elicit this from their parents. Without any attachment to a mother or a strong mother substitute, a baby’s physiology is damaged and if not rectified in time, these children grow into adults who suffer from a variety of mental health conditions that are difficult to manage and preclude living a well-integrated, successful life. In cases of severe emotional neglect, even if babies are adequately fed, they die.

Human beings do not arrive fully “assembled”; they require many years of conscious focus by others to furnish the limbic system with the skills that are necessary for it to function as it was designed to do. All that gazing into each other’s eyes, the cooing and talking is not ‘wasting time’, it is creating the ‘library’ in a baby’s brain where all the ‘books’ they will need use to be socially competent will be stored.

Babies and their mothers are a dyad

There is no substitute for the constant presence of a committed adult in the life of a baby. The person best placed to assume this role is usually the baby’s mother. This is not a sexist statement; it is stating a physiological fact. Women’s bodies are altered forever by the experience of pregnancy and birth.  Fetal DNA remains in his or her mother’s body, possibly forever and can have an impact on women’s future health.

Women begin to bond with their babies well before birth. How they feel about being pregnant can influence the relationship they make with their baby once s/he is born. And how a mother feels during pregnancy is partially responsible for how her baby’s brain develops and how her baby copes with stress. Women entering pregnancy with dysregulated emotional systems are more likely to produce babies who face emotional derailment themselves.

And babies are not ‘blank slates’ upon which we can foist any old adult in the role of a mother. Babies know their mothers when they are born. They are in tune with their heart and respiratory rates and have been listening to their mothers’ voices for months before birth. Amazingly, babies younger than three days old can elicit the sound of their mother’s voice, in preference over that of another female or male voice. Babies become acclimated to their family’s diet and smells through the food that their mothers eat during pregnancy, the essence of which is in the amniotic fluid they have been ingesting. And babies recognise and are comforted by the smell of their own mother’s milk, which they will turn to in preference to the milk of some other woman before they are a week old.

Every mammal born is expecting to meet their mother and separation from her can cause lasting trauma. Even sleeping separately causes anxiety that can be measured. Mothers are stressed when separated from their babies, even if intellectually, they understand the reasons why.

Babies and mothers are not like Lego bricks that can be pulled apart and put back together in an infinite number of configurations.

What about hormones?

Normal brain development is dependent on the fundamental relationship between a mother and her baby. The primary hormone that supports this is oxytocin.

Oxytocin is a peptide hormone. Hormones, in general, are biological molecules used in multicellular organisms to direct and coordinate development, growth, and reproduction. The word peptide refers to peptide bonds between amino acids. A peptide hormone, therefore, is a chain of amino acids which serves the function of a biological communication molecule. A neuropeptide is a small protein-like molecule (peptide) used by neurons to communicate with each other. Peptides are neuronal signalling molecules that influence the activity of the brain and the body in specific ways.

The anatomical arrangement of oxytocin allows release to integrate both hormonal and neurogenic effects when stimulated, for example when a baby is suckling. Oxytocin exerts a broad range of effects in females and in males. The fact that the molecular structure of oxytocin is the same in all mammals is further evidence that it has a fundamental role in behaviour and physiology.

The highest levels of oxytocin to be found in humans is in the time period immediately before and just following birth, for both mothers and babies. Never again, at any point in time will any hormone be so important for the long-term health of a mother and her baby.

Why is this? Because oxytocin plays a key role in human society and reproduction. This begins well before a child is conceived; couples who are attracted to each other have higher circulating levels of oxytocin than randomly paired people. Oxytocin is woven into all our significant relationships. Levels surge during orgasm, labour, birth and breastfeeding.

Dairy farmers have known this for decades. They work to keep their ‘girls’ calm and happy during milking because otherwise, even a full udder will yield little milk as oxytocin is responsible for the milk letdown reflex in mammals.

So hopefully have we reached a point where it is obvious how important the limbic system is in human relationships and how, partnered with oxytocin, this empowers the mother/baby dyad to promote healthy psychological and physiological growth and development in brand new human beings.

What happens to babies when there are no “mothers”?

Because it is impossible to change your sex, trans women remain biological males, whatever size of silicone breasts they have chosen to have implanted on their chest wall. Reading through a random smattering of articles on the internet, some writers assert that since a few babies have been born to women courtesy of uterine transplants, men are just the obvious next step. This just underscores the incredible levels of ignorance around what is needed to successfully gestate a baby.

Mammalian reproduction is an incredibly complex ‘dance’ of hormonal conditions and physical capacities. You need more than an empty uterus to grow a baby in and men just aren’t up for this job. Over 20% of pregnancies end spontaneously, many of them so early that the women may not even have realised they were pregnant. I believe the amount of experimentation that would be needed with human embryos to be grown in men would be unethical and in today’s overpopulated world, unnecessary.

It is also prioritising the desires of adults over the needs of babies.

Which is what is also in play when trans women claim they want to breastfeed babies.

Remember, they are not wanting to feed their baby (unless they were the sperm contributor). They did not conceive, gestate, labour or birth this baby and the baby is going to regard them as a biological stranger.

Some men have been able to produce some milk-like fluid after many months of hormone treatment and expressing. This is not breastfeeding as it is usually understood. There are case reports about men who have managed to produce a small part of a baby’s nutritional needs for a few weeks, which are celebrated as some sort of victory, but it is a win for pharmacology, not for babies.

Since when do we celebrate the use of babies as sex aids? Many men who take on Synthetic Sex Identities are autogynaephilic and those who use breastfeeding as part of their “womanhood” are lactophilic as well.

How can groups such as La Leche League International, which was founded and based on mother-to-mother support enforce policies of helping “everyone” to breastfeed and disaccredit their volunteers who refuse to comply? This abandonment of babies and erasure of women as mothers is a complete turnaround for an organisation which used to be an advocate for the mother/baby dyad long before science caught up with the fundamental importance of this relationship.

Everyone may want to, but not everyone can. And “human milk feeding’ is not a relationship, it’s a product of some woman’s labour

The other group of ‘non-mothers’ are women who don’t identify as women. The girls who were started on puberty blockers and progressed to cross sex hormones will not be faced with any dilemmas around birth or breastfeeding as they have been sterilised by their “treatment” so are infertile. Due to vaginal atrophy and the increased risk of cancer, they may have undergone a hysterectomy as well as of course, the ubiquitous “top surgery” (bilateral mastectomy of healthy breasts).

But many women who choose to identify as something else and started transitioning too late for puberty blockers will be able to become pregnant and have babies. Many questions should be asked around this, but very few are asking these. A few things I have been wondering about are:

• What is the effect of excess testosterone on a fetus? Especially on a female fetus? And what about the eggs that the fetus is forming? Although sex is determined at conception, an embryo is six weeks old before the Y chromosome presence or absence starts the process of sex differentiation. Is anyone asking this question? If not, why not? Have we learned nothing from the disaster caused to women by their mothers taking medications during pregnancy?

• We already can make an educated guess about some problems that ‘non-women’ having babies will encounter from looking at medical conditions that women and their care teams are already dealing with. Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) are dealing with multiple hormone imbalances (including excess testosterone) that cause many reproductive problems, starting with difficulties conceiving, higher rates of miscarriage, prematurity and difficulties with breastfeeding. ‘Non-women’ having babies will need more monitoring and interventions than women will need to keep them and their babies medically safe.

• As testosterone ‘ages’ the uterus, can we expect these pregnancies to have more in common with older women having babies? The effects of later in life (from the late 30s) pregnancies are already known. Placental insufficiency, leading to smaller and more premature babies; pre-eclampsia and other complications. Extra monitoring will be done, and more interventions will be performed.

•  High testosterone levels in women during the perinatal period are not normal. How does this affect the mother/baby dyad? Why is no one considering that the baby has not consented to this?

Do natal women identifying as men have the same experience as ‘mothers’?

The role of hormones in human reproduction is so fundamental that we ignore our evolutionary physiology at our peril. Oxytocin release is vital to attachment and bonding to babies and their mothers for both short- and long-term positive outcomes. Oxytocin is also a factor in men’s relationships with their babies and men who are well attached to their children have temporarily lower levels of testosterone during the postnatal period.

So, if you are having a baby as a ‘man’, what might be different about this experience, in comparison with a woman?

Two antagonists to oxytocin are adrenaline (which floods the body in fearful situations) and cortisol (the stress hormone). That’s one reason why labour often stalls when you make the shift from home to hospital. Your mind may ‘know’ that hospital is a ‘safe’ place, but your body may not agree.

It is reasonable to assume that levels of both adrenaline and cortisol will be higher for “transdads”. Every media story featuring “dads who gave birth” will be a tale of the stress of being misgendered and of having to use resources designed for women only. There is no other area of health care that is designed for the exclusive use of <1% of the population, but as is common with those following the trans agenda, there is never a situation that is not all about “me”.

Breastfeeding is an important component of the reproductive cycle for women. It provides a metabolic ‘reset’ that enhances a mother’s overall health for the remainder of her lifespan. If you can’t breastfeed because you have no breasts, you miss out on the health optimising factors that are bestowed through breastfeeding.

Oxytocin is vital for all mammalian relationships and mothers who are breastfeeding are being constantly bathed in oxytocin as this is also a hormone vital to the success of lactation. Adults’ responsiveness to babies is of course more than just hormonal, but studies have shown that how adults care for babies is partly influenced by how they were mothered themselves. As previously noted, being loved (or not) changes how a baby’s brain develops and an insecurely attached adult may perpetuate the cycle with their own baby.

Another thing that bothers me is:

Mammals don’t abandon their babies to others.

I am not talking about adoption. Adoption is doing the best we can in unfortunate circumstances, making the best of a less than ideal situation. The distress of children who were adopted has been well studied now though and gives us a lot of knowledge about what happens to babies who are separated from their mothers to be raised by others.

Surrogacy is not ethical. It is the deliberate creation of a new human being to satisfy the wants of adults, without any consideration of the needs of babies. It ignores the human rights and agency of babies and presumes that this is not as important as the desires of an adult.

Surrogacy commodifies women and babies and turns babies into a consumer good. It is a fancy way of buying another human being. It is a form of human trafficking.

Surrogate pregnancies are more high risk than non-surrogate pregnancies. Not only are there more physical risks, including death, but one has to ask, what is the psychological cost to a woman who ‘loses’ her baby by giving him or her away? What mental gymnastics are needed to tell oneself and the world ‘this isn’t my baby’ as you become breathless and need to pee constantly as the baby fills your abdominal cavity and it feels as if someone is doing somersaults inside you? How do you explain to your other children that you are giving away this baby? What if they worry that they might be the next child to be given away to someone else?

Asking the question again:

Are you a mammal or a reptile?

Naomi Stadlen, in one of her wonderful books talks about how loving mothers keep their children in mind. And how mothers who can’t do this because of drug addictions or depression raise children that can spend their lives looking for what they missed as children.

She also asks if the trend for women to go back to paid employment not long after their babies are born is not because they are failing at the intimate relationship that a mother and her baby require, but because they never thought about relationships being a part of motherly work. A modern woman who has been socialised her entire life to value career success as the chief measure of her worth as a person faces a very real shock when her baby demands that she pays attention to him or her right now, not when it may be convenient.

Birth is a transformative experience unlike any other. Your body is altered visibly and invisibly, your life course is changed forever and none of this is under your conscious control. This is true even if your baby dies or is given away.

Reptiles do not grieve the loss of their babies and do not care for them to ensure their survival. Mammal mothers may risk their own lives to save them from danger and if their babies die, they suffer.

Is your limbic brain in working order or not?