I wonder whether the ‘compartments’ of the OP might be seen more as ‘categories’ or ‘stages’. I see the categories as (1) physical, being the physical characteristics of a genetic male with which we are endowed at conception (which may later be modified by environment , culture or surgery), (2) mental, i.e. brain programming for gender and sexual orientation by androgen pickling during fetal development (which process may be absent , deficient or disrupted by environment, disease such as rubella, or pharmaceuticals such as DES or other disruptors), (3) hormonal, when the body is flooded with androgens from puberty onwards (the effect of which is again modified by environmental and cultural factors), and (4) knowledge based (being our accumulated mental databases of information, disinformation and experience that our brains accumulate during life, obviously once again influenced by environment and culture).
When stage 2 fails to complete conventionally, this may result in gender or sexual orientation which is variant from the norm. In the case of sexual orientation this deviation is labelled as paraphilia, ranging from bisexuality through homosexuality and asexuality to pedophilia, zoophilia and a multitude of other more or less exotic -philias, whereas variant gender orientation tends to result in dysphoria and seeking feminisation, breast growth and all the other things we discuss. This commonly involves taking estrogen, or if we are seeking to avoid prescription drugs, phytoestrogens. The most commonly vehicle for dosing ourselves with an effective phytoestrogen, at least in this community, is PM. But PM contains much more than just phytoestrogen and clearly can and does do much more than just simulate the effect of natural estrogen. How much more we are still finding out, but it seems that it effects not only just the hormonal category, but also the mental category. It may even influence the physical category , but it is hard to see how it can influence the knowledge based category except that our experiences and discussion of it add to our personal databases, and the mental effects of it may influence how we use our data.