> Does that mean you support the idea of "trans" people / kids? Or, that male/ female traits are overlapping..?

No, there IS no converting a male body into a female body, and the hormonal and especially the surgical attempts to do so are horrors; those who do such things to young people who have been conned into having them done are criminals. They know damn well you can't turn a young man into a woman, nor can you turn a young woman into a man. The detrans movement is full of people who are living with the mostly unfixable consequences and more than a few are unABLE to live with those consequences.

What Dr. Panksepp is saying is that there are differences in male and female brains, and because our brains and the rest of our bodies are on somewhat different developmental tracks, it is possible for a person to have a clearly male body with a largely female brain, or for a clearly female person to grow up with a brain closer to the male norm. I believe that is one common reason for people to grow up feeling "they're in the wrong body" and, in some cases, to have same-sex attraction. Again, that's certainly not the ONLY way people feel uncomfortable in their bodies or find themselves attracted to the same sex, but it's one that I don't see being discussed or taken into consideration, well, anywhere. I believe a person's sexual preference is neither a moral decision nor anyone else's business, and the available science supports that, IMO.

On religion: I grew up attending Methodist churches and Sunday School but always felt the Old Man with a Beard in the Sky idea was bizarre and on the same level as Santa or the Easter bunny. Also, I knew too many people who attended church and/or identified as Christian who were mean-spirited in their daily lives, which told me that at the very least "being Christian" by itself didn't make one a good person.

So from an early age I was an atheist; science made sense to me, religion did not.

On the other hand, I believed that religions had important things to say about life, and learned more about them.

Physics, of all things, really started getting me interested in religion a few decades ago. The science of consciousness, of quantum mechanics, and of several other areas fascinates me (there's a LOT of interesting material in those areas) and eventually I ran into something that really flipped a switch for me:

The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality by Bernardo Kastrup.

It's not even that I fully embrace or believe his views, but rather that it shocked me into seeing how a shift in paradigm (the framework we use to organize facts and details into a coherent mental picture) was enough to help understand the common thread among nearly all religions and to see their utility for humans in our many cultures. I am less concerned now about the specific framework that people or cultures have and more focused on what actually happens and the fundamentals being depicted (as opposed to the way those fundamentals are named or dressed up).

It also made clear that the various ways religions describe heaven, an afterlife, and other spiritual matters might be (in part) attempts to conceptualize a universe in which consciousness is foundational rather than a side-effect of the squishy matter between our ears.

Kastrup's Idealism solves the "hard problem of consciousness" (how can atoms and flesh create SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE?) and a few other problems in physics, but the shift from "matter is primary, and creates consciousness" to "consciousness is primary, and creates the matter and physical laws we see in the universe" is quite a jolt. There are many other versions of (roughly) that idea; Kastrup discusses them and highlights the problems of each.

To oversimplify, Idealism sees the physical brain as capturing a tiny, dissociated bit of the universal consciousness -- That Which Experiences, as he puts it -- and it is THIS which constitutes our soul, this which keeps us from being zombies, acting on information from our senses (as even a thermostat on the wall does) without ever experiencing anything.

All life on Earth is family, because we share the language of DNA (and for one example, every living thing on Earth uses the same energy-transfer molecule, ATP, without which life slams to a halt; even melatonin is so ancient that even many plants make it).

If Kastrup is right, all conscious life -- LOTS of argument about where consciousness starts, both in other species and in a growing human fetus -- is family for another reason: our very consciousness is temporarily dissociated piece of the universal consciousness itself.

As for Jesus: These four short quotations from Him are, for me, all the Bible needs to contain. If anything, much of the other material has caused confusion and problems, imo. Any true religion supports love, compassion, and therefore particularly supports the proper and compassionate treatment of children.

Matthew: 
18:1 -- 18:6 about children, and protecting them.

Mark: 
10:13 -- 
10:15 about children

Luke: 
17:21 Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.

John: 
13:34 A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. 
13:35 By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

I just read through this and am appalled at how long it is. I've just run on and on, really. It would take me a week or more to edit this properly. I hope you find something useful or interesting in some of it, useruser123, and in any case, I wish you well on your own journeys.