njlauren
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quote:
ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
If one subscribes to the orthodox meanings of sex and gender in this context - ie. sex refers to physiological/biological differences between the sexes, and gender refers to the social psychological and behavioural differences - then practically by definition all gendered behaviour is learned.
That isn't a good definition, it is one that has been blown out the window. The argument that all gender characteristics and gender roles are socially enforced has been shown to be false, much the same way that either being hardwired for everything or a tabula Rossa has proven out to be false.
Ones sex is determined by your chromosomes, that much is true, but beyond that it is complicated as hell. All human fetuses start out as female morphologically, then at an early stage, several months, a hormone bath kicks in and the body differentiates..and there have been babies born that are otherwise normal appearing boys and girls, whose genetics are the opposite (ie a girl is xy, boy xx).....
More importantly, what studies on mammal brains have shown is that gender identity and roles may be wired in the brain, and the culprit again is hormones in utero. If the baby's developing brain has the hormone bath interrupted, if it doesn't happen in the right sequence, weird things can happen. Studies with rats and other mammals where they deliberately played around with the hormone bath, showed startling results. Male rats where the chain was interrupted ended up mimicking female rats, in mating, in a lot of things, female rats likewise could end up mimicking male behavior.
Studies across societies, including societies isolated from each other, show traits in males and females that are consistently the same, even across cultures. Studies of kids raised in 'gender neutral' homes, where for example the kids are not forced into the pink and blue dichotomy, where a girl would be likely to have trucks as well as dolls, showed that even in those kind of circumstances, with parents striving to be gender neutral, boys and girls tended to go for different things. Likewise, CAT and MRI studies of males and female brains when doing tasks show very different ways of doing things in some cases or many cases, the whole thing about women being more intuitive and men more relying on logic seems to have basis in brain morphology. Other things, I grant, are ingrained by what a child picks up, there is no doubt. I can tell you from personal experience that hormones make a difference, thinking, how I approached things, were very different with estrogen dominated blood levels versus testosterone, and i was on them long enough to know the difference.
More importantly, there is something that strongly indicates gender is a lot more then social roles or roleplaying, something a lot more immutable then we think. There was a case, a number of years ago now, where a couple had a son that needed some kind of surgery, and somehow the doctors fouled up and they ended up screwing up the kid's penis. A decision was made by the parents, consulting with doctors and such, that the boy should be raised as a girl. The child was raised as a girl, they I believe did surgery on the baby to make it more conforming, as the child got older they put it on HRT. More irmportantly, the child was worked on by a team of psych specialists, including Dr. John Money, one of the then foremost experts on gender and so forth, they spent incredible amounts of time and energy socializing the child as a girl, they put all this effort into effect programming the child to id as a girl, to be one......and the results were horrific, the poor kid didn't fit in, never felt right, was treated like shit, ended up miserable, despite all of that. When the child grew up, he transitioned to living as a male; sadly, he ended up committing suicide. Basically, the point is that all that socializing, all the programming, teaching of social customs, failed...(I believe the person wrote a book about it, it is called the Joan/John case or some stuff)......
It is all very complex, it ties into so many things. Some people think because the common name is transsexual this is some sort of sexual fantasy, driven in effect like it is giant fetish (which if they knew what HRT did for a M to F, would be laughable, the sex drive goes *pfffy* mighty fast, it is one of the reasons HRT is a kind of test of who is in this for real and who is on some sort of fantasy trip....
I understand why people think a 5 or 6 year old wouldn't know without parental pressure, but claiming it is because the parents wanted a girl when they had a boy is ludicrous. First of all, no parent would want to put their child through what it is like to be trans, faced with a child like that, most parents would spend a lot of time and effort, including sadly physical beatings, trying to stop it from thinking it was a girl (or boy the other way around, though F to M children have it a bit easier), they are ashamed, worried what others will think....
The thing is, that identity mismatch is very strong, and even young kids know there is something wrong, that they don't identify with the other kids of their group, it is just feeling different. I cannot totally talk about that situation, because while I am pretty certain I had those feelings, I buried them very deep and even in intensive therapy, I only had glimmers of what was going on, and that is common, faced with seeing the reactions when you do things differently (for example, in kindergarten, my first playmates were all girls, which caused me no end of problems at home,not cool), but I ended up burying it in fear, but other kids never bury it, it is strongly there from the time they can remember. A good friend of mine, that i met in support groups, when she was that young, was very willowy looking, kind of had long hair, and she used to go to another neighborhood to play, because she was accepted as girl there, I am talking maybe 6,7........so it does go way back.
As far as how to handle kids this young, there is a lot of debate about that. It is true that kids can go through phases, boys can go through a 'princess phase', lots of girls go through the tomboy phase, and it can be hard to tell the difference. There is a lot of reluctance with young trans people to do anything permanent, having a young boy live as a girl is no big deal, little girls and boys aren't that much different, but then there is puberty..for a M to F, in a sense, it is a kind of death sentence, because testosterone is powerful, nasty stuff on the body, and if it hits, it makes transitioning later difficult..on the other hand, if you started a boy thinking they were a girl on HRT at puberty, then suddenly they decide they want to be a boy, it is a mess.....what normally happens is when the kid reaches puberty, they will put them on androgen blockers, so that the testosterone doesn't take effect.......if they eventually stop them, puberty will hit, which gives some flexibility, if they later decide they still want to be girls, they can take HRT and it will work a lot, lot better.
One thing I will say, no one, not parents, not advocates, no one does this lightly or without thought, I find it offensive and stupid when I hear people (not really people on here) who say things like "oh, it is the parents doing it, they are making the child do it, they are just hippy dippy's wanting to emascualte children" and that is such horse hit. The parents who support their kids want their kids to be happy, it is the ones who try to browbeat the kids into 'being normal' that are the ones wanting to make the kid fit their image. The suicide rate among young trans kids is through the roof, and sadly, more then a bit of it is because they find hate and anger at home, not love, not understanding, and if you add you local bible thumpers into the mix, one.
This is all so new, this has only started happening in the past 10 years or so, it just was unheard of before this, and people are trying to adjust. In all fairness, other then the idiots who somehow thing a 6 year old M to F is a pervert or a sexual predator, most people are understandably confused about it, and most people, other then the haters and the religiously stupid, try to understand, they really struggle with it, in many ways it is no different then what I saw as an adult, when I was going through the process......
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RE: Transgender discrimination suit against CO schools - 
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