So ... Does this indicate that you CAN be 'born the wrong gender'?

The David Reimer case is horrible for what was done to those boys by the psychologist but also for the impact it had on medical practice.

John Money (the psychologist). Had proposed that a persons gender identity was entirely socially constructed. David Reimer was meant to be his definitive test case as David had a twin who still had an intact penis and could be raised male while David (now Brenda). Would be raised female.

John Money knew that David had rejected his female identity and identified as male. But he falsified his results and allowed the medical and scientific community to believe the transition was a success.

chunky and I were discussing a clinical study of 16 boys born with no/exceptionally tiny penis.
As neonates 14 of these boys were reassigned as female (testes removed and surgery completed).

Only 5 of these subjects still identified as female as teenagers. Whether you feel male or female is clearly not just socialisation.

I'm glad someone had explained the Bruce Reiner story. It was horrific! And yet again an " experiment" for the psychiatrist involved.
Didn't he end up taking his own life? Poor man.

Coco you are completely wrong about Bruce Reimer.

Bruce Reiner was born male but with deformed genitals. As a baby his parents decided to have his penis turned into a vagina, and under medical supervision over a number of years, he was raised as a girl.

He had a twin brother. As a toddler, he had an operation to correct a problem with his urinary tract. It went wrong and his penis was badly damaged. The parents were advised to remove the penis and raise him as a girl. Suddenly he was treated differently to his brother and was raised as a girl in accordance with strict gender norms. The therapy was horrific and the doctor made the boys role-play sexual activity with Bruce as the woman. Some of this was photographed.

What we can learn from this is that doctors can be dangerous in the pursuit of their ideologies. What we cannot learn from this is anything about the innateness or otherwise of conformity with gender expectations.

And yes, it's pretty constant not just a play thing.

Coco - no, my point is that she is FOUR! Just 4 YEARS OLD. If she is still proclaiming to be a dinosaur and call her Rex all the time when she is 11 or 12 then I might start to be concerned that maybe she is Transdinosaur.

Same for this lad. He's 4. They are funny little bundles at that age. If he was in the paper about this at 12 (and a bit more able to consent to the publicity as well at that age), then I might take it a bit more seriously.

chunky in the same situation I would have gone the no surgery route too. Would still have meant a difficult life for the boy but I think it would have been the best option.

I also thought it was odd when the mother in the article said she had noticed something was wrong at 18 months
This hasn't been handled well at all. Shes making it into something it's not for attention!

And yet, the law and irreversible medical treatment is proceeding as if there were overwhelming evidence for innate gender identity. I find this very worrying.

Me too Buffy. I also find it worrying that if you question the accepted narrative you are told you just don't get it, or you're a transphobic bigot, or probably both.

Yes When - they were all going to have tough lives when it comes to this no matter which direction they took. What a responsibility the parents had to take to make this decision.

I suspect that I would err on the side of the 2 who declined to participate personally - but then, I don't think I 'raise boys' at the moment - they're only young, they're just kids, their sex/gender doesn't matter yet at all.

chunky glad I didn't sound rude. It's hard to say exactly how happy the 5 girls who remained as girls were. The researchers said they "presumed the girls were happy."

It wouldn't have been ethical to question them too much about their gender identity incase it caused issues that otherwise would not have arisen.

I do agree that in humans virtually nothing is innate. But biology does affect us, it can and does affect our psychology.

Socialisation does of course have an impact but factors in the womb certainly seem to play a big part in sexuality in human males.

For example I believe that a person who is happy to be homosexual today might have presented as straight 100 years ago.
The person and their sexuality would be the same but their willingness to express it might be greatly reduced if it was illegal to be gay.

Just a thought - I know sod all about medicine, but if these boys are twins, then wouldn't they have received the same amount and type of hormones in the womb? So that would not support the argument for hormones influencing 'brain gender' if one is trans and one not.

As a woman with PCOS, I have excess testosterone. I'm definitely not trans do have a cracking beard though.

Oh, no problem WhenShe - I confess I didn't even notice.

I agree, you can't call it successful - but it's not an abject failure either - in fact, it doesn't help us at all! Some people were clearly happy to have their gender totally determined by being socialised, and some weren't - which is just more of the same - that perhaps it's biological (but we don't know what), and it's at least partially social.

From my reading on the FMRI studies, many are problematic because the subjects are MTTs who have undergone hormone treatment , years of living as women (with the neuroplasticity that will follow) etc

We also don't know how many men have these differences and have no problems with their gender identity

So they are far from conclusive IMO.

I think socialisation is partially why we do see trans people. You are a boy, and boys do x/y/z, but you like doing a/b/c. If socialisation tells you that a/b/c is only for girls then where does that leave you? If gender as a social construct didn't exist then boys who like doing a/b/c would think of themselves as boys who like doing a/b/c, not as girls in the 'wrong' body. Possibly.

I personally think sexuality and gender identity is strongly influenced by factors in the womb.

And I agree with coco if it was all down to socialisation we wouldn't see trans people. They would be socialised to feel like a boy if they were in a boy's body.
But of course there are some people who would do better transitioning to the sex they feel best suits their brain.

that said I do think Drs should be very cautious with hormone therapy in teenagers. its a pretty angsty and unhappy time and I can imagine teenagers thinking a sex change is the solution when it actually isn't

Anathema

About your daughter who likes to be a dinosaur. Does she think this way constantly, 24/7, or is it a play thing? I'm not sure it's quite the same as someone who is transgender.

You know, not that long ago the same sort of arguments could have been put forward about gay people. Just a phase. They will grow out of it. Perhaps we could condition them?

I suspect that in 10 years time - given the rate we are learning about the brain - a lot of people on this thread will go "oh yeah - got it now."

chunky

Firstly sorry that last post to you was a bit abrupt (rude). I'm trying to settle a miserable toddler who has a fever and it was a bit rushed.

The trial is very interesting, one of the topics that came up in the discussion was that some of the parents went against the advice of the doctors and told the children they were reassigned.

I don't think you can say that this was successful because 5 out of 14 were happy to remain as female and 3 were ambiguous.

WhenShe - 2 weren't re-assigned. 5 identify female, 6 male, and 3 don't have an identity - for such small numbers, that's basically as many successfully switched as didn't, with some in the middle.

They must have been told at some point that they had been re-assigned (I should read the study) - it's rather an important thing to know, presumably around about puberty when they'd have to start taking hormones etc. and be informed of what's different about them for medical reasons - even if they weren't told at first - and that's a hell of a time to find out anything that serious about yourself, I can't begin to imagine the depth of impact that must have.

I think that if I was suddenly told that, then I would certainly question my gender more than I would otherwise - you'd have to think about it. Hell, I'm a grown woman with two kids, and if pressed, I'd certainly put my gender in the middle group - not identifying as woman or man - even though I'm clearly a woman and have no dysphoria over that at all, because I'm not even slightly feminine, and happy that way.

When I was very small I watched the Magnificent Seven and decided I wanted to be James Coburn, or rather his character in that film. That phase lasted until I saw the Three Musketeers and switched my allegiance to d'Artagnan.

when Im sure I have also come across some studies that shows that an inadequate level of testosterone during pregnacy also affect the way that the genitals are developping.
Although rare, there are some cases of 'men' (as having XY chromosomes) who look like women, have been brought up as girls/women and only to discover they actually are 'men' when their periods don't start....

I'm not aware of any of these men/women actually wanting to live as a man rather than a woman...

I have met a woman (man??) in a similar situation than BR.
She has a chromosomal problem (2X and 1Y if I remember correctly) and when around 3~2yo, as 'her' penis hadnt developed properly, it was 'removed' (her words). That was 20 years ago, she was in her fourties and at the time (so that's more than 60 years ago), this was deemed to be the best decision to take for the child.

She said she could still remember 'being' a boy and having a penis.
She was raised as a boy for the first years of her life.
She felt she was in fact a man and not a woman but had to endure living within that sex.

In her own words though, she also always said that a big part of her sexual identity was linked with the way she was raised (the brain part) rather than her sexual attributes.

What I am finding really worrying is this tendency to put people and children into a pigeon hole. So here is a 2yo, a four yo boy who likes 'girly' things, so he has to be trans. (Note you don't hear that if a 2 or 3 yo girl says she likes boys things stuff then that means she is ought to be man instead ... Always the other way around...).
What a great way to actually conditioned a child to think that they ought to be different than what they are.
Or to teach them they ought to be different even though deep down they are not feeling so different with all the issues coming with it.
And if it was actually helping people/children who actually ARE trans, then you could wobnder if this wuld help.
But as a PP pointed out, trans children don't actually know. They work it out much later and this is THEN that they need help and support and acceptance.
When children are so young, they should just be encouraged to be themselves, with as little sexual references as possible. They should be treated the same way (again as much as possible), taught the same things (from compassion towards another person/animal to climbing tress, building lego, counting and playing with dolls and the kitchen).

Meh.

My DD1 is convinced she is a dinosaur and plays at being a dinosaur etc. Does dinosaur things and wants to be a dinosaur when she grows up. Sometimes a dragon but mostly dinosaur.

She is also 4 and has been like this since age 2 as well.

I'm not thinking I have a transdinosaur. I'm thinking it's a phase, she likes being a dinosaur and doing dinosaur things, and will eventually reconcile herself to being a girl when older.

Chunky is that seriously your interpretation of that trial?

14 boys were operated on and reassigned as female. If you read the study their parents were instructed not to tell them they had been reassigned. So they shouldn't have had any reason to question their gender.
At the end of the study only 5 of these reassigned children were still happy as girls.

The interpretation of this trial (and there have been similar studies) is the exact opposite of what you have concluded.
That male sexuality seems to be influenced in the womb by fetal androgens and it is not always appropriate to reassign a boy as it is not always successful.

Seriously 5 successful cases out of 14 isn't a good success rate.