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

[Garrick]

www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/im-girl-meet-twin-boy-6348318?

Summary: Twins Alfie and Logan, 4yo, are both boys. Logan has insisted on wearing girly clothes, doing girly things, and that he is a girl since the age of two. His mother, who sounds brilliant, reports him wishing his willy would fall off.

I'm somewhat flummoxed. When I were a lass, little boys like this were described as camp (behind their fathers' backs) and, as far as I know, mostly grew up to be camp and fulfilled their rightful destinies. Rather like Ugly Betty's brother.

But this is what some transwomen say they felt like as children, isn't it? And I have rubbished it because I find it hard to believe in gender as an innate feeling. I'm not sure whether I think little Logan proves me wrong

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I disagree that you can conclusively draw that from this case.

demented read the trial and then see what you think.

www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa022236#references

It's not just a one off trial - there are others that point towards the importance of hormonal influences in the womb on sexuality and gender identity.

A few highlights from the trial

• the boys all suffered a rare disorder that affected physical development in the pelvis (including no/exceptionally small penis).

• they had normal testes so would have had normal hormonal levels in the womb

• male foetuses produce large amounts of testosterone in the womb in the first trimester (females do not have this large surge). This is important for the growth of male physical structures (eg penis) but also is thought to have developmental effects on the brain.

• 13 of the boys were reassigned before they were 2 weeks old. 1 when he was 12 weeks old (obviously testes were removed)

• so all 14 reassigned children were reassigned very early.

• of the 16 entered into the trial (2 were not reassigned). 8 identified as male.

2 expressed a wish to be male but their parents wished them to remain female, 1 had been told she had been born male and refused to discuss her gender with anyone (it's really sad this kids sounded really confused and angry).

• of the 5 who reported being happy as a female none of them had been told their birth sex (it was felt this could undermine their identity)

• of all 16 kids only one of them had never expressed an interest in becoming male.

The author of the trial also discusses female patients suffering from the same disorder (problems in the development of structures within the pelvis but ovaries were ok).
They also required a lot of medical intervention but they developed as female in the womb and were also raised and socialised as female,
As a group they don't have gender identity issues, whereas the boys raised as girls clearly did.

I honestly can't see how you could read that trial and think feeling like you belong to one gender or another is just due to how you are socialised.

I honestly can't see how you could read that trial and think feeling like you belong to one gender or another is just due to how you are socialised.

I see that this study may have something to say about sex, not about gender.

Also the parents knew the truth. We cannot say for sure this had no influence on their parenting and what affects this may have had on the children.

I think socialisation is partially why we do see trans people.

I'm afraid that the more I learn about trans* people - particularly transwomen, as they seem to get all the airspace - the more convinced I become that gender is an entirely social construct and that 'transness' is an expression of discomfort with one's gender role.

If humanity ever gets real enough to separate the idea of gender from biological sex - or, ideally, to forget gender altogether - then there will still be people who are dissatisfied with the sex of their body for one reason or another, but infinitely less pressure on them to take drastic measures in search of resolution. And infinitely more flexible options available to them.

I may be slightly unusual in having known very many gender-free, pan-gendered, trans-gendered and otherwise non-conforming adults through my life (thank you, arty people!) I think such fluidity is a kinder way of being for everyone, including those who like to play out their assigned gender to the max.

Plus, of course, if we ever get around to ditching gender, we won't need feminism and patriarchy will have to employ its weapons with a bit more ingenuity

One other thought. Until females and males are treated completely equally, biological differences aside obviously, that kind of study can never be unbiased. We will never know if the born boy, raised as a girl, 'identifies as male' because they want to do the things that society calls masculine.

Just last week, my nephew was round and he really liked a flowery gift bag I had. I said he could have it. Mil (his nan) immediately pipes up "No you can't have that. That's too pretty for a boy." I made sure he went home with the bag but he's also taken the message that he shouldn't really like that, that it's a girl thing to like.

I'm not saying that is going to have any deep impact on his life, but it's a constant drip, drip of messages that children get from birth and it does affect them.

I honestly can't see how you could read that trial and think feeling like you belong to one gender or another is just due to how you are socialised.

I don't think anyone on this thread has proposed that. Perhaps more like this.

Did the female patients have their ovaries removed? Can't compare if not.

Also 5 of the children that identified as male only did so after being told of their condition. Only 2 spontaneously identified as male.

As demented said, parents and dr's knew so hardly double blind controlled trial. Lots of children say "I want to be a boy/wish I were a boy" but the parents will have taken far more notice of it. Parents might well have been more tolerant of "boy" behaviour and less likely to discourage it than they would a girl.

There is no way to ethically trial this subject so no publication will ever be conclusive.

One of the many problems with studies like that, When, is that (perhaps necessarily) there are no control groups. By and large, too, they are conducted & published by an expert who's pinned their entire career on proving a point.

My endocrinologist was trying to mount a study of gender-related matters with women who had PCOS. I like a lot of his theories, felt they applied to me, and volunteered to report back after taking spironolactone for a long period. It wasn't, however, possible, to control for all the variables in his subjects' lives and neither was it possible to empirically quantify any observed differences between women with PCOS and those without. I could write him a detailed report on how I felt "a bit more feminine" on the spiro and on hormone treatment, and describe perceived changes in the way other people related to me, but all this was totally subjective. There's no way of telling whether another woman would describe the same experiences the same way, even if our experience was identical (and of course it wasn't.)

5 girls reporting they're happy as girls means absolutely zip. You can find 5 girls to say they're happy as girls anywhere - even girls who've been sexually abused or punished for not being boys would say that. Each of us only has experience of being ourselves. A child who was told they were a Martian, referred to as a Martian, and was well treated as a Martian, would most likely report being happy as a Martian.

This is all psychology, not hard science at all.

Nice graphic, Flora :)

Gender as in "Girls love pink and play tea party games, they are soft and gentle, then they grow up and cook/clean" etc is entirely socially constructed.

Gender identity as in "I know I am a woman" is the brain knowing what sex the body is, and that is not a social construct.

I think the English language is confusing on this subject and can do with better descriptors. It might be an idea to call it "sex identity" rather than gender identity, because what the brain is passing judgement on is whether or not the body is male or female (erroneously, in the case of trans people) and not whether it fits into the society's view of one gender or another.

As such, I am not at all surprised that studies show transwomen's brains are similar to women's in some respects - it is expected to find a neurological basis for such discrepancy between a person's perception of himself and the reality. Similarly, it is to be expected that Bruce Reimer continued to believe himself a man despite undergoing GRS as a baby and being raised as a girl - he was nothing other than a castrated man.

If we had a society where men or women could wear what the fuck they liked clothes wise (decency rules permitting and being identical for both sexes), children could play with whatever toys they wanted, and men and women were truly equal.... Would there still be trans people?

I think there would still be people with sex dysphoria.