The kind of “girl” that a boy who identifies as a girl thinks he is

[MyAmpleSheep]

How do people who celebrate the transitioning of five year old children know that the kind of girl a boy who identities as a “girl” identifies as is the same kind of girl that a girl who identifies as a “girl” is?

Other than than from what he sees girls doing, how can a boy “know” what being a girl is, to be sure he is one?

is it posited that there is an innate sense of boy:girl that exists outside of the experience of seeing and being the presence of others?

If a child was “raised by wolves”, could they be trans? If that child had a male body and reached the age of 20 never having seen or met or known of the existence of women is it possible for them to grow up with dysphoria? When eventually discovering the other sex would they suddenly recognize “they had been born in the wrong body”?

This is true.

There are expert accounts also where the staff in gender clinics did not report an increased rate of suicides above the rates of the comorbid mental health issues.

There is a lot that doesn't add up in the arguments supporting medicalising children in particular. The dismissal of the harms is abhorrent.

Why do you feel you have the right to be arbiter on what does or does not constitute gender incogruence when someone is telling you that they have experienced it to a distressing degree?

I mean you're all for listening to people's lived experience right? 🙄

Lacksie, self appointed gate keeper.

It's notable that the articles themselves don't define the treatment in clinical terms, referring to 'gender creative' and 'gender expansive' youth.

Meanwhile desisters are simply 'irrelevant'.

it's chilling.

@Lacksie sorry but you cannot keep being the ‘expert’ on multiple threads without becoming ridiculous.

Please stop. For your own sake. Get of MN and go do something wholesome with your kids and family. The amount of input you have on MN on trans/women/gender is really not healthy.

You are also really out of touch with issues women face.

They can only do that through processing the information fed to them by the adults and the world around them. Which is how Susie Green's son Jack decided he must be a girl. He enjoyed playing with his big sister's toys, but his father didn't approve. He referred to them as 'girls toys' and then removed them from him. Jack concluded that because he liked playing with 'girls toys' then he must really be a girl. Fast forward. Meet Jackie.

It's not a misunderstanding at all. In order to know that you feel the same way as someone else feels, then both parties need to be able to describe the same experience in similar ways..

Your stuck in the same loop.

" In order to know that you feel the same way as someone else feels, then...."

you don't need to know what anyone else feels that's the entire point.

Cognition doesn't work like that - it's 'thinking' that takes place in your own brain, it doesn't depend on knowing someone else's internal experience.

A chromosome is a chromosome. Your knowledge of your chromosomes is a cognition generated in your brain. It can develop through social learning—you know what a chromosome is because someone explained it to you—but having that cognition doesn’t depend on knowing what someone else’s internal experience of thinking about their chromosomes is like.

Gender incongruence is a neurocognitive/psychological condition whereby a person’s internal recognition or representation of themselves as male or female does not correspond with their physical anatomy.

The person is not deluded about what anatomy they have, but despite this anatomy, their internal perception/ recognition of self remains persistently at odds with those physical characteristics.
This is not something that a person can typically control, and it doesn't require knowing how other people experience being male or female.

Now you might say that this cognition has developed because the person has learned that girls like dresses, and they like dresses. But that is a different proposition from a claim that it requires insight into how someone else experiences being a girl. It doesn't.

And that explanation - the role of stereotypes - cannot simply be assumed because it seems intuitive to you. It does not account for trans girls who don’t have stereotypically feminine likes, preferences or interests. Having stereotypically feminine interests is not the same thing as recognising oneself as a girl. A trans girl can understand perfectly well that boys can wear dresses without that resolving her incongruence. She might not even like dresses.

And if you listen properly to accounts of gender incongruence, a recurring theme is not “I’m a girl because I like playing with dolls”, but a direct recognition of self. A conversation like the one I had with my 4 year old earlier this evening is much more typical-
"how do you know you are girl?"
"I just know it".
"because I am"
"I feel it in my body"
"I see it".
If you tell a gender incongruent child - "you can be a boy and play with dolls, where dresses, be whomever you want to be!", she is likely to reply:
"I know I can. But I'm a girl".

There is also research relevant to claims that gender identity is simply a matter of stereotypical interests or being socially recognised as a boy or girl.

Gülgöz et al. (2019) measured children’s identification as boys or girls separately from their preferences for toys, clothes and playmates. They found similar variation among both trans and cis children: some girls had strongly stereotypically feminine preferences, while others did not. Being a girl, or identifying as a girl, and liking stereotypically feminine things were not interchangeable.

Olson and Enright (2018) found that trans children endorsed fewer stereotypes and were more accepting of gender non-conformity than gender typical comparison children.

Rae et al. (2019) assessed gender-nonconforming children before some later socially transitioned. Those who subsequently transitioned had already expressed stronger identification with the other gender before changing names or pronouns. Their identification therefore preceded their social transition.

None of these studies settles how gender identity develops ofc. But they challenge the simple assumptions that a child identifies as a girl because she likes “girls’ things”, or because other people started calling her a girl.

Change the word 'Sterotypes' to 'expectations'. Expectations either indirectly, or directly, communicated.

In order to claim to be a girl, you have to have an idea of what a girl is; the word is just a label for a concept. A child has to have a mental image of what a girl is, to believe that they are one.

So it's worth asking what that internal idea of "girl" is, and where it comes from.

"how do you know you are girl?"
"I just know it".

Misses the obvious next questions to the child: what is a girl, and how is one different to a boy?

Can you explain to me why any of these ( 4 of which are abstracts/ only 1 is a full text, do you have access to all the full texts?) suggests to you reasons as to why we should continue to provide children and young people with hormonal and surgical interventions? I am totally in agreement with you that the paucity and poor quality of evidence is absolutely an issue - but for me that should have meant that gender affirming medical services should have pulled back a long time ago from any form of prescribing or surgical intervention unless it was part of a good quality clinical trial…instead , as we know from people like those involved with WellBn , they have carried regardless. I will provide you with the full text of the Finnish study ihttps://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/apa.70533. A notable paragraph is “Medical GR is often suggested to be beneficial, even vital, for the mental health of adolescents suffering from GD 4-6], but the evidence supporting subsequent improvements in mental health, quality of life or functioning is very limited 18, 19]. Many of the studies in this field are cross-sectional and unsuitable for assessing developments. The few longitudinal studies have been of low quality and provided inconsistent results. The sample sizes have been small; there usually has been no control group, follow-up periods have been short, and the measures of assessing changes in mental health have varied. Loss to follow-up has often been substantial. A notable exception to this is the study by Hisle-Gorman et al., who, in their register-based follow-up study, discovered that transgender youth presented with greater psychiatric morbidity and greater needs for mental healthcare than their siblings. After medical GR interventions, the overall need for mental healthcare had not decreased, and the need for psychotropic medication had increased across therapeutic classes 20”. Seeing as the Finnish study “has several strengths, including a large, nationally representative sample, a three-decade inclusion period that allowed exploring secular trends, the use of matched population controls and a long follow-up period. The register datasets used are comprehensive, with no loss of data during follow-up because reporting is mandatory for health authorities, and patients may not opt out. “ then is there a reason why this isn’t featuring in your thinking process but you still are hoping that the Pathways study provides clarity ,despite the fact that more YP will therefore undergo potential harms?

'you don't need to know what anyone else feels that's the entire point.

Cognition doesn't work like that - it's 'thinking' that takes place in your own brain, it doesn't depend on knowing someone else's internal experience.'

Good lord. We are human beings with experiences in common, and we use language to describe those experiences.

Do you really think that the word 'male' has no correlative thing in the real world?

You've got very confused, here.

Because words exist independently of the signified thing, does not lead to the assertion that the signified thing no longer exists if we change the word.

People seem to get bamboozled by linguistics, and extrapolate the theories of semiotics etc to what becomes an utterly absurd degree.

Yes, absolutely, and that’s why your initial question about a child raised by wolves is an interesting one and impossible to answer with confidence. Children learn about sex categories and the words to describe them through social learning. A child who was never exposed to this learning might never develop gender incongruence, or they might have a sense that something about their body feels wrong but lack the words and concepts to identify and describe what they are feeling. We cannot know.

But it doesn’t follow from this that how a child neurocognitively or psychologically identifies with one category or another must itself be determined by social learning—or depends on inferring their identity from a particular learned account of what a girl or a boy is.

Developmental theories do not simply treat children’s identification as boys or girls as a deduction from stereotypes. Some propose that identifying with a category helps organise children’s subsequent learning about gendered interests and behaviours, rather than merely resulting from it. Children can identify themselves as boys or girls before they can clearly explain what being a boy or girl means, or how they recognise themselves as one.

That’s where the language analogy was helpful: language development depends on social interaction, but our capacity to acquire language has a neurobiological basis. There is no basis for excluding this possibility for how gender identity develops. Indeed it is my view that it is the only explanation we have, as it stands, that can adequately and meaningfully account for the body of empirical evidence.

Although some posters rely perhaps too heavily on AI to 'help' them construct responses, I feel some of them are missing a trick here, and should perhaps download Grammarly too.
Perfect for the pompous who need a little help to construct more coherent responses.
Although it's predominantly used by teens, I think some adults here would benefit.

If your points hold any weight at all, there should be no need for this incessant bafflegab.

Oops! Off to Grammarly I go!
It must be catching...

So basically Glass Delusion.

Yes I was thinking GenAI… sigh.

It's a miracle my toes haven't grown back into my feet such is the amount of cringe I feel when reading some regular poster's contributions.

It's like being forced to read through the dissertation I wrote on Italian Neorealist Cinema when I was 20.
Make it stop! 😭😭😭

It's unfortunate that you end up with that chirpy AI tone which just emphasises the chasm between the seriousness of the treatment proposed and the lack of understanding of what is being treated.

So we're now in the realm of Cartesian philosophy. "Cognito, ergo sum." "I think that I'm a boy, therefore I am a boy". Who knew that children that can barely cope with "fish fingers or chips?" have such towering intellects?

Oh, of course— lost for anything meaningful to contribute, resort to ridiculing the person and accusing them of using AI. I suppose being accused of being a chat bot is at least a step up from being accused of being a man 😂.

Alternatively you could always engage with what I've actually written, and we could have an actual conversation.

It's not interesting for me, sorry.

Despite your best efforts to appear informed, thoughtful, and so extremely educated on the subject, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up whenever I read your posts.

As I said, I'm just so relieved that given your views, you'll come nowhere near small children in an educational setting.

Thank god for the adults in the room.

Charming.

Okay.

'Developmental theories do not simply treat children’s identification as boys or girls as a deduction from stereotypes.

This seems a somewhat sweeping statement. Got anything to back it up, or point to which/whose theories you mean?

' Some propose that identifying with a category helps organise children’s subsequent learning about gendered interests and behaviours, rather than merely resulting from it.'

No shit. A small child is told, repeatedly, they are a boy or girl, and then told repeatedly, by inference or explicitly, that this is what boys and girls do.

' Children can identify themselves as boys or girls before they can clearly explain what being a boy or girl means, or how they recognise themselves as one.'

See above, A small child is told, repeatedly, they are a boy or girl.
And children, being children, believe what they are told, especially when it comes from their caregivers.

'That’s where the language analogy was helpful: language development depends on social interaction, but our capacity to acquire language has a neurobiological basis. '

I don't know what analogy you are referring to, but the fact that we have brains that are capable of learning language doesn't mean that we'd learn it were we not exposed to it. Is that really what you're suggesting? That a child raised in a cave with no human contact would create a recognisable language out of thin air?

'There is no basis for excluding this possibility for how gender identity develops. Indeed it is my view that it is the only explanation we have, as it stands, that can adequately and meaningfully account for the body of empirical evidence.'

Well, I assume you are positing a gendered soul, an innate 'identity' we are born with.

'Developmental theories do not simply treat children’s identification as boys or girls as a deduction from stereotypes.

yes there's a long standing literature on this. Some classic papers:

1. Ruble, D. N., Taylor, L. J., Cyphers, L., Greulich, F. K., Lurye, L. E., & Shrout, P. E. (2007). The role of gender constancy in early gender development. Child Development, 78(4)
2. Martin, C. L., Ruble, D. N., & Szkrybalo, J. (2002). Cognitive theories of early gender development. Psychological Bulletin, 128(6), 903–933.
3. Martin, C. L., & Ruble, D. N. (2010). Patterns of gender development. Annual Review of Psychology, 61, 353–381.

you are always talking about gendered souls, I have no idea what you mean by it.

"how do you know you are girl?"
"I just know it".
"because I am"
"I feel it in my body"
"I see it".

You could substitute a number of words for 'girl' in the first question, and a 4-year-old might give a very similar answer:
how do you know you are an alient?
how do you know you are a dinosaur?
etc.

The question 'Tell me what a girl is?' might be more productive than 'how do you know...'

Thank you Lacksie for the earlier links to articles, I'll work my way through them if I can.
One of them (Skinner et al 2023) has already raised red flags as it starts from the partisan position that transgender people are universally a stigmatised and marginalised group, which is contradicted by their disproportionate visibility and influence in UK society; and by the use of subjective terms like 'culture wars'.
It comes across as an article that set out with assumptions, rather than a position of academic objectivity, and that kind of article needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, doesn't it?

I can add a more recent one:
Miroshnychenko A, Roldan Y, Ibrahim S, et al
Puberty blockers for gender dysphoria in youth: A systematic review and meta-analysis
Archives of Disease in Childhood 2025;110:429-436.
Puberty blockers for gender dysphoria in youth: A systematic review and meta-analysis | Archives of Disease in Childhood
It is useful because it is a meta-analysis which assesses bias and certainty of evidence in the sources it studies.
And it is recent.

.

Very important points here. The open-minded atmosphere of the 1970s was a boon to PIE. I remember a friend saying unhappily that of course we had to listen to their views and consider their proposals. Luckily they had nowhere near enough support, and most of the population was strongly opposed.

The present transgender industry has learnt from PIE’s failure. It is far better organised and massively well funded. And of course it has dishonestly hitched a ride on the success of the gay liberation movement, which causes no harm and makes no unreasonable demands. It spent years getting transactivists into positions of power or influence.

Drugs and surgery are now available for purposes that were unthinkable back then. And importantly, adults in positions of responsibility are accepting the use of children in experimental treatments.

That’s why children are in more danger now than in the 1970s.

It’s impossible to suffer from gender incongruence/dysphoria without implicitly referencing gender stereotypes.
“I’m psychologically suffering because my body is male and therefore I must be female really’ is a whole world away from ‘I’m psychologically suffering because my body has a penis and I want it removed’