Re: FW: Gender identity study

["Nancy Whittier" <NWHITTIE email smith edu>]

Hi - I think Ken's critique is right on-target about this study and
pretty much all the others.  In almost all cases, children who have
their gender reassigned have multiple surgeries during childhood, have
genitals that are different from others, have to take hormones at
puberty, and are subject to whatever the parents do to try to deal with
all of this.  

It is quite rare for children who are genetically female to be raised
as boys.  In cases of ambiguous genitalia, children are most often
reassigned as female, partly because the surgical/medical techniques are
a lot better (phalloplasty is not a very successful technique).  So, as
you say, some children assigned to be girls are likely to be
less-than-totally feminine because the cultural value placed on
masculinity, plus the fact that girls have more leeway to do
stereotypically masculine things than boys have to do stereotypically
female things.

The website of the Intersex Society of North America (isna.org) is a
good source for material on this, as is Anne Fausto-Sterling's book
Sexing the Body.

Nancy

>>> Ken Olum <kdo cosmos phy tufts edu> 3/18/2004 1:20:22 PM >>>
I finally had a chance to read the study about gender identity in
cloacal exstrophy that was discussed here in January (see
http://cosmos.phy.tufts.edu/mhonarc/nonsexist-parenting/msg00091.html).
I really don't think you can learn much about gender identity from
this particular condition.  (And the authors of the article do not
intend to do so.  They discuss only the treatment of children with
this and related conditions.)

The problem is that the children don't have normal genitals no matter
what, and sooner or later they will realize that, and react to it in
some way.  Furthermore the parents know the child's genetic sex, even
if
they have successfully concealed it from the child, and so might well
treat their child differently.

In terms of what the study actually found, of 14 genetically male
people with cloacal exstrophy that were raised as girls, 8 declared
themselves to be male.  Of those, 4 did so upon learning that they
were genetically male, and the other 4 presumably without learning it.
I don't think the first 4 are of any consequence -- it's a strange
situation to discover that your parents have been lying to you to your
entire life, and I don't think how a person reacts in that situation
tells us anything about gender identity in general.  If there's
anything to be learned, it's from the other 4.

The rest of the results are very difficult to interpret.  There are a
lot of questions about whether children played more with boys or
girls, what activities they are interested in, and so on, but I don't
think those are very indicative of anything.  The authors of the
article don't seem to understand that a great deal of the differences
between girls' and boys' activities are due to social expectations.

Is there any condition where genetically female infants are told that
they are boys?  There is an asymmetry in our society between men's and
women's roles and it's easy to imagine why more girls would like to be
boys than vice versa.  I think there was a study that found such an
effect.  Thus anything that might make a child think that he or she
had the freedom to choose a sex would be much more likely to lead to
girls wanting to be boys than vice versa.  Thus the cause of the 4 out
of 14 above might not be hormonal effects on the brain as the authors
speculate but rather than their ambiguous situation leads to their
ability to choose.

                    Ken

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