Troubling, no? For starters, psychologists are expected to refrain from undermining parents. Dr. Savin-Williams should have told John that his attraction to other boys may be temporary,109 and for this reason alone he’d be wise to delay sexual behavior. Boys who self-label as gay in high school are more likely to use drugs and alcohol,110 be infected with an STD, and become HIV positive.111 It would have been appropriate, too, as a “scientist” to tell John about Spitzer’s research, and about organizations like NARTH and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays 112 (“PFOX”).
There’s also a deeper issue, one that really hit home for me after meeting the Circle of Men. Educators and therapists must recognize that not everyone worships at the shrine of self-love and acceptance. Some people wish to struggle against their natures. While many choose to define themselves by their desires, others discover who they are in their struggle against those desires.
Professionals must understand that in this struggle, success is not measured by outcome. One person has better results, the other worse; what confers meaning is the daily effort to live in a manner consistent with one’s values.
But how can educators recognize these truths, when doing so would bring down their house of cards? Their worldview is based on rejecting moral restrictions and struggles. Their aim is to replace the no’s with yes’s, remember? How can they, heirs to Kinsey’s model of sexuality, and after decades of crusading for the expansion of sexual expression, admit that for some people, the exact opposite is best? The patriarch would turn over in his grave.
Chapter Seven
Genderland
PARENTS, FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS. If what you’ve learned so far about sex education horrifies you, and you believe it can’t get any worse, I caution you: it can and it does.
Remember Alice in Wonderland? How Alice followed the White Rabbit into Wonderland, and each new adventure was more impossible than the last? A cat that vanishes into thin air, leaving only its smile behind. A tea party that never ends, because time has stopped. A queen making loony decrees, such as, “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.” 1
Well, welcome to Genderland, where the madness of sex education reaches a peak, and everything you know is turned on its head.
If you’re like most people, you assume someone with a Y chromosome and affiliated genitals is male, and the rest of us, with two X chromosomes, are female. You are certain that girls become women and boys become men. Can anything be more obvious than that? But for sex educators, this is a thorny subject requiring pages of clarification. There’s more to male or female than DNA and anatomy, they explain to kids. There’s also gender.
Sex, gender—is there a difference? You bet, and you need to know what it is. Ditto for distinguishing a cross dresser from a transsexual, and knowing why our “bipolar gender system”2 is flawed.
Genderland is a dumbfounding departure from reality. Here, male and female are arbitrary identities based on feelings, not biology. Here it’s normal for, say, your adolescent son to wonder what he is—a boy, a girl, or neither? That’s right, in Genderland the idea that he must be one or the other is an arbitrary, oppressive paradigm—another noxious “ism,” like racism. Citizens of Genderland reject that model—some insist they’re male and female, others claim they’re neither. Hence words such as “ze” (another option aside from “he” and “she”), and “hir” (an alternative to the oppressive “his” and “her”).
Have I already lost you? It’s okay. Trust me, I’ve been there.
What’s the difference, you wonder, between sexual identity and gender identity? The former refers to the sort of person you’re attracted to. The latter refers to whether you experience yourself as male or female (more on what that means later). Sex ed dogma claims the two are unrelated; in other words, gender identity does not necessarily determine sexual identity.
Yes, Genderland sure is a peculiar place. I discovered it on websites and in books recommended to teens. With each visit, I feel like Alice lost in Wonderland—confused and disoriented. My jaw drops, my eyes open wide. What the heck is this? I keep asking, as I inspect what experts teach our kids.
Every parent needs to visit Genderland, ahead of his child, and carefully observe the landscape. Many will feel, as Alice did, like they’ve fallen down a black hole and landed in a truly bewildering place.
We Are All Hermaphrodites
We owe it all to psychologist John Money, who in 1955 introduced the concept that humans develop an internal sense of maleness or femaleness, separate from chromosomes and anatomy.3 Infants are born gender-neutral, he claimed, without a predisposition to think, feel, or behave in a masculine or feminine manner. “[M]en impregnate,” Money wrote, “women menstruate, ovulate, gestate, and lactate.” 4 All other distinctions are due to socialization.
According to Money’s scheme, while Baby Jill has two X chromosomes, she has the potential to feel like a man. Little Jack has a penis, but if he’s dressed in pink, given Barbies, surgery, and estrogen, he’ll do fine as Jacquelyn. Jack and Jill’s gender identity will depend on messages they receive in the first years of life from family, friends, school, religion, and media. Money taught that until two and a half to three years of age, gender remains vulnerable to environmental influence. After that, the feeling is fixed.
You should not be surprised to discover that, like Alfred Kinsey, John Money had some—well—unconventional views. This is not a 1960s version of Dr. Phil we’re talking about. For one thing, like the good Dr. Kinsey, John Money believed sex between adults and children could be beneficial.5 He was a proponent of adult–child love,6 even incest.7 For another, Money crusaded against traditional morality, arguing that ancient taboos were destructive.
Kinsey and Money appear to have been kindred souls in another way: from John Money’s writings about childhood and abuse at the hands of his father, we see evidence of deep emotional wounds and (you guessed it) gender issues.
“I suffered from the guilt of being male,” he wrote. “I wore the mark of man’s vile sexuality....I wondered if the world might really be a better place for women if not only farm animals but human males also were gelded (neutered) at birth.”8 That’s troubling, isn’t it, coming from someone who ended up advising parents to have their sons castrated?
Money was fascinated by hermaphrodism9—a rare medical disorder in which a baby is born with both male and female reproductive organs. And he dedicated his life to proving to the world that psychologically, we are all hermaphrodites.
For real hermaphrodites, and their parents, the condition is not some ideal psychological state, but a serious dilemma. Boy or girl? That’s the first of many urgent questions that follow the birth of these unfortunate children. Blue blanket or pink? What about a name, and what should parents tell family and friends? Money’s Ph.D. thesis, completed in 1952, was on this medical condition and its treatment. Afterward, he pioneered the work in “sex assignment”—the complex decision of whether to raise a particular hermaphrodite as male or female. He established the country’s first clinic for hermaphrodites’ surgeries at Johns Hopkins University. Money’s clinic later became the first in the United States to provide sex-change surgery for adults.
Money didn’t confine himself to deciding the sex of hermaphrodites. Bruce Reimer, Money’s most famous patient, was born a full-fledged boy, with an identical twin named Brian. In a ghastly medical accident when he was eight months old, Bruce’s penis was destroyed. Bruce’s parents heard Money holding forth on TV about how all it took was a little estrogen, a few Barbie dolls, and some surgery to make a boy into a girl, and they turned to him in their desperation over their son’s plight. At twenty-two months of age, Bruce was castrated, renamed Brenda, and dressed in frilly clothes. He would be raised alongside his twin, who would be given trucks and GI Joes instead of Barbies, as the perfect test case for Money to prove to the world that nurture, not nature, determines gender identity.
The twins’ story became a landmark case, widely cited as proof t
hat the sense of male or female is learned, not inborn. Money’s theories were accepted and taught as dogma; because of them, parents all over the world facing similar circumstances—due to trauma or a medical condition—were advised to castrate their sons and raise them as girls.10
Fast forward to 1996. Dr. Money had not seen or heard from the twins for about twenty years; nevertheless, he republished Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, in which he described the experiment as a complete success.
But a year later, “Brenda” came forward and revealed that “she” was now David,11 a janitor in a slaughterhouse, married and father to three adopted children.
The public learned that the whole thing was a hoax,12 and a fiasco ensued. Contrary to Money’s published results, far from accepting the gender reassignment, David had fought against it tooth and nail from the very beginning—refusing to play with dolls, preferring wrestling over cooking, and even urinating standing up whenever possible. She was teased relentlessly for the boyish way she moved, spoke, walked, and gestured. Kids called her “cavewoman.” In second grade she wanted to be a garbage man, and in eighth, an auto mechanic.13
In short, Bruce/Brenda/David endured years of agony, exacerbated by the “therapy” Money put him and his twin brother through. During their yearly visits,14 Money firmly, loudly, and angrily told the children to take off their clothes, look at each other’s genitalia, and act out sexual intercourse.15
After years of this nightmare—not only for Brenda but for the whole family16—Brenda’s psychiatrist urged her parents to reveal the truth: Brenda was male. Despite Money’s warning never to do so, they gave in.
The twins were 14 when “Brenda” was told that she’d been born a boy. His reaction? “I was relieved. Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did. I wasn’t some sort of weirdo. I wasn’t crazy.”17
And how did Dr. Money respond? He didn’t. The esteemed professor simply stopped mentioning and writing about the case.18
So while the pretense ended, the misery did not. The damage had been done. Both David and his twin eventually were lost to suicide.
Apparently, David’s story—and the doubts it raises about Money’s gender theory—hasn’t penetrated the hearts and minds of today’s sex educators; they remain loyal to that theory. In the same matter-of-fact way your daughter is taught multiplication or geography, she’s told a girl’s preference for pink, her interest in dolls, and her tendency to empathize are due to cultural messages she’s received about how a girl is supposed to feel, think, look, and behave.
Advocates for Youth: Gender is the collection of behaviors, dress, attitudes, etc., culturally assigned to people according to their biological sex.19
Scarleteen: Gender is a man-made set of concepts and ideas about how men and women are supposed to look, act, relate, and interrelate, based on their sex.20 What our mind is like—the way we think, what we think about, what we like, what skills we have—really is not, so far as data has shown us so far—about our gender or biological sex, period.21
Planned Parenthood: All people are “gendered beings” by virtue of the fact that we are socialized into a heavily gendered culture....22 Cultures teach what it means to be a man or a woman.23
What cultures teach about gender, your daughter learns early on, is wrong and harmful. Most cultures endorse “gender stereotypes” and expect everyone to fit them. Like racial and ethnic stereotypes, she learns, gender stereotypes are unsubstantiated and destructive. They prevent people from being who they really are.
According to gURL.com, society expects females to be “emotional, delicate, domestic, nurturing, creative, introspective, meterialistic (sic), patient, moody, concerned with looks, not assertive, catty.”24
If she fails to meet these expectations, your daughter learns, the consequences can be grave. Chances are she’ll be scorned and called names: dyke, butch, or tomboy. She might be assaulted and raped. She could even be murdered. That’s what happened to Brandon Teena, a woman who chose to live as a man.25 If your daughter wants to know more about gender, instructs gURL.com, she should check out Brandon’s story in the film Boys Don’t Cry.
“Sex Education for the Real World”
When it comes to my gender, I: ❏ Was assigned female sex at birth and also identify myself as female.
❏ Was assigned male sex at birth and also identify myself as male.
❏ Was assigned female sex at birth and identify myself as male or transgender.
❏ Was assigned male sex at birth and identify myself as female or transgender.
❏ Was assigned female sex at birth and identify myself as genderqueer, questioning or something else.
❏ Was assigned male sex at birth and identify myself as genderqueer, questioning or something else.
❏ Am intersex and identify myself as female.
❏ Am intersex and identify myself as male.
❏ Am intersex and identify myself as intersex.
❏ Am intersex and identify myself as genderqueer, transgender or something else.
VOTE
Poll on scarleteen.com
Outdated
In the 1960s Money’s theory of infant gender neutrality may have been plausible, given what was known at that time, but in this century it is not. Fifty years ago, the predominant view was that the Y chromosome26 carried little important information; aside from the genes for male genitalia, it was considered a “genetic wasteland.” If males and females essentially had the same genetic endowment, went the thinking of that time, differences between them must be due to society’s messages and expectations.
That was before the biotechnology revolution. Now we can scrutinize DNA and carefully map out each twist and turn. Today we know the Y chromosome is teeming with units of DNA that are unique to males.27 There are distinct male and female blueprints created from the moment of conception.
“The striking quantity and diversity of sex-related influences on brain function indicate that the still widespread assumption that sex influences are negligible cannot be justified, and probably retards progress in our field,”28 reports Dr. Larry Cahill from the University of California, Irvine’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. “There has been a renewed emphasis on the direct actions of the X and Y chromosomes in bringing about sex differences,” state a team of neuroscientists at the Isis Fund for Sex Differences Research; “Cutting-edge discoveries are revolutionizing our concepts of what makes a male or female brain.”29
Consider a boy’s preference for rough play with other boys, and for vehicles and building toys. According to Money—currently echoed by SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, Heather, and the rest—these result from messages received from his environment, starting with the blue blanket. You are a boy. Boys like blue, they are active and physical, they love construction, trains, cars. So when a boy picks a Thomas the tank engine instead of a Barbie, they claim, he’s conforming, albeit unknowingly, to those expectations.
Rubbish, says neurobiology.30 He goes for the truck primarily because of his boy-brain. The toy provides an opportunity for movement, something he’s predisposed to enjoy. Sure, it’s socially reinforced, but his masculine brain circuits precede any cultural messages. For similar reasons, he’s partial to competition and rough-and-tumble play, but unlikely to be drawn to babies. He’ll have a stronger sex drive, and be less likely than a girl to change his sexual preferences during his lifetime. To explain these differences, and others, neuroscience leads us away from social cues like blue blankets. His boy-brain existed long before birth, due to a very different sort of message.
It comes from a gene that instructs the testicles to produce and secrete testosterone.31 Unless directed otherwise, the prenatal brain grows in a female direction. If testosterone is released during critical periods of development, that changes. The hormone travels through the blood, targeting cells whose surfaces have matching receptors. Like a key in a lock, when a hormone molecule fits a surface receptor, a “door” opens, allowing entry. The
hormone makes a b-line for the control center. In the nucleus it instructs the DNA: turn these activities on, and those off.
Think of each cell as a factory. A hormone breaks through security, finds the foreman, and directs him to change the work orders. Make hats instead of shoes, it demands. The machines grind to a stop and change course. When the order comes from the top, everyone complies.
Testosterone inhibits the development of a feminine brain, with larger centers for communication and emotional memory, and establishes a masculine course—more brain space devoted to centers for action, aggression, and sex drive.32
The cascade of hormonal effects are global and permanent. Although some manifestations will not be seen for years, such as the changes that come with puberty, the boy-brain trajectory is set at eight weeks, when the gene directs the testes: get to work!33
Not eight weeks after birth; eight weeks after conception—seven months before the pink or blue blanket. That’s right, a fetus has a boy-brain or girl-brain before some women are even aware they’re pregnant—when it is the size of a kidney bean.
The research supporting that fact is voluminous, but to SIECUS and all the rest of them, it doesn’t exist. Gender is man-made, they still insist in 2009; cultures teach what it means to be a man or a woman. Are they stuck in a time warp like the March Hare—at a tea party where clocks stand still? Instead of force-feeding kids 1960s ideology, modern sex ed curricula should describe studies done in this century—on infants in their first day of life, on Japanese kindergarteners, and on juvenile monkeys.
You're Teaching My Child What? Page 16