These studies indicate that genetics and pre-natal hormones predispose boys and girls to have—among other things—specific toy preferences, play styles and activities, and peer relationships.34 Simply put, science in the twenty-first century supports the stereotypes SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, and other sex educators are telling kids to reject.
What Crayons Can Tell Us
Let’s discuss babies first, then their blankets. Abundant research indicates that sex differences in social behaviors—girls’ and women’s increased sensitivity to emotional nuance, for example—are related to early brain development. At one day of age, presumably before the child has received any messages about conforming to a gender stereotype, boys look longer at a mobile, while girls show a stronger interest in the face.35 At one year, girls are drawn to a video of a face moving; boys to a video of cars moving.36 And at both one and two years of age, girls make more eye contact with their mothers than boys. Remarkably, the amount of contact is inversely correlated with the prenatal level of testosterone. The higher the testosterone level was before birth, the lower the amount of eye contact.37
Now what about those blankets? gURL.com considers them part of “gendering,” a message for the baby about social expectations based on identity. Color preference, they insist, is a result of socialization.38
The color pink is mainly associated with females, says gURL.com. If a boy painted his room pink, people might think it was a little weird.39
But those people would be right; it is weird to find a boy who prefers pink, and not only because of what others might think. How do I know? I read about it in the medical journal Hormones and Behavior .
Researchers in Japan examined the drawings of 252 kindergarteners. 40 They found significant differences between the drawings of girls and boys. Among them: boys drew a moving object twenty times more than girls. Girls included a flower or butterfly seven times more than boys. Then they examined the crayons each child had used over the course of six months, measuring how much of each color remained. Overall, girls decidedly preferred pink and flesh colors. Boys used two colors more than girls: grey and blue.
Okay, you’re thinking, but girls are supposed to like flowers, butterflies, and pink; boys are dressed in blue and expected to enjoy things that move. These preferences aren’t innate, they were learned.
To control for that, the researchers analyzed the drawings of a third group—eight girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia. CAH is a genetic disorder in which the fetal brain was flooded with high levels of male hormones. Girls with CAH may have an enlarged clitoris; they may even be identified at birth as males. They are treated medically and surgically, and raised female. In the nature/nurture debate, these girls are intriguing, because nature signaled “you’re a boy” to the fetus, but nurture has been saying “you’re a girl” since birth.
Clearly, the people over at gURL.com aren’t reading Hormones and Behavior. Otherwise they’d know the astonishing results: CAH girls drew cars and buses, not butterflies. And the cars and buses were blue, not pink.
Gender is culturally assigned? I don’t think so. And neither can any person who follows neuroscience in this century.
In a radio interview in 2000,41 David Reimer laid bare the horrors of the years spent as Brenda. “I was betrayed by the medical profession... they put my life on the line so that they could hold onto their theories.” David has since been lost to suicide, but the betrayal continues. Other lives are on the line, but hard science is scorned, and phony theories canonized.
The educators who have enshrined Money’s gender theory and now foist it on our youth need to understand that John Money’s preoccupation with hermaphrodites and sexual reassignment was related to his own inner struggles. His belief in gender plasticity was wishful thinking. Gender identity is separate from anatomy and chromosomes? It’s based on feelings, learned from experiences? Baloney. In what’s probably just the tip of the iceberg, twenty-first century science indicates that the tendencies to typical boy or girl behaviors—yes, gender stereotypes—are innate. We’re not psychological hermaphrodites at birth, potentially masculine or feminine—we are wired for one or the other in the womb.
Different Worlds
“Step on to any playground anywhere on the planet and you will see boys and girls playing in different worlds. They differ in what they are doing, with whom they are doing it, and how they are doing it.”
So begins a chapter in a 2008 book by an international group of experts, Sex Differences in the Brain: From Genes to Behavior.42 We learn here that “across cultures, girls more than boys are interested in and engage with dolls and doll accessories, arts and crafts, kitchen toys, fashion, and make-up, whereas boys more than girls are interested in and engage with transportation toys, electronics, blocks (especially complex building sets), and sports.”43 These preferences are pervasive and consistent.44 They begin to emerge at nine months,45 and are stable by eighteen months.
Yet we’re suppose to believe that when a two-year-old girl passes up the set of Hot Wheels, choosing the Dora the Explorer doll instead, it is because of cultural expectations—because she has learned girls play with dolls, not cars? This is what gender theory would have us believe, and what your child learns, but it’s unlikely. You see, at that age, she doesn’t know she’s a girl. That awareness comes later.46
Until at least two and a half years of age, children are unable to consistently label themselves—or discriminate between—male and female. That’s a year or more after showing a preference for the doll or the truck. How can children choose particular toys based on what’s expected of them as a girl or boy, before grasping the concept of girl or boy?
That’s a problem for those who argue that kids are socialized to prefer one toy or activity over the other. A more likely explanation, consistent with data collected in the past two decades, is that preferences relate to the toy’s use or function. Prenatal hormones wire a girl’s brain to be interested in nurturing, and a boy’s to enjoy motion. Children then choose the doll or the car for the opportunities they provide for the respective activity.47
In support of this theory, girls with CAH show increased preference for male playmates and toys typically preferred by boys.48
Studies conducted on young male and female monkeys produce similar results. Juvenile male monkeys, both rhesus and vervet, prefer playing with balls and vehicles. Female monkeys like dolls and pots.49 . . . Pots ? Researchers suggest the female monkeys’ increased interest in them was due to their red color. The faces of infant vervets are reddish-pink, so the color may act as a cue signaling an opportunity for nurturance. Are animals oppressed by gender stereotypes too? The author of one study, a psychologist, notes: “They are not subject to advertising. They are not subject to parental encouragement, they are not subject to peer chastisement.”50
The female monkey chose a doll while the male chose a truck.
Over the Edge
I wish this were the end of the story, but the principles of Genderland have gone far beyond Money’s pseudoscience—we are born gender-neutral; cultures teach what it means to be a man or a woman. That’s old. Like an angry adolescent testing limits, pushing the envelope harder each day, the agendas have become increasingly radical. But how radical can you get, how far from the truth can you move, before falling over the edge and losing touch with reality?
In step with Money, sex ed curricula define gender as separate from biology. They take his theory a step further, however. When gender and biology don’t “align”—you’ve got boy genitals but feel like a girl, or the opposite—they say that’s normal. “Being transgender is as normal as being alive,” kids are told by Advocates for Youth.51 “It’s not uncommon for a person to identify strongly with the other gender,” says Planned Parenthood’s teen site. “Many people, including teens, have non-traditional feelings about gender roles and sexual identities and that is normal, too.”52
Let’s say the experts are right, and it’s “normal” for
a boy to insist he’s a girl. It’s a “variant” that he loathes his genitals and wears dresses. What about other cases of “misaligned” identity? Are they “variants” as well?
Consider a rare condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Its victims, according to a recent Newsweek article,53 have “an overwhelming desire to amputate one or more healthy limbs or become paraplegic.... They describe a persistent, tortuous chasm between their mind’s image of their own body, and the physical body they inhabit.” Only after they’re disabled—by self-inflicted mutilation, or with the help of an underground surgeon—do they feel complete.
The similarity of their condition to that of transgenders is apparent. The “amputee wannabees” also suffer with a “misaligned identity.” What causes this strange affliction? Some speculate it’s due to an abnormality of the area of the brain involved in constructing a coherent body image.54
These people need our understanding, support, and help. Should that include extreme measures, like amputation of a healthy limb, or sex reassignment surgery? I’m not sure.
I am sure however, that a boy who persistently and intensely feels he’s a girl, like someone distressed about having two healthy legs, has an illness. The goal should be to help him find relief. Normalizing transgenderism—called Gender Identity Disorder by mental health professionals—is, again, based on an ideology that wishes to blur the distinctions between male and female. Having this disorder is not “as normal as being alive,” as Advocates for Youth want young people to believe.
I wonder, do those who teach our kids that being male and female is subjective and changeable apply that approach to other aspects of identity? Does the individual who yearns for his legs to be severed represent a “normal variant”? It seems a fair question to pose.
The Gender Binary
As extreme as it may be, even the idea of transgenderism is nevertheless consistent with the premise that there are two, and only two, possible identities, male or female. It’s blue or pink, Jack or Jill, one box marked “M,” another marked “F.”
But in Genderland this model, the gender binary, is considered false and oppressive. It stands in the way of the right to what’s called gender expression. Instead, authorities say, male and female are on a continuum, with many genders in between. There are endless shades between blue and pink, and a whole bunch of boxes on the application. At different times in life, kids learn, you may feel male, female, both, or neither. And that’s just fine.
As Heather Corinna says on scarleteen:Like most aspects of identity, as you continue into and through your adult life you’ll likely find that your personal gender identity... changes and grows, and becomes more clear (and more murky!) with time and life experience. Likely, you’ll find that the older you get . . . you realize that gender isn’t anything close to binary, but like most things, is a wide, diverse spectrum, a varied, veritable genderpalooza.55
Let’s examine this one point at a time.
1. As you go thru life, says Heather, your gender identity changes and grows.
Now where did that come from? Not from John Money: he taught that gender identity (“I am a boy”) is fixed by age three. Not from child development experts: they explain that gender identity is followed about a year later with gender stability (“I will grow up to be a man”), and by age seven at most, by the more sophisticated idea of gender permanence (“I cannot become a girl, even if I wear a dress and lipstick”). As one authoritative psychiatry textbook explains, “Children know that nobody can change gender... [a boy] knows that he will always be a boy until he becomes a man.”56 And not from the eminent psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers who authored the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As mentioned above, according to the current edition, a child with a strong and persistent gender dysphoria—the desire to be, or insistence one is, the other sex—is given the diagnosis Gender Identity Disorder.57 It’s seen as an emotional disorder.
No matter. Heather rejects these conventions, in company with SIECUS58 and Planned Parenthood.59 “Our gender identity may shift and evolve over time,” says Planned Parenthood. “It may change over the course of your lifetime,” agrees SIECUS. And Advocates for Youth adds: “People can realize their... gender identity at any point during their lives.”60
Gender identity, Heather states with authority, changes and grows, sometimes it’s clear, sometimes murky.
What do they mean? That while your daughter insists “I’m a girl” at age five, she might also insist “I’m a boy” at fifteen? And you have no reason for concern? Isn’t identity by definition a stable sense of self? Stable—you know, as in, stays the same?
This is absurd. It’s one thing to propose that boys climb trees because of social expectations; that’s a somewhat plausible theory, even though current science has disproved it. It’s altogether another to state that often boys yearn persistently to be girls—not to play dress-up or help in the kitchen, but to be a girl. To have breasts, periods, the whole shebang. And to assert this is nothing to worry about.
The “experts” want teens to think that there’s nothing unusual about all this; to the contrary, it’s another struggle for freedom and basic personal rights. It’s about being yourself, free from arbitrary, unnecessary restrictions. Society dictates strict gender roles, kids are reminded, and some people are dissatisfied with that.61 The gender expressions62 of these individuals “vary from common social expectations;”63 they don’t conform to social norms and want to “redefine traditional notions.”64 They’re no different from you or me, it seems, except for feeling uncomfortable with the sex they were “assigned” at birth—as if the “assignment” was a hit or miss process—and this is in reference to genetically, developmentally, and endocrinologically normal children.
To be dissatisfied with society’s expectations . . . to fight against norms and restrictions . . . to join with others in the struggle for freedom and rights . . . do you see why young people, especially troubled ones, might be drawn in to gender-bending?
This has real-life consequences. “Luke” Woodward arrived at Brown University a “masculine-appearing lesbian,” with no plans to change his sex. It was not until a trip to Cuba, he reports—where people were shocked to discover he was female—that he began to wonder: Am I a woman? Returning to the United States, he met several transsexuals, and realized there were other options. The summer before his senior year she/he underwent a double mastectomy. No testosterone for Luke yet—he can’t afford it. And what about more surgery—as Luke puts it, “down there”? He hasn’t decided.65
In my experience as a campus counselor, I know of students like Luke, undergoing dangerous hormone treatments and irreversible surgeries66 after being introduced to the notion of fluid gender on campus or elsewhere. But kids hear about these far-out ideas long before college.
I hate being a girl, a thirteen year old calling herself “abnormal” tells Heather. Is there something wrong with me wanting to be a boy?67
Heather replies: There’s nothing patently abnormal or wrong about being uncomfortable with your own sex or your gender. . . . Gender dysphoria is especially common at the age you’re at right now....It’s really typical to feel this way....
Just a moment, Heather. That’s not true. If you’re going to use technical terms, use them correctly. Gender dysphoria, defined as “a persistent aversion toward some or all of those physical characteristics or social roles that connote one’s own biological sex,”68 isn’t just some pesky matter teens must tolerate, like oily skin or annoying siblings. We’re not speaking here of, for example, a girl envying boys because they have more athletic opportunities, or don’t need to diet or shave their legs. Gender dysphoria is a girl’s yearning for a double mastectomy. It’s wanting testosterone injections to lower her voice and allow her to grow a mustache. Gender dysphoria is a disturbance in a child’s view of herself. And it’s not “really typical”69 at any age.70
Heather is in no position to couns
el thirteen year old “abnormal” about her gender identity—a complex matter that can involve genetic and medical disorders, as well as psychosocial factors. While Heather touches on these in her reply, she’s clearly in over her head; the gist of her advice rests on Genderland ideology—it’s all about what feels right to you.
What’s most important isn’t having a gender identity that “matches” your biological sex, or one which everyone else thinks is best, but having one that feels best to YOU and most authentic for you.
2. As you get older, it’s likely you’ll realize that gender isn’t anything close to binary...
Now that’s interesting. In a binary, there are only two possibilities. On or off. Positive or negative. Left or right. Yet Heather’s saying gender isn’t binary? We’re not either male or female?
Nope. That’s another falsehood foisted on us by society, says Heather. Like the incorrect assumption that everyone who “menstruates, ovulates, gestates, and lactates” feels like a woman. This view is restrictive, intolerant, and must be challenged.
Reject the binary, kids are told. Gender is “a wide, diverse spectrum.” 71
Says SIECUS: People “have an internal sense that they are female, male, or a variation of these.”72
Gender Isn’t Just Either/Or, claims a brochure73 students might find in the nurse’s office.
“The truth is....Not everyone looks or feels like one sex or the other,” Advocates for Youth says. “Traditionally, gender has meant either ‘male’ or ‘female’.... However, there is really a range of genders, including male and female, but also including genderqueer74 or gender ambiguous, butch (man or woman), femme (man or woman), transgender . . . and many others.”75 And according to gURL.com, the spectrum of gender includes transgender, transsexual, transvestite, and pangender, the latter signifying people who do not identify with the term male or female. The person may feel they are a mix of either genders, genderless or another gender altogether.76
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