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Study on transgender children


Acing It

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I found this, this morning. I've never been so confused reading something I think, during the first couple of paragraphs. I thought, what are they claiming here? What do they mean with the word gender? Birth sex or gender? The outcome of the study would be completely the opposite for either interpretation, but please read on to the bottom and all becomes clear.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/11/cis-trans-lgbtqi-kids/

 

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It wasn't so confusing to me. They just said that trans girls consistently had girly interests, and trans boys consistently had boy-y interests, just like cis girls and boys of their age would.

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12 minutes ago, Laurann said:

It wasn't so confusing to me. They just said that trans girls consistently had girly interests, and trans boys consistently had boy-y interests, just like cis girls and boys of their age would.

That seems to favour the hypothesis of gender as a cognitive lens (in your reusable gender explanation text :P Was it Roughgarden's theory?) at least partially.

I don't see how else trans kids would follow stereotypical behaviours of their gender rather than those of their AGAB, since gender stereotypes heavily depend on culture. No? :)

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8 minutes ago, Laurann said:

@NoelciMeta It does :) 

And yeah, you got the name right!

Phew, I didn't get it wrong :P

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10 hours ago, Laurann said:

It wasn't so confusing to me. They just said that trans girls consistently had girly interests, and trans boys consistently had boy-y interests, just like cis girls and boys of their age would.

I did read this article and started the thread in the small hours as I couldn't sleep. Re-reading it now, the clue is in the first sentence I think. 😄 I don't know anything about Roughgarden's theory or gender theory, but I'll look it up. I think it's an interesting article and I wonder what any of the trans deniers would have in response. I'm not sure if it does anything to make the case for early transitioning. That's still a minefield.

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10 minutes ago, Acing It said:

I don't know anything about Roughgarden's theory or gender theory, but I'll look it up.

Joan Roughgarden is a transgender evolutionary biologist who wrote a book on LGBT science stuff called 'evolution's rainbow.' I lifted a paragraph of hers in my standard explanation bit for when people online ask questions about nonbinary people or trans people in general. She's not some widely recognized gender theorist, I just like her way of seeing and explaining it :) 

 

I often use this text to try to get not-super-accepting people (that's a euphemism) to accept nonbinary people as real. It's not meant to be 100% accurate, it's meant to be convincing. Like, the David Reimer part, that's waaay simplified. And Judith Butler is one of the most difficult theorists to understand (in my experience, though Homi Bhabha can give her a run for her money in that aspect), so I don't think I've managed to nail down her theory in less than a paragraph. But so far this text has managed to sway number of people, so I'm happy with it :) 

I leave out parts based on circumstances. It's multipurpose, I also use it for people who are questioning their gender or people who've got gender expression and gender identity confused sometimes.

Spoiler

What is 'transgender'?

Basic definitions & explanations

Transgender:

 

Denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex.

 

But what is meant by 'sense of personal identity and gender'? In this next bit I'll lay out some of the theories around what 'gender identity' means.

  • Sex is whether you’re biologically male, female or intersex.
  • Gender is psychological, not biological, and should be separated from sex entirely. From here on, I’m going to leave sex out of the equation.
  • Sexual orientation is even less relevant to this conversation. It's who you're attracted to, not who you are. I'm leaving this out of the equation too.

There are a lot of different aspects to gender.

  • Gender roles/norms/expectations are unwritten rules society has for how men and women should behave. (Men can't wear make-up. Crying is for girls. Women shouldn't be too assertive.) These are not part of an individual's identity. They are part of a society's culture.
  • Gender expression is what your gender appears to be to other people. (Includes gendered things like clothing, colors, make-up, mannerisms, tone of voice, way of walking, gestures while talking, how intensely emotions are expressed etc)
  • Gender identity is a very complicated concept and it is the core of what we are talking about when we’re discussing trans issues. Before you can know what ‘transgender’ is, you need to know what ‘gender identity’ is. 

So there are two main theories on what 'gender identity' is.

 

First you've got the (in my opinion outdated) theory put forward by Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir and the like. They resist the idea that any aspect of gender identity can be innate. As de Beauvoir says "One isn't born a woman, one becomes a woman." This basically means that you feel like a woman because it's what you're used to. You behave like a woman because that's what's socially acceptable. In this view people act how they're supposed to act according to the gender roles in their culture. The constant repetition of doing what they're supposed to do gets etched into their brains and becomes their gender identity. For Butler and de Beauvoir, gender identity is the internalization of culturally imposed gender norms and expectations.

 

Then there's a newer theory about gender identity. This one builds on the first one and accepts it as partially correct, but asserts that gender identity is also partially innate. If it wasn't, then it would logically follow that trans people simply can’t exist, because your gender identity would entirely depend on what you were raised to be.

Joan Roughgarden, a transgender evolutionary biologist who wrote a whole book on the science of lgbt identities, is a proponent of this one. According to her, ‘gender identity’ is a deep-seated sense of self that's been established from the time you were born. In her book 'Evolution's Rainbow', she writes:

 

I envision gender identity as a cognitive lens. When a baby opens his or her eyes after birth and looks around, whom will the baby emulate and whom will he or she merely notice? Perhaps a male baby will emulate his father or other men, perhaps not, and a female baby her mother or other women, perhaps not. I imagine that a lens in the brain controls who to focus on as a “tutor.” Transgender identity is then the acceptance of a tutor from the opposite sex. Degrees of transgender identity, and of gender variance generally, reflect different degrees of single-mindedness in the selection of the tutor’s gender. The development of gender identity thus depends on both brain state and early postnatal experience, because brain state indicates what the lens is, and environmental experience supplies the image to be photographed through that lens and ultimately developed immutably into brain circuitry. Once gender identity is set, like other basic aspects of temperament, life proceeds from there.

 

So a cisgender female baby instinctively emulates women, a transgender baby with a female body instinctively emulates men, and a non-binary baby instinctively emulates both. Simple. 

 

The innate part of gender identity is the part that decides which of the two genders (or both or neither) you will instinctively emulate during your life. The behavior of that group of people then supplies you with the learned aspect of your gender identity. So the innate part tells you which gender(s) to imitate and the learned part is what kind of behavior you're actually imitating and internalizing.  

 

Gender identity as Roughgarden describes it, is a deep-seated, immutable sense of belonging or kinship to a gender (either to the social construct or to the group of people). A sense of "I belong with those people, or the other group, or maybe both or not really with either."

 

You can't change this sense of belonging by raising someone differently. There have been cases where a doctor made a mistake while circumcising a baby boy and then cut off the entire penis. For example, there’s David Reimer. That boy was raised as a girl instead, from birth, but still always felt like a boy.

 

Gender identity is at least partially innate and biological, not just cultural, so the argument that your gender identity can't be anything but 'man' or 'woman' because that's the only two genders that exist in our culture is not applicable. Gender identity =/= gender as a social construct. Gender identity is to which degree you instinctively identify with those two culturally established genders.

 

Some brains are simply somewhere in between male and female. Some people feel a sense of belonging to both genders, and others to neither.

Spoiler

Wm1KqL3.png

My guess is agender people don't feel at home in either group, genderfluid babies could emulate their dad during some activities (like boxing) and their mom in other situations (like socializing), and neutrois people sort of feel stuck in between the two groups, but I don't know. The only way to know is to ask them. Our neurobiology science skills aren't advanced enough to read people's minds yet.

Gender Identity versus Gender Expression

Of course everyone has a feminine and a masculine side, but that's not what we're talking about here. For example, a man can be feminine, he can like wearing make-up and dresses, talk in a stereotypically feminine way, and still identify as a man. Is his feminine side a 'deep-seated sense of identity', 'a cognitive lens that determines which gender(s) a baby will emulate from the minute they're born'? I doubt it. I think it's gender expression, not gender identity. For a nonbinary person, that's different.

 

A nonbinary person is not someone who simply dislikes the gender role they're put into. A guy who likes to break gendered expectations by wearing dresses is a crossdresser, a drag queen or a gender-nonconforming person, not a nonbinary person. Those are terms for people who have non-standard gender expressions. A nonbinary person is a person who has this innate, deep-seated, unchangeable sense of belonging to both genders, or to neither. If their body or the social role people ascribe to them doesn't line up with their inner sense of what they are, this leads to dysphoria. Dysphoria is an integrally important sign of ‘transgenderness’.

 

Gender dysphoria is either a feeling of discomfort/distress with gendered aspects of your body (meaning you'd feel a need to change your body = transition) or a feeling of discomfort/distress because of what gender people perceive you to be (meaning you'd want to take steps in order to be perceived differently = transition).

 

Gender euphoria is the opposite of dysphoria, it's feeling extremely 'right' when you're seen by others as how you perceive yourself. Euphoria can also be the thing to clue people in on their gender identity, sometimes instead of dysphoria.

 

Gender expression includes gendered things like clothing, make-up, mannerisms, tone of voice, way of walking, gestures while talking etc.

The innate part of gender identity doesn't have anything to do with any of those things.

Are NB’s trans?

                                                                Trans people

                                                       ↙                                  ↘

                                    binary trans people                nonbinary trans people

They're all trans.

 

Nonbinary people can transition, so even if you were (in my opinion incorrectly) basing your definition of ‘transgender’ on whether or not transition is possible, you still wouldn’t have a reason to say NB’s aren’t trans. NB’s can transition medically (through hormone treatment and surgery) as well as socially. Social transition isn't easy. It should be taken seriously. http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Social_Transition

 

An NB transitions for the same reasons a binary trans person transitions, in order to have their body reflect their inner selves more, and in order to be perceived differently. It's true that in this culture NB's won't 'pass' as their true gender, because not enough people know that nonbinary identities exist, so they won't automatically recognize someone as 'Oh, that person doesn't look quite male or female, they're probably nonbinary,' as they would (most of the time) correctly recognize a woman to be a woman and a man to be a man. However, that's a problem with our culture, not with nonbinary people.

 

'Binary trans' and 'nonbinary trans' are two different types of being trans. If individual nonbinary people don’t identify as trans, then there's probably a personal story for why they don't, or maybe they just aren’t aware that nb’s are trans, or maybe they’ve made the common mistake to confuse gender expression with gender identity and they’re actually gender-nonconforming. You won't know until you ask them.

 

NB's not identifying as trans is kind of like black feminists not identifying as feminists. Some black feminists don't identify as feminists because they don't feel represented by white feminism. They feel white feminists aren't committed enough to ending all forms of oppression, instead of just to ending sexism. I believe they call themselves womanists. They're feminists, but refuse to identify as such for personal or political reasons.

 

That's what it's like with nb's too. They're trans, but some refuse to identify as trans for personal or political reasons. These reasons are very diverse. For example, indigenous folks don't conceptualize their genders in the same way western societies do. It's not as medicalized or othered. Personally I could understand why they'd rather identify with the concepts they had before ours came along.

 

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Janus the Fox
Quote

Children who identify as the gender matching their sex at birth tend to gravitate toward the toys, clothing, and friendships stereotypically associated with that gender. Transgender children do the same with their gender, regardless of how long they have actually lived as a member of that gender.

Looks at my own transgender youth

 

has none of these despite being trans

 

*Surprised Pikachu Face* 
 

I guess that there’s still a lot of non-binary transgender youth being completely missed, here’s hoping for the future more of the trans spectrum is recognised :)

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9 minutes ago, Janus DarkFox said:

Looks at my own transgender youth

 

has none of these despite being trans

 

*Surprised Pikachu Face* 
 

I guess that there’s still a lot of non-binary transgender youth being completely missed, here’s hoping for the future more of the trans spectrum is recognised :)

Yeah, it stated that kids with ''they'' pronouns weren't included. It could have been very interesting... 

 

As for myself, luckily, I wasn't too actively socialised with my AGAB... my room was yellow, then blue, and now green... I did wear a lot of dresses, but that was because jeans were too stiff for my small size and caused sensory issues (not anymore). I got dolls, train circuits, marbles, plush toys, dolls' tea sets, tool kits, and of course, when I was old enough to convince my parents, science kits and a remote-controlled tarantula :D

Happy nonbinary childhood... O puberty, why must you exist? 

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On 12/17/2019 at 9:41 PM, Laurann said:

Joan Roughgarden is a transgender evolutionary biologist who wrote a book on LGBT science stuff called 'evolution's rainbow.' I lifted a paragraph of hers in my standard explanation bit for when people online ask questions about nonbinary people or trans people in general. She's not some widely recognized gender theorist, I just like her way of seeing and explaining it :) 

 

I often use this text to try to get not-super-accepting people (that's a euphemism) to accept nonbinary people as real. It's not meant to be 100% accurate, it's meant to be convincing. Like, the David Reimer part, that's waaay simplified. And Judith Butler is one of the most difficult theorists to understand (in my experience, though Homi Bhabha can give her a run for her money in that aspect), so I don't think I've managed to nail down her theory in less than a paragraph. But so far this text has managed to sway number of people, so I'm happy with it :) 

I leave out parts based on circumstances. It's multipurpose, I also use it for people who are questioning their gender or people who've got gender expression and gender identity confused sometimes.

  Hide contents

What is 'transgender'?

Basic definitions & explanations

Transgender:

 

Denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex.

 

But what is meant by 'sense of personal identity and gender'? In this next bit I'll lay out some of the theories around what 'gender identity' means.

  • Sex is whether you’re biologically male, female or intersex.
  • Gender is psychological, not biological, and should be separated from sex entirely. From here on, I’m going to leave sex out of the equation.
  • Sexual orientation is even less relevant to this conversation. It's who you're attracted to, not who you are. I'm leaving this out of the equation too.

There are a lot of different aspects to gender.

  • Gender roles/norms/expectations are unwritten rules society has for how men and women should behave. (Men can't wear make-up. Crying is for girls. Women shouldn't be too assertive.) These are not part of an individual's identity. They are part of a society's culture.
  • Gender expression is what your gender appears to be to other people. (Includes gendered things like clothing, colors, make-up, mannerisms, tone of voice, way of walking, gestures while talking, how intensely emotions are expressed etc)
  • Gender identity is a very complicated concept and it is the core of what we are talking about when we’re discussing trans issues. Before you can know what ‘transgender’ is, you need to know what ‘gender identity’ is. 

So there are two main theories on what 'gender identity' is.

 

First you've got the (in my opinion outdated) theory put forward by Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir and the like. They resist the idea that any aspect of gender identity can be innate. As de Beauvoir says "One isn't born a woman, one becomes a woman." This basically means that you feel like a woman because it's what you're used to. You behave like a woman because that's what's socially acceptable. In this view people act how they're supposed to act according to the gender roles in their culture. The constant repetition of doing what they're supposed to do gets etched into their brains and becomes their gender identity. For Butler and de Beauvoir, gender identity is the internalization of culturally imposed gender norms and expectations.

 

Then there's a newer theory about gender identity. This one builds on the first one and accepts it as partially correct, but asserts that gender identity is also partially innate. If it wasn't, then it would logically follow that trans people simply can’t exist, because your gender identity would entirely depend on what you were raised to be.

Joan Roughgarden, a transgender evolutionary biologist who wrote a whole book on the science of lgbt identities, is a proponent of this one. According to her, ‘gender identity’ is a deep-seated sense of self that's been established from the time you were born. In her book 'Evolution's Rainbow', she writes:

 

I envision gender identity as a cognitive lens. When a baby opens his or her eyes after birth and looks around, whom will the baby emulate and whom will he or she merely notice? Perhaps a male baby will emulate his father or other men, perhaps not, and a female baby her mother or other women, perhaps not. I imagine that a lens in the brain controls who to focus on as a “tutor.” Transgender identity is then the acceptance of a tutor from the opposite sex. Degrees of transgender identity, and of gender variance generally, reflect different degrees of single-mindedness in the selection of the tutor’s gender. The development of gender identity thus depends on both brain state and early postnatal experience, because brain state indicates what the lens is, and environmental experience supplies the image to be photographed through that lens and ultimately developed immutably into brain circuitry. Once gender identity is set, like other basic aspects of temperament, life proceeds from there.

 

So a cisgender female baby instinctively emulates women, a transgender baby with a female body instinctively emulates men, and a non-binary baby instinctively emulates both. Simple. 

 

The innate part of gender identity is the part that decides which of the two genders (or both or neither) you will instinctively emulate during your life. The behavior of that group of people then supplies you with the learned aspect of your gender identity. So the innate part tells you which gender(s) to imitate and the learned part is what kind of behavior you're actually imitating and internalizing.  

 

Gender identity as Roughgarden describes it, is a deep-seated, immutable sense of belonging or kinship to a gender (either to the social construct or to the group of people). A sense of "I belong with those people, or the other group, or maybe both or not really with either."

 

You can't change this sense of belonging by raising someone differently. There have been cases where a doctor made a mistake while circumcising a baby boy and then cut off the entire penis. For example, there’s David Reimer. That boy was raised as a girl instead, from birth, but still always felt like a boy.

 

Gender identity is at least partially innate and biological, not just cultural, so the argument that your gender identity can't be anything but 'man' or 'woman' because that's the only two genders that exist in our culture is not applicable. Gender identity =/= gender as a social construct. Gender identity is to which degree you instinctively identify with those two culturally established genders.

 

Some brains are simply somewhere in between male and female. Some people feel a sense of belonging to both genders, and others to neither.

  Hide contents

Wm1KqL3.png

My guess is agender people don't feel at home in either group, genderfluid babies could emulate their dad during some activities (like boxing) and their mom in other situations (like socializing), and neutrois people sort of feel stuck in between the two groups, but I don't know. The only way to know is to ask them. Our neurobiology science skills aren't advanced enough to read people's minds yet.

Gender Identity versus Gender Expression

Of course everyone has a feminine and a masculine side, but that's not what we're talking about here. For example, a man can be feminine, he can like wearing make-up and dresses, talk in a stereotypically feminine way, and still identify as a man. Is his feminine side a 'deep-seated sense of identity', 'a cognitive lens that determines which gender(s) a baby will emulate from the minute they're born'? I doubt it. I think it's gender expression, not gender identity. For a nonbinary person, that's different.

 

A nonbinary person is not someone who simply dislikes the gender role they're put into. A guy who likes to break gendered expectations by wearing dresses is a crossdresser, a drag queen or a gender-nonconforming person, not a nonbinary person. Those are terms for people who have non-standard gender expressions. A nonbinary person is a person who has this innate, deep-seated, unchangeable sense of belonging to both genders, or to neither. If their body or the social role people ascribe to them doesn't line up with their inner sense of what they are, this leads to dysphoria. Dysphoria is an integrally important sign of ‘transgenderness’.

 

Gender dysphoria is either a feeling of discomfort/distress with gendered aspects of your body (meaning you'd feel a need to change your body = transition) or a feeling of discomfort/distress because of what gender people perceive you to be (meaning you'd want to take steps in order to be perceived differently = transition).

 

Gender euphoria is the opposite of dysphoria, it's feeling extremely 'right' when you're seen by others as how you perceive yourself. Euphoria can also be the thing to clue people in on their gender identity, sometimes instead of dysphoria.

 

Gender expression includes gendered things like clothing, make-up, mannerisms, tone of voice, way of walking, gestures while talking etc.

The innate part of gender identity doesn't have anything to do with any of those things.

Are NB’s trans?

                                                                Trans people

                                                       ↙                                  ↘

                                    binary trans people                nonbinary trans people

They're all trans.

 

Nonbinary people can transition, so even if you were (in my opinion incorrectly) basing your definition of ‘transgender’ on whether or not transition is possible, you still wouldn’t have a reason to say NB’s aren’t trans. NB’s can transition medically (through hormone treatment and surgery) as well as socially. Social transition isn't easy. It should be taken seriously. http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Social_Transition

 

An NB transitions for the same reasons a binary trans person transitions, in order to have their body reflect their inner selves more, and in order to be perceived differently. It's true that in this culture NB's won't 'pass' as their true gender, because not enough people know that nonbinary identities exist, so they won't automatically recognize someone as 'Oh, that person doesn't look quite male or female, they're probably nonbinary,' as they would (most of the time) correctly recognize a woman to be a woman and a man to be a man. However, that's a problem with our culture, not with nonbinary people.

 

'Binary trans' and 'nonbinary trans' are two different types of being trans. If individual nonbinary people don’t identify as trans, then there's probably a personal story for why they don't, or maybe they just aren’t aware that nb’s are trans, or maybe they’ve made the common mistake to confuse gender expression with gender identity and they’re actually gender-nonconforming. You won't know until you ask them.

 

NB's not identifying as trans is kind of like black feminists not identifying as feminists. Some black feminists don't identify as feminists because they don't feel represented by white feminism. They feel white feminists aren't committed enough to ending all forms of oppression, instead of just to ending sexism. I believe they call themselves womanists. They're feminists, but refuse to identify as such for personal or political reasons.

 

That's what it's like with nb's too. They're trans, but some refuse to identify as trans for personal or political reasons. These reasons are very diverse. For example, indigenous folks don't conceptualize their genders in the same way western societies do. It's not as medicalized or othered. Personally I could understand why they'd rather identify with the concepts they had before ours came along.

 

That's very helpful. Thank you. I'm even more intrigued to find out more now.

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9 hours ago, Janus DarkFox said:

Looks at my own transgender youth

 

has none of these despite being trans

 

*Surprised Pikachu Face* 

Same here. Early childhood I was pretty typical for my AGAB. When puberty hit, that's when everything changed.

 

9 hours ago, NoelciMeta said:

As for myself, luckily, I wasn't too actively socialised with my AGAB... my room was yellow, then blue, and now green...

My room actually started out bright pink, and then when I was 10 ish it was like I flicked a switch and hated everything pink and only wanted blue things. I didn't understand why at the time, and neither did anyone else. My mom said I was like Picasso (could've been some different painter idk) who started out with a pink phase in his paintings, and then went to blue. He went to brown afterwards, so that's her prediction for me too. 

 

And yeah dresses are comfy. It's a shame dysphoria won't allow me to wear those anymore.

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DanTheMemeMan

ok one thing, did they just call trans men tomboys? 

 

oh they didn't never mind

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DuranDuranfan
8 hours ago, Laurann said:

And yeah dresses are comfy. It's a shame dysphoria won't allow me to wear those anymore.

When they’re the right cut and made with the right fabric, yes

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