Sunday, November 9, 2008

Transgendered Children

Well, we've seen some heated debate on cultural values here the last couple of days. So, perhaps readers might wrap their minds around the Atlantic's disturbing story on the debate over transgendered children and the crisis of parental indulgence in cultural decay and political correctness:

It took the gay-rights movement 30 years to shift from the Stonewall riots to gay marriage; now its transgender wing, long considered the most subversive, is striving for suburban normalcy too. The change is fuel‑ed mostly by a community of parents who, like many parents of this generation, are open to letting even preschool children define their own needs. Faced with skeptical neighbors and school officials, parents at the conference discussed how to use the kind of quasi-therapeutic language that, these days, inspires deference: tell the school the child has a “medical condition” or a “hormonal imbalance” that can be treated later, suggested a conference speaker, Kim Pearson; using terms like gender-­identity disorder or birth defect would be going too far, she advised. The point was to take the situation out of the realm of deep pathology or mental illness, while at the same time separating it from voluntary behavior, and to put it into the idiom of garden-variety “challenge.” As one father told me, “Between all the kids with language problems and learning disabilities and peanut allergies, the school doesn’t know who to worry about first” ....

In 1967, Dr. John Money launched an experiment that he thought might confirm some of the more radical ideas emerging in feminist thought. Throughout the ’60s, writers such as Betty Friedan were challenging the notion that women should be limited to their prescribed roles as wives, housekeepers, and mothers. But other feminists pushed further, arguing that the whole notion of gender was a social construction, and easy to manipulate. In a 1955 paper, Money had written: “Sexual behavior and orientation as male or female does not have an innate, instinctive basis.” We learn whether we are male or female “in the course of the various experiences of growing up.” By the ’60s, he was well-known for having established the first American clinic to perform voluntary sex-change operations, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore. One day, he got a letter from the parents of infant twin boys, one of whom had suffered a botched circumcision that had burned off most of his penis.

Money saw the case as a perfect test for his theory. He encouraged the parents to have the boy, David Reimer, fully castrated and then to raise him as a girl. When the child reached puberty, Money told them, doctors could construct a vagina and give him feminizing hormones. Above all, he told them, they must not waver in their decision and must not tell the boy about the accident.

In paper after paper, Money reported on Reimer’s fabulous progress, writing that “she” showed an avid interest in dolls and dollhouses, that she preferred dresses, hair ribbons, and frilly blouses. Money’s description of the child in his book Sexual Signatures prompted one reviewer to describe her as “sailing contentedly through childhood as a genuine girl.” Time magazine concluded that the Reimer case cast doubt on the belief that sex differences are “immutably set by the genes at conception.”

The reality was quite different, as Rolling Stone reporter John Colapinto brilliantly documented in the 2000 best seller As Nature Made Him. Reimer had never adjusted to being a girl at all. He wanted only to build forts and play with his brother’s dump trucks, and insisted that he should pee standing up. He was a social disaster at school, beating up other kids and misbehaving in class. At 14, Reimer became so alienated and depressed that his parents finally told him the truth about his birth, at which point he felt mostly relief, he reported. He eventually underwent phalloplasty, and he married a woman. Then four years ago, at age 38, Reimer shot himself dead in a grocery-store parking lot.

Today, the notion that gender is purely a social construction seems nearly as outmoded as bra-burning or free love. Feminist theory is pivoting with the rest of the culture, and is locating the key to identity in genetics and the workings of the brain. In the new conventional wisdom, we are all pre-wired for many things previously thought to be in the realm of upbringing, choice, or subjective experience: happiness, religious awakening, cheating, a love of chocolate. Behaviors are fundamental unless we are chemically altered. Louann Brizendine, in her 2006 best-selling book, The Female Brain, claims that everything from empathy to chattiness to poor spatial reasoning is “hardwired into the brains of women.” Dr. Milton Diamond, an expert on human sexuality at the University of Hawaii and long the intellectual nemesis of Money, encapsulated this view in an interview on the BBC in 1980, when it was becoming clear that Money’s experiment was failing: “Maybe we really have to think … that we don’t come to this world neutral; that we come to this world with some degree of maleness and femaleness which will transcend whatever the society wants to put into [us].”
Readers should spend time with the whole thing, here.

11 comments:

  1. I remember hearing about that a few years after it happened. A few years later I had read that it was a failure.

    With a left a theory is never disproven. You just try-try again until you succeed no matter how many lives you ruin in the process. Theory is more important to leftist eggheads than people will ever be.

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  2. Don, you hilighted the part that shows a flawed theory, but I'm pretty sure that even that kid's parents & doctor thought they were doing the best thing for the child.

    What about the rest of the article? There are two distinct theories currently being used to treat such kids, and both are showing degrees of success. (In fact, the way the article paints it, the more radical "let the child be who s/he thinks s/he is... ...and here's a drug that'll help" theory is meeting with greater success.)

    Do you agree that transgenderism is more nature than nurture, or was that guy you highlighted correct about gender roles being a product of nurture, and only wrong about how the kid in that situation should've been treated?

    For any who're dead set for/against one theory or the other: Do you deny that both theories have scientific backing, or that whatever theory you are personally against and for whatever reasons you believe as you do, the parents pursuing the one you're against are doing so believing it is the best thing for their child, and not out of some socio-political bias?

    As a product of the Free to Be… You and Me generation, I still believe that there is some degree of societal & family nurture in gender roles, and that it's alright for boys to dig the color pink, play with dolls, or otherwise explore & role play opposite gender "parts" while playing & learning. Same with girls & the color blue & footballs... (which seemingly has always been less of a problem for onlookers, whatever their age & place in life.)

    I can't imagine what it must be like to have a child you care about in your life who's experiencing these things, or what I would think & feel if I did.

    There are no easy answers, and I can't condemn anyone for making whatever choices they make in response...

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  3. Reppy: I highlighted the key parts of the essay, especially the notion that research is moving away from the nurture model, a move based on sound science. I have nothing else to add.

    If you want to promote wild transgendered relativism, that's your play, big boy.

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  4. That poor kid. Terrible to experiment on a living human being like that. His parents must feel terrible about what they did to him. I've got a feeling that doctor doesn't feel so bad, though.

    The fact that someone 'means well' when they commit some sort of abominable act doesn't count for much in my book.

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  5. Sorry Nero...

    It was a good post... Almost made me forget for a second what an ass you can be personally, sometimes... I'll try not to do so again...

    In light of that response, it's interesting in that I'd think many conservatives would take (or prefer to take) the approach that does not allow the child to determine his/her gender, and goes with what the body type says s/he is, rather than what the child's brain is telling him/her is the correct gender.

    Even the article talks about an evangelical family that does not want their child exposed to a boy dressed & acting like a girl, and the stepfather of Tina (Brandon's mother) is also painted as more of a conservative, and also disagrees with allowing Brandon to dress and act as s/he does.

    For the record, I have no clue what it is you're calling wild transgendered relativism, or what I said that leads you to believe I'm promoting anything of the kind.

    I thought I was pretty clear in saying I believe these families have a tough row to hoe, and that I don't believe I know enough to say that any of 'em are doing harm to their kids by following the treatment plans they've chosen. If you believe that (or anything else I said) promotes "wild" anything, you'll have to explain how, rather than just accuse...

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  6. I might get ripped part for this comment, but I believe that homosexuals, bisexuals , and transgender people should all be killed. Literally we should kill them all. A little bit less radical thing would be to build jail like detention facilites for them. That is plan B for me. I say we kill them.

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  7. I believe that people that call themselves "red white and blue-patriots" should all be killed also.

    No particular logical foundation. I am a man of "traditional values" and I feel "red white and blue" doesn't fit in well with my own "traditional values"

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  8. I might get ripped part for this comment,

    Worse.

    People may judge conservatives as though they all think & behave like you, just as the good professor does with liberals, whenever he finds an example as stupid or ignorant as you on the opposite side of the aisle.

    Good blog there, by the way... Not just a homophobe, but a racist, too... (Are you sure our friend Donald really represents your kind of conservatism...? Have you seen this post, where he discusses his heritage?)

    Sorry bub, but as far as I'm concerned, you're not even worth the ripping apart even you know you deserve... Just crawl on back from whence you came, and we'll call it even...

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  9. It so happens I read this Atlantic article before seeing this post.

    The article presents a considerably more complicated, nuanced, and uncertain view of this issue than you suggest. The impression I took away is that there is no current consensus on causes of gender dysphoria (I believe that's the term the article used) or on what are the 'best' responses. There seem to be lots of relevant individual factors (e.g. age of the child, etc.), and it's not simply a question of parents "indulging" their children, as you suggest, though that may come into play occasionally.

    You chose not to reproduce what I thought was a most interesting quotation, the one from the researcher who said that while he expected research would eventually turn up or confirm *some* biological component to gender identity, he thought the biological component would turn out to be smaller for gender identity than it is for sexual orientation. I have no idea if he's right, and obviously there will be variation in individual cases, but I thought this was one of the most interesting quotes in the piece.

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  10. it's not simply a question of parents "indulging" their children, as you suggest,

    That is a good point, lfc, and why I was trying to tease out Donald's actual point of view on this.

    On one hand, he talks about these parents indulging their children, but on the other, he talks about how the science is moving toward the nature theory of gender dysphoria on which the "indulgence" of these children by their parents as a treatment model is based. He includes the story of a doctor whose nurture theory of gender proved to be a failure--at least in that one case--as though it proves something, but then appears to say that parents who treat these kids as though gender roles are a product of nature are wrong, as well (by virtue of their indulging in moral decay & political correctness by doing so).

    Nowhere does he highlight anything anyone from any camp is calling success in helping these kids, though both sides do offer examples of "good news, at least so far" in the article.

    Other than beating up on the doctor who suggested turning the boy into a girl after the botched circumcision--which isn't really the same thing as what's going on with these kids, anyway, and that I suspect was based on solid scientific theory at the time, though it seems awful now, and accusing the parents following the nature model of indulging in cultural decay and political correctness--while at the same time positing that they are following the theory with "sound science" behind it, unlike those following the nurture model, I don't see the point or point of view of Donald's post, and I'm beginning to wonder whether he wants it that way...

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