Justin Cascio offers insight to a Washinton Post story about a gender variant 5 year-old child, who was born a girl and insists he is a boy.
On Sunday, The Washington Post ran an intriguing profile of a 5 year-old child who was born a girl, but since he was 2, insisted that he was a boy.
Trans people very often report having known our true gender identities since earliest childhood. Unlike sexual desire, which does not make itself known to us until adolescence, we know whether we are boys or girls by the time we’re three or four years old.
In my childhood, when an older person saw me writing with my left hand, they would sometimes stop to tell me how, in their youth, their left hands had been hit with rulers to stop them from writing with them. Lewis Carroll, it is said, had been disabused of writing left-handed, and he developed a strong stutter as a result.
It’s accepted now, at least in some families, that we may be born with a persistent and powerful gender identity that does not match the body in which we are born. Medical and mental health professionals are more often telling parents of gender variant children that it makes as little sense to repress a child’s gender expression as to thwart any other innate characteristic, like handedness, shyness, artistic bent, or sexual orientation, and that to do otherwise is only traumatizing to the child.
We understand more about human diversity, and in fewer cases consider variance from the mean sinful or wrong. Those who would have been marginalized are brought into the mainstream, a win-win: an individual’s options are no longer limited by differences irrelevant to the situation, and everyone lives in a more diverse society. Just as we no longer “correct” the left handed student, someday it will be just as unthinkable to “correct” the gender identities or behavior of our children. That will be progress, indeed.
Photo of Little Builder courtesy of Shutterstock
So what happened??? One view among scientists concerning the origin of anatomically modern humans is the recent African origin of modern humans hypothesis (the “recent single-origin hypothesis” or “recent out-of-Africa” model), which posits that Homo sapiens arose in Africa and migrated out of the continent some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, replacing populations of Homo erectus in Asia and Neanderthals in Europe. An alternative multiregional hypothesis posits that Homo sapiens evolved as geographically separate but interbreeding populations stemming from the worldwide migration of Homo erectus out of Africa nearly 2.5 million years ago. Evidence suggests that several haplotypes of Neanderthal… Read more »
When I was very young, I more closely identified with boy than girl. I was maybe 5 at the time. I wanted to dress like a boy, when I played pretend games I would choose a male role. I played with more androgynous toys, I liked hot wheels, and I have always played video games. My parents thought that I was going to be either a lesbian or trans. As a young child I had many more boy friends than girl friends, but I was interested in them romantically as well. Going through adolescence was also taken in the middle… Read more »
Is it transphobic to actually be concerned about stuff like this…when I was little, I was very much a tomboy who dressed in boys clothes and played with boys, and my parents were always telling me to behave like a lady, at times I thought maybe I was really a boy and not a girl, because I sure didn’t act like one. Parts of me think its wrong to label kinds transgender so early and then place them on puberty blockers, but I also don’t want to deny people the right to choose for themselves….its just that 5 is so… Read more »
I have a close friend who was born biologically male but from what she tells me she always hated being labeled as a boy. In daycare she wanted to play with dolls. Elementary schools always love to divide children up by gender for various activities; she disliked being lumped together with the boys. Her favorite colors are pink and yellow. Yet she’s also interested in stereotypical male activities like computer games and most of her friends have been male. (Though she’s only come out rather recently and has been trying to appear male for most of her life so I… Read more »
Thanks for pointing on this article and the continuing the discourse about gender identity.
As a stutterer, I just have to say that the idea that Lewis Caroll developed a stutter from being forced to write with his left hand is absurd. Stuttering is a partially genetic, biological, medical condition. Stress cannot cause stuttering, although it can exacerbate it, like it does to many other conditions. Perhaps Caroll developed a different speech impediment which sounds similar to stuttering, hence it could be grouped into the same category, or a mild stutter could have been made worse, but there is no way he could have developed a stutter from stress alone.
As a southpaw who shares the trait with both maternal and paternal grandfathers, and who’s studied the history of left-handedness well before Wikipedia existed, I just have to say that the idea of Lewis Carroll developing a stutter because of “stress” is absurd. Like everything else on this planet, the exact cause of “mancinism” is unknown; the prevailing theory is that it’s a result of brain damage from not enough oxygen in the womb, which sounds like a medical condition to ME. In addition to that wonderful bit of news, lefties cash out up to 9 years earlier than righties… Read more »
Stuttering can actually be “taught” or at least reinforced by other people drawing increased attention to it as a child. (See the unethical experiments in the 1930’s in which researchers turned a group of developmentally delayed children into stutterers [and then couldn’t turn them back].) The way that a child is raised can have a big influence on whether the stuttering continues or not. I suspect that his forced righthandedness and speech habits were not cause and effect, but two results of a common cause – the education and childrearing practices of his day. There is something about the traditional… Read more »
I know some people just know when they’re very young that they were trans. There’s no reason to assume that this is just a phase he or she is going through. But, I think we ought to hold off a little bit putting the kid in any particular category just yet. I’m curious from the 5 year old’s perspective what it means to that particular child to “be a boy.” I’m not assuming that he’ll grow out of it or anything like that. It just seems like adults may be jumping the gun a little and imposing their own models… Read more »
P.S. Perhaps being beaten out of lefhandedness made Lewis Carroll a stutterer. Given the fact that the causes of stuttering are still something of a mystery, it could be a good explanation, but it’s likely he would have stuttered anyway. I hope no one has the assumption that stuttering is evidence of some sort of child abuse or suppressed identity.
Your analogy with left handedness is very illustrative. What was once thought as a sinister trait is now scarce – hard to find a good lefty pitcher nowadays.
I can somewhat understand and sympathize with parents that think correction will help them live an easier life. Every good parent wants this for their child. It must be then made clear that the correction is inhumane and serves no good purpose for anyone involved. It is really that simple.
Exactly so. Let people be who they are, I say.
A friend of mine has a son who has wanted to be a girl from the time he was a toddler. I would not have believed it but I saw it with my own eyes. As a small child, he wanted to play with the neighborhood girls, liked dolls and pink dresses and Disney princess costumes, and hated being around boys. As he got older, he learned the hard way (being bullied at school) that he needs to act like a boy, so he no longer asks to wear girl’s clothes, but he’s a lonely and socially awkward teen right… Read more »
But that is the trick to it, is it not? We are told that all the characteristics we associate with a particular sex are actually social constructs and in no way biological. So we should not see any children behaving in stereotypical ways associated with the opposite sex. I am curious as to how closely transgender children match the stereotypes. From what I have read and seen, the majority play to the stereotypes almost to the letter. That hardly seems biological in nature. It seems unlikely that girls have an innate love of pink, for example, and therefore any boy… Read more »
Trans people don’t fit a rigid mold – they display a wide variety of interests and activities, some of which fit stereotypes and some of which shatter them. Some trans men knit and collect dolls, and some trans women enjoy puttering with car engines. So back to your point: trans kids and teens (like all young people) are still in the process of trying things out and discovering who they are and what they like. Perhaps young trans kids make it a point to pursue and embrace stereotypical objects and activities of the gender they do not physically appear to… Read more »
That’s heartbreaking, Sarah.