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
About Justin Cascio
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 now and is seeing a therapist. His parents have tried really hard to be non-judgmental and accepting, but he’s had a lot of difficulty with his peers. Most of his friends are girls and he is active in theater, music and dance (I know that sounds stereotypical but it’s true….)
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 who believes he is a girl will automatically like pink.
One would expect to see more transpeople saying they are the opposite sex, but showing a greater variety of behavioral patterns, much like what we see with homosexuality. For example, while the stereotype of gay men in that they are effeminate, many gay men are behaviorally no different than straight men. Yet we do not see that with the trans community, which suggests to me that this trans “trait” is less like being left-handed and more akin to being autistic (in terms of why it occurs).
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 be that may interest them because these are usually inaccessible, whereas, the permitted stuff that interests them is within reach anytime. Maybe?
That’s heartbreaking, Sarah.
Exactly so. Let people be who they are, I say.
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.
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 onto someone with a lot of growing to do.
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.
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 and are more apt to succumb to manic depression and dementia.
Many lefties exhibit signs of cross-dominance, or the ability to do certain tasks with either hand, likely due to living in a right-hand-oriented world. God knows I’VE never been able to find a set of lefthanded scissors that worked at all.
However, learning to adapt because you’ve really got no choice, and being forced to adapt are two very different things, and back in Carroll’s day (and even earlier), some of the means of “deprogramming” a lefty make water-boarding at Guantanamo sound like an ESPN-sponsored event…and those deemed “incurable” were left to rot in sanitariums with what marbles they had left in the bag.
Maybe Carroll’s speech impediment WAS mislabeled as a “stutter”, but being forced to function with his right hand sure as !#$%^& didn’t HELP him any. “Stress” indeed….
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 English boarding school system that produces a significantly higher number of stutterers than average. The way that children acquire language and learn to speak must have some influence on their speech patterns.
Thanks for pointing on this article and the continuing the discourse about gender identity.
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 believe that may have something to do with it.) She’s told me that it is more than just looking female or having a female social role, she would also like to physically be female as much as possible (I believe she intends to have surgery eventually). Growing up in a conservative town has been pretty hard on her and her family has not been very supportive (she is certain they will disown her if they find out). I hope that her family will turn out to be more supportive but I try to be as supportive of her as a can; she’s like a sister to me and I’m kind of a nerd for discussing social power relations and gender roles–something she enjoys.
On the topic of autism, I have heard that a lot of such folk don’t neatly fit into the binary gender system either. I suspect I am myself and while I wouldn’t say that I am transgendered in the way that my friend is, I feel that in social terms I am pretty androgynous. I think that some of the distaste that I have had for “being female” has been ameliorated by the realization that I’m really not female in the behavioral sense. When people say “men do this, women do that” I can distance myself from the gender stereotype by realizing that they aren’t talking about me since I’m neither of those (whether or not the stereotype is true anyway).
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 freaking young! Also are all gender varient people considered transgender?
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 ground. I was sexually interested in both genders, but I was only romantically interested in males. Now that I’m older I identify as a straight female, but I still feel more closer to the middle on the scale. Based on my own experience, gender identity can be determined at a young age. In my case, I went from boy to girl, but I was born with very much a female body.
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 origin are present among all non-African populations, and Neanderthals and other hominids, such as Denisova hominin may have contributed up to 6% of their genome to present-day humans.
So what happened? well before religion andphilisophy and well before man went into the cave and after he came out-mankind had no reason to suppress gender. So what happened????? We can see an ancient written record that records gender as both male and female and displayed in some terms as heteosexual and homosexual…but why not transgender. WHY? Isn’t this just man in another of his confused states? After the Age of Enightenment allowed mankind to explore in a variety of ways many sublects and live in many different ways bu choice. So isn’t ths just choice running wild?