There is a measurable difference between that and what is going on here. Transgendered people do not “want” to be the other gender. They are the other gender. They are not mixed up or confused. They have a pretty clear understanding of what is going on. 38% of transgendered people say they knew what was going on before age 5.
It’s not about wanting to take on a different gender role. There are butch lesbian male-to-female transgendered people who wear flannels and hiking boots and spend all day fixing cars and dreaming of hot chicks, as well as matronly transwomen who marry boring accountants and bake cookies for the PTA. There a fey female to male transgendered people who act like swishy femmy gay guys as well as transmen who get a dull desk job and live a nice suburban life with their wives and kids. There are plenty of boring transpeople who just wear jeans and a tee shirt and don’t really worry about much about gender. Really, transpeople run the same spectrum of gender roles as anyoen else.
Again, there are detectable differences in brain structure in transgendered people. There are countless rigorous studies in scientific journals documenting difference in transgendered brain structure and function. Do a quick search and you’ll find more about the neuroscience than you can handle. We don’t have a single unified theory, and it will probably be a long time coming since gender appears to be a really complicated interplay between chromosomes, hormones, genetics and brain structure, all of which is interpreted through the lens of culture and individuality.
Had I known what being transgendered was at the time, I would’ve said I was really a boy. I also fantasized about being the reincarnated Catherine the Great at a time.
I don’t think an 11 year old boy has the mental capacity to make that kind of medical decision, and it’s not right for his parents to do it, either.
I have a student who dresses like a boy. She’s a self-identified lesbian and may very well be one. Or maybe she’s hiding something else - I donno. I wonder what her life would be like if, at 11, she said she’s really a boy and her parents decided to remedy that with medicine.
Being a 9 or 10 year old already confusing. I vote ‘let him/her’ wait.
There is currently a long-term research project underway to answer that. It has turned up interesting physical differences in certain brain structures between transsexuals and cissexuals. Right now the evidence is scanty because the research requires a post-death analysis and dissection of brain structures, work that simply cannot be done on a live person. There aren’t that many transsexuals as a percentage of the population to begin with, much less those who have willed their brains to the project and died.
Specifically, there seems to be a structure in the hypothalamus, the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST), which shows distinct gender differences that align with gender identity. That is, heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexuals who identify as men have a BST of one configuration, and heterosexual, bisexual and homosexual women have a BST of a different configuration. Where this gets intriguing is that transsexuals have a BST of their identified gender and not that of their biological at birth gender.
In other words, this all may come down to a small structure in the brain that determines the gender you feel yourself to be. While normally this is in alignment with the gender of your body, if they are not in synch then transsexuality may be due to, for lack of a better term, a birth defect and is a type of intersexuality.
My notes indicate there is a published article out there on this research titled “A Sex Difference in the Human Brain and its Relation to Transsexuality” by J.-N. Zhou, M.A. Hofman, L.J. Gooren and D.F. Swaab published in Nature in 1995.
This article had a large impact on my thinking about transsexuality. If it really is due to a physical mis-match between brain structure and body then it’s not a matter of being delusional or mentally ill but rather a developmental defect. My thinking is that if we can’t change the brain structure to bring it into alignment with the body, then modifying the body to make the person as comfortable as possible is an acceptable course of action. It also means that transsexuality is not something you develop through environmental influences but rather really is present from birth.
The parents in the OP aren’t making that decision. They have a child who seems to have the condition, and they’re delaying puberty under the child does, in fact, have greater mental capacity and is capable of making medical decisions. Nothing permanent is being done here.
Hey, when I was 10 or 12 I also sometimes expressed a desire to be a boy. What I really wanted was what I perceived to be the freedom of being a boy, of being allowed to use power tools and wear workboots and do messy, physical things instead of being restricted to socially accepted female roles of the time and place. I didn’t really want to be a boy, I just wanted to do the things that boys did without question. In other words, I was a butch tomboy. I wasn’t a transsexual or a dyke though I’ve had other people assume that on occasion (yeah, that butch). In actual fact, I’m a heterosexual and happy to be a woman, because I now realize that being female is not as much of an obstacle to what I want to do as I thought when much younger.
Of course, that’s the reason for all the psychotherapy suspected transsexuals go through - to distinguish the genuine article from kids like you or me who have something else going on.
I will never understand the people who write this stuff off as ridiculous.
Just because you identify a certain way, or have conceptualized notions of sexuality and gender in a certain way, does not mean that this is the “truth”. We have no way of knowing what’s going on in another person’s brain, or what exactly causes people to act the way they do.
What we do know is that people who are transsexual and told constantly that they are crazy and that they should shut the hell up suffer from tremendous emotional turmoil. This is undisputed. So, given this reality, what do you do? Make people suffer or offer them a treatment that has been shown to work? Removing your own skeeved-out factor out of the equation makes it a no-brainer.
Nature influences up so many facets of our development. Why should gender and sexuality be left untouched? It makes no sense that they should. Humans are so complicated. We know nothing about what makes us who we are.
Perhaps you have heard of the strange, sad case of David Reimer, aka “John/Joan”. If not then Wikipedia provides a summary. The really short version is that when David was a baby in the '60s his penis was amputated as a result of a botched circumcision. Prominent psychologist John Money convinced David’s parents that that since a fully functional penis could not be surgically constructed for David, he’d be better off having his testicles removed and being raised as a girl. Money claimed for years that this worked out fine and that “John” (his pseudonym for David) was happy as a girl, “Joan”. He used this as evidence to support his theory that gender identity is primarily due to social influences. But the truth was that David never identified as a girl, even though he was not told the truth about his past until he was 14. As an adult he underwent several surgical procedures and hormone treatment in order to reconstruct his penis and make his appearance more masculine. He eventually committed suicide.
This case is complicated by the fact that David never had typical female genitals, and that part of Dr. Money’s “therapy” involved forcing him to take the “feminine” role in sex play with his twin brother. A biologically female child who was treated in the same manner probably would have wound up pretty troubled too. That said, if just being told “You’re a girl” by parents and other authority figures were enough to convince a child that this was true, David would have identified as a girl. Yet he didn’t, despite having lost his male genitalia before he was two years old and being given estrogen treatments as an adolescent that caused him to develop breasts. He seems to have possessed an innate masculine gender identity, one that could not be overcome by outside factors or even the appearance of his own body.
Why do you think this has to be the result of some outside influence? Plenty of children are born “different” in lots of different ways, regardless of how the rest of the world thinks things should be.
I don’t think two and three-year-old transsexuals are saying they are different.
They are different. Maybe their parents notice it and quickly squash that “non-conforming” behavior, or they allow it to go on for awhile before the kid realizes their behavior is weird and they clamp down on themselves. Or maybe no one notices because the feeling doesn’t manifest itself in particular behaviors.
A transsexual two- or three-year-old does not announce, “Hey, I’m DIFFERENT!” They voice who they think they are and then everyone else tells them they are wrong.
By blocking the hormones to delay puberty, that’s exactly what they are doing. It isn’t as if they are surgically altering the child’s genitals, or doing anything permanent while they are still very young. If I understand this correctly, the idea of delaying puberty is to wait until the child is 18 and can make his/her own medical decisions in a responsible way.
And it’s willfully obtuse to compare someone dressing like the opposite sex to what is going on in children who have gender disorder. It isn’t the same as being gay, nor is it the same as a girl being a tomboy or a boy being feminine. For the sake of fighting your own ignorance, it might be good for you to do some reading to learn the difference.
The Daily Fail headline is absolutely misrepresenting what this family is doing with their child. “Parents say it’s better for Thomas to have sex change before he is adult” isn’t what’s going on here at all. Blocking hormones isn’t the same thing as a sex change, not even a little bit. I honestly don’t know who reads The Daily Mail and takes anything they have to say seriously. They pull this crap constantly.
Yesterday I saw a guy who left me wondering whether he was FtoM.
The luxurious moustache and goatee would have made Athos envious, but the face was way too soft and the hips could only be called womanly. It wasn’t merely a hip-to-shoulders and hip-to-waist ratio more similar to those of women than to those of men: his fat clearly went more to the upper thighs than anywhere else, a female pattern.
If he was, indeed, FtoM, I certainly can see why he might have wanted to block puberty: so long as he has those hips, he’ll always look like a woman in drag. With blockers, he’d look like that woman’s brother.
Obviously I need to learn more about transgender disorder, because even after reading this thread I’m having a hard time believing this boy’s environment hasn’t influenced his mentality.
That said, it makes no sense to suggest two women would adopt a boy just to turn him into a girl.
That said, the article suggested the older adopted brother also had gender identity issues before accepting his boyhood, correct? So now I’m back to thinking there’s a possibility this could be more environmental than psychological.
I don’t see anything like that in the article linked to in the OP. The only references to the older sons are the photo caption “Here is Tammy with her mothers and older brother Edgar at his recent bar mitzvah. Mother Pauline said Tammy was shy and unhappy as a boy when compared to her older, outgoing brothers” and then “The couple were married in 1990 by a rabbi and have two older sons and grandchildren” in the body of the article.
The CNN story I linked to earlier says “Unlike his two older brothers who were boisterous, athletic and masculine, Thomas was unusually quiet.”