Transgender toddlers

In My Humble Opinion
121

Those are ages for puberty NOW, not historically.

This article provides some overview - highlights include German researchers providing statistics that around 1860 the average age of puberty onset in girls was 16 years, not 11. In other words, in prior centuries the norm was to start puberty at an age where kids these days are finished and done with the process. Our “normal” is not, in fact, normal when viewed historically.

I don’t have time right now to dig up a primary-source research paper on the topic, but a quick google will show you ample information that the average age of puberty dropped by 5 years in the 20th Century and that puberty in the age range of 15-17 was, historically, the norm in many places and eras.

Another problem with tracking the long term effects of puberty blockers is that their use in young transgender people - that is, presumably people who are biologically normal for their birth gender - is relatively new. Other uses involve kids with precocious puberty, which untreated can have its own problems (such as increased risk of cancer over a lifetime), and a subset of kids with things like hormone-secreting tumors who, again, have medical issues that may or may not affect long term outcomes.

So yes, there probably are potentially bad side effects. The same can be said for untreated gender dysphoria. That’s why professionals need to be involved in evaluation of the problem and treatment decisions. This is not something DIY.

But also consider that no one is going to be giving puberty blockers to a 3 year old. The only way a kid, say, 8 years old is going to be giving puberty blockers is if they are, in fact, in precocious puberty for which puberty blockers are a long-standing treatment. A transgender kid may be on the blockers fewer years on average than kids with precocious puberty would be, although exact lengths of time depends on the individual.

The fact is we routinely give kids, even young kids, powerful medications for various reasons, all of which can have side effects both short and long term. While certainly puberty-blockers shouldn’t be handed out lightly in conjunction with on-going treatment for a problem I don’t see where they should be ruled out or viewed as something totally new when, in fact, they aren’t. This particular use is new, but the medications are not.

122

[quote=“RickJay, post:113, topic:841597”]

So what was the point in bringing up what color people dress girls and boys in?

As I said, “I think it’s interesting that, on one hand, people are shocked at the idea that a child might know that they are transgender at a young age, but on the other hand have no problem whatsoever pushing gender stereotypes onto them and punishing them if they rebel against those.” People seem to feel that the idea that a child might know anything about their gender is absurd (one poster thinks they don’t even know he/she at age three), but children are actually bombarded with information about gender and how they fit into it. And a lot of the signals they are sent are very recent inventions and not part of longstanding tradition or ‘human nature’ like people often like to pretend. The pink/blue genital information color coding serves as a readily identifiable example of this, and is a very historically recent phenomenon.

123

If we magically erased all preconceived / stereotypical notions about differences between the sexes from everyone’s heads, there are two likely outcomes:

a) From that point on, we no longer have any beliefs about differences in personality, behavior, priorities, values, or anything else, other than the most fundamental physical structural facts, about how the sexes differ. (And maybe not even particularly polarized notions even about that).

= or =

b) Over time, people make generalizations, which become widely shared because they are relatively consistent generalizations about the sexes, and we once again have a stereotyped notion about what it means to be male (or a boy, or a man) and what it means to be female (or a girl, or a woman).
Someone walked up to my desk 20 minutes ago and asked if I could direct her to the bathroom. Note that I use the pronoun “her”. This person did not specify a pronoun choice, nor did this person specify which bathroom was the one being sought. Based on a combination of visible morphological contours, apparent texture of facial skin, hair length and styling, choice of apparel, timbre of voice, and probably a few dozen other things I wasn’t entirely consciously aware of, I gendered this person as female and assumed “she”, and assumed she was seeking the women’s bathroom.

She returned to my desk a couple moments later and said someone else had told her that, no, the bathroom was not on this side (where I had pointed her). The bathroom that is on the corridor on the other side of the building is the men’s bathroom. (We have a neutral-gender bathroom on the floor above me). She, or, rather, this person, did not tell me they had been informed that a specific bathroom was “not on this side” but with this additional information I clarified that there was a women’s bathroom in the direction I had previously pointed but to get to the men’s bathroom one would walk through the kitchen and along the left hand side of the corridor would find it.

Which is to say that relying on a generalization doesn’t prohibit adjusting for the possibility of exceptions.

For now – if not forever in perpetuity – our world does operate with generalizations which constitute gender. We gender people, we assign them identities in our head without consulting them, based on these generalizations. Toddlers learn about the generalizations (that’s specifically when it is acquired) and they may, at that time, decide that they are exceptions.
That could be because they wish to be gendered by other people as the other common identity.

That could be because they perceive themselves as fitting the generalizations associated with the other common identity more accurately than they fit the ones associated with their sex.

(Or, in simpler terms, a toddler may think of themselves in much the way we adults think of a transgender individual, or a toddler may think of themselves more the way we think of sissies and tomboys, people who are gender atypical but still identify as the bio sex that their pediatrician has on their medical record).

We should not impose a belief system on them about what it “means”. Let them tell us.

124

Well of course. But there’s always bad doctors; look at the opioid epidemic. There ARE examples of doctors being absurdly quick on the trigger in prescribing drugs to kids who declare gender dysphoria, but that’s not really my point; the pharma industry as a whole doesn’t yet have the full story on long term effects (positive or negative) so we can’t say we KNOW what the long term results will be. Use of hormone inhibitors for this indication in relatively new.

For that matter, transgenderism is to some extent new; we assume it’s always been with us and there are a number of famous examples, but the number of kids being identified as gender dysphoric now is climbing exponentially, and we do not yet know what the long term “results” of that will be, either. There isn’t even any sort of agreement on, say, whether or not kids who identify as trans will change their minds later; you will hear from some people that that even almost never happens, but a few posts ago is a cite that it actually happens a lot. Until the current generation matures to adulthood, we’ve no clear idea. How often trans kids attempt suicide is a matter of many competing claims but limited clarity. There is no consistency at all from place to place or service provider to provider as to how to help kids dealing with gender dysphoria and there is VERY little investigation into what the comorbidities are.

The long and short of it; anyone who says they KNOW about the science of this is fooling themselves.

125

From this and other posts, I get the impression that your model is that gender identity is principally or entirely a social construct. Certainly it is to some degree, but surely the very existence of transgender people strongly implies that there is some degree of sexual dimorphism in the behavioral phenotype. Transgender people assert a gender identity that is in opposition to massive social pressure to adopt a cis identity, historically placing themselves at great risk of persecution and suffering. It’s hard to imagine how this could be a result of social conditioning. It’s surely likely to be a combination of genetics and/or early non-social environmental factors.

126

Two ends that are, I believe, equally ignorant, and excluding the middle that is most backed by the data that we have.

The data is pretty clear that most gender incongruent younger children will NOT remain so forever … and that some fewer will. And no one, including the child, knows at that point which kid will be the one whose gender incongruity persists or fades, including the child. One can respect and support where they are at that moment without trying to impose an adult forever identity upon them. Give them the space to explore and come to their own conclusions over the course of childhood, confident that they are loved whatever identities they embrace, plural intended as the chosen identity may change and they need to know that it is okay to be fluid and to be a boy for now and a girl later and maybe back again, no lasting choices need to be made yet, and when it is time we will be here with you, loving you as you make that decision then.

127

I would think the example of David Reimer showed that gender isn’t simply a “social construct”. You can’t force a cis kid to be trans, so people should realize that forcing a trans person to be cis ain’t gonna work.

John Money tried to claim that gender roles were purely social – but the jury’s still out on the “nature vs. nurture” deal. Probably a good mix of the two.

128

Gender is, by definition, a social construct. Sex is what is biological; gender is what is social. That’s the traditional definitive difference between the two terms.

A theory the effect that being transgender is biologically based does exist. There is some supportive evidence, but the interpretation of such evidence is very heavily flavored by the politics of the outcome of the interpretation.

At an absolute minimum, though, it remains true that transgender people may exist whose gender variance is not the consequence of anything biologically different in their brains. Using the modern wider definition of “transgender” – a person whose gender identity is different from the sex they were assigned at birth – that seems extremely likely, since we’re now talking not only of people who feel that the body with which they were born is wrong and needs medical intervention, but also people like me, and people who identify as “nonbinary transgender”, and others who do not regard their physical body as in need of any kind of physical alteration. Given that wide range of variation, it is unlikely that a single built-in physical difference at the brain level is responsible for all of that.

Why? I have no difficulty believing that at all. Our culture has a massively unwelcoming and negative response to gender-atypical people (masculine female people and feminine male people), and that’s on top of the social friction of being constantly assumed to be something that one is not (i.e., assumed to be a masculine male if one is male, assumes to be a feminine female if one is female).

One need not “assert” a gender identity in order to slam headlong into persecution and suffering. In the absence of coming out, of defining one’s atypical gender identity, one has the limited choice of either faking one’s persona so as to fit in among those of the same biological sex (profoundly uncomfortable, severe suffering) or expressing who one is more honestly and being regarded as “wrong” for one’s sex.

Transitioning – or at least presenting as the physical sex that is typically associated with how one actually is inside, instead of as the physical sex one was born as – is something one does to alleviate the persecution and suffering. It is something that one does in order to more accurately be thought of and to be treated more in accordance with the person that one actually is.

Social conditioning is exactly why the people of the world, at large, behave in such a rigid, sex-polarized and intolerant way. I’ve seen enough change in how we are regarded during the short course of my own lifetime to convince me that there’s no reason or need to posit a built-in biological hatred for feminine males or masculine females.

And if that tolerance were to expand to the point that a feminine male person or a masculine female person were accepted and embraced from birth as a minority, a male girl or female boy or however you want to characterize that, and no longer regarded as ‘wrong’, just minority, then many more of us would opt to not transition – in fact transitioning would be limited to those who specifically consider their body to be wrong, and not those who transition in order to be regarded and treated the way the opposite sex is treated, since being recognized and accepted as male girl / female boy would accomplish the latter without transition.

  • shrug * maybe, maybe not. There could be a genetic or congenital or non-social environmental reason that I have, for a lifetime, been inclined to perceive myself as being one of the girls (proudly), to behave in ways that others view as feminine, to be this way. If so, that has never made me want my body to be biologically female. If the reasons that propel the transitioning people to want to transition is the same difference, it has multiple expressions; if it’s a different genetic (etc) difference, we’ve got multiple phenomena going on and shouldn’t assume gender-variant behavior means one and doesn’t mean the other. If only the transition-inclined people have a built-in genetic (etc) difference, then the rest of us, those not at odds with our physical morphology, are up against the socialization stuff only, and again, gender-variant behavior in children should not be viewed as indicative of the genetic version when it might be the other phenomenon.
    Let’s transform society and create space for those of us who don’t wish to transition OR fake our identities, and see who still wants to transition. And make sure that those who wish to transition have access to the process without impediment.
129

Just to dive into a little etymology… not exactly. The terms are being separated into those two definitions now, but that is quite a recent thing - that usage is younger than I am - not a “traditional” thing, and in common English people still use “gender” to just mean “biological sex.” Virtually any English dictionary will say “gender” can mean either the things attributed to a sex or can be just synonymous with sex.

The use of “gender” in the sense of distinguishing between sexes dated back to roughly the sixteenth century;; prior to that it generally meant “a group of like things,” and is related the the Latin “genus.” In the late nineteenth century it came into more common use to replace the word “sex” in usage not related to the erotic sense of “sex.” So to almost any English-speaking person a hundred years ago, “gender” meant “sex.” The concept of social constructs of gender wasn’t really a thing they would have comprehended.

Of course gender also has a grammatical meaning too but that’s not pertinent here.

Anyway, that’s a nitpick. The rest of your post was very thoughtful and wise.

130

AHunter3, not sure where your raising “a single built-in physical difference at the brain level” comes from. Spectrums of outcomes based on biological predispositions of multifactorial origins is usually how we think of complex behavioral phenotypes, not single items.

Be that as it may, how does your model of considering gender as a social construct apply to sexual orientation, which also has a spectrum and many with some fluidity, some clear biological predispositions, but more evidence for persistence from early childhood into adulthood than gender incongruence does?

131

Both good points, DSeid.

This, I think, needs to be said: the implicit, generally unspoken subtext of the “hey, it’s built into the brain, it’s biological” argument is “aww gee they can’t help it so you have to excuse or forgive them and not hold it against them that they’re like this”.

And that’s an attitude that slides right under my fingernails and pokes me sharply.

Fuck that shit. Why are our identities on trial?

And it’s a false dichotomy. There’s not “one of me” and outside of that my biology, my personal history, the events in my past that have shaped me, my genetics, etc, that are somehow “not me” but instead are responsible for how I am. Nope, it’s all me.

I experienced myself as choosing, affirmatively, to behave in ways that were condemned by others as feminine. I experienced myself as choosing to embrace a sense of self as one of the girls. Now, you could ask “Well, could you have chosen otherwise and still been true to yourself? Could you have chosen otherwise without it being the choice to live a lie?”, and I’d say “no”. I could not have. But that’s what I mean by saying it’s a false dichotomy. Who I am and the choices that I have made are not separable things. And I’m not apologizing for any of it, nor crawling into the convenient shadows of some kind of biological-causative absolution as if I needed permission, forgiveness, or anything of the sort.
Having said that, yeah I suppose there’s some knee-jerk elements to my reaction to the topic.

132

No, it’s not, unless you buy into assumptions of postmodern social theory that are at odds with reality.

Biological sex is the physical body excluding the brain (to a biologist, part of the somatic phenotype); gender identity is part of your mental state, how you feel and act as a person (part of the behavioral phenotype). Both body and mind are determined by a combination of genetics and environment, with environment subdivided into social and non-social factors.

Now, of course the relative importance of nature vs nurture is a matter of great interest and controversy; but only if you adopt some ludicrous extreme version of the “blank slate” model of human behavior would you assume that there are no genetic factors influencing aspects of our mental state such as gender identity. Just as with all animals, virtually every aspect of what it means to be a human being is some combination of both genetics and environment.

Of course. Absolute genetic determinism is just as ludicrous as extreme forms of the “blank slate” model. Both genes and environment. It’s not nature or nurture, it’s always nature and nurture.

Who said anything about a single genetic factor? Everything about us, both physically and mentally, is influenced by a huge number of complex genetic factors. The fact that some aspect of phenotype exists in a diverse spectrum is not evidence one way or the other about the relative importance of genetic vs environmental factors.

To which you responded:

I’m scratching my head at your reasoning here. What you’ve laid out is precisely why it’s so implausible that being trans is a result of social conditioning. How do you imagine that social persecution would condition kids to adopt an LGBT identity? All the social conditioning I see kids being exposed to pushes them strongly to conform to “traditional” straight-cis-binary stereotypes. If our gender identity were entirely the result of social conditioning, i.e. our minds were infinitely malleable blank slates, why would LGBT people exist at all in a society that has historically rejected and persecuted them? Transgender (or any LGBT or non-binary) kids seem to be rebelling strongly against the social conditioning they are exposed to, historically making their lives far more difficult by doing so. That strongly implies that their identities are not infinitely malleable blank slates, that they cannot be comfortable with the straight-cis-binary identity that social conditioning tries to foist upon everyone from birth. It strongly implies significant contributions to gender identity from genetic factors and/or non-social environmental factors.

133

possibly. Probably, even. OK I’ll give you that.

I am a sociologist-type academic kind of person. I’m not as extreme as what I was taught in college — that absolutely everything is social and nothing is intrinsic, and in fact I find that perspective oppressive — but I lean towards a social explanation first and foremost. Unless I see specific evidence of it, I tend not to assume built-in biological causes for observable differences.

Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.

You are treating the LGBT people as if they, and they alone, were the socially constructed particles in this interaction. I tend to think of the people constituting their social environment as socially constructed. (Individual variations may exist but when we’re speaking of a person’s social environment we’re dealing with the aggregate, so I think I have stronger case for it). A person is gender-variant. It’s the response of their social environment that makes it into a Thing. Otherwise it’s of no more concern than being lefthanded in a righthanded-majority world.

I’ve never for a moment believed we were blank slates. I’ve occasionally believed that the true nature of people is at odds with the oppressively imposed definitions of masculine and feminine, though. The first level of socialized forces acting upon a person tries to shoehorn them into masculinity, if male, or femininity, if female. If that doesn’t “take” the next level of socialized forces marginalizes them as wrong and weird and establishes a stereotype about feminine males and masculine females.
I am one. I am a sissy-femme girlish male person.

134

There has been more research brought to light recently. Most significantly, Michael Biggs, a professor at Oxford, has analyzed results from a study done by Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), the service in NHS focused on treating transgender youth. His full academic write-up of the results can be found here, a summary for the public is here. Concerning the actual effects of puberty blockers on mental health:

It tracks 30 of the children on triptorelin, measuring changes after one year of the drug regime; presumably the remaining 14 subjects had not completed their first year on the drug. The text is sometimes internally inconsistent and occasionally contradicts the tabulated figures, suggesting that the appendix was prepared in haste. But we can summarize those changes that were reported as statistically significant (p-value < .05). Only one change was positive: “according to their parents, the young people experience less internalizing behavioural problems” (as measured by the Child Behavior Checklist). There were three negative changes. “Natal girls showed a significant increase in behavioural and emotional problems”, according to their parents (also from the Child Behavior Checklist, contradicting the only positive result). One dimension of the Health Related Quality of Life scale, completed by parents, “showed a significant decrease in Physical well-being of their child”. What is most disturbing is that “a significant increase was found in the first item ‘I deliberately try to hurt or kill self’” (in the Youth Self Report questionnaire). Astonishingly, the increased risk of self-harm attracted no comment in Carmichael’s report. Given that puberty blockers are prescribed to treat gender dysphoria, it is paradoxical that “the suppression of puberty does not impact positively on the experience of gender dysphoria” (measured by the Body Image Scale).
…
For the children who commenced the blocker, feeling happier and more confident with their gender identity was a dominant theme that emerged during the semi-structured interviews at 6 months. However, the quantitative outcomes for these children at 1 years time suggest that they also continue to report an increase in internalising problems and body dissatisfaction, especially natal girls.
…
Expectations of improvement in functioning and relief of the dysphoria are not as extensive as anticipated, and psychometric indices do not always improve nor does the prevalence of measures of disturbance such as deliberate self harm improve.

So the results show that puberty blockers increased suicidal thoughts by at least one measure and did not consistently help patients with gender dysphoria. This clearly undermines the whole justification for using puberty blockers.

135

And acknowledging that you’ve also said:

Much of modern social science is not science, it’s ideologically motivated, and never tested against reality. And nobody has ever proposed a credible explanation of how humans, unlike all other animals including all our ancestors in the tree of life, at some point in evolution mysteriously lost all instinctive behaviors and evolved blank-slate brains without any firmware. I think the only sensible null hypothesis is that both genes and environment are significant contributors to most aspects of what we are, absent strong evidence that one or other dominates.

I’m not sure what you mean by this and the subsequent paragraph, but I’m discussing to what extent gender identity in general is genetically vs socially determined. But it’s LGBT people who provide some evidence on the question, because they appear to be examples of gender identities that persist in opposition to strong social conditioning.

136

Thanks. I guess this ‘insistent, persistent, consistent’ part is an important part.

Interesting, thanks.

137

I clicked the first link expecting to see some actual research link. Foolish me.

No ITR an individual sociology professor making (verbose) accusations of a cover up by the expert medical bodies is not something I will bother wading through.

There are areas that I will try to be the expert on, areas in which I will do the comprehensive full literature review myself, weighing the complete body of evidence critically, sometimes coming to a different conclusion than expert panels have. This is not one of them.

As more evidence comes in over years of experience the expert medical panels will review the complete body of evidence inclusive of it. I for one will defer to their conclusions over the conspiracy rantings of individual sociology professors. Now and when they revise in the face of new data if they do. YMMV.

Expert panel review and conclusions were shared FWIW. Place the “worth” value of it vs individual rantings where you feel is appropriate.

138

A genetic predisposition towards gender is not like a genetic predisposition towards being tall or having red hair. It (if it exists) is more like a genetic predisposition towards the characteristics that would make one an excellent jet pilot or an exceptional oil painter: nobody in the absence of social learning could ever identify as a “born jet pilot” or “born artist”. We learn through social interaction what those things are. None of our paleolithic ancestors thought of themselves as “born jet pilots” because the concept didn’t exist.

Hence, LGBTQIetc people do not, in fact, have identities that “persist in opposition to strong social conditioning”, or at least that’s a misleading way of looking at it; we position ourselves and reach our sense of our own identities against a backdrop of identities discernable to us. Same as cis hetero people.

Certainly the reason that Individual A comes to think of himself as a “him”, and as attracted to the people he categorizes as “her” type people, may have built-in biological components. (On the other hand, there may NOT be any such built-in differences setting him apart from Individual B of the same morphological body structure who reaches different self-evaluations; we do not know for sure. But there certainly CAN be).

What we do know for absolute ironclad fact is that for both Individual A and Individual B, the process of identifying is very much a socially immersed one.

139

Sure, but in considering the contributions of genetics vs environment this is a really a distinction without a difference. If we say that someone has a genetic predisposition toward some trait, that always requires that we specify a set of environmental conditions in which that trait is manifest. The fact that a trait may be a complex result of many factors, or may be manifest at all only in environmental conditions which did not exist for our ancestors, doesn’t mean it can’t be genetic. The question is still: among individuals exposed to identical environmental conditions, is there variation in the trait that’s attributable to variation in genotype?

140

For something as complicated as gender identity and sexual attraction pattern (which incorporates not just the either-or of “do you find male people hot or female people hot?” but all the different inclinations and tastes and preferences woven into what is or is not hot, or even what hotness itself is actually like), I don’t think there are any two individuals who have been exposed to identical environmental conditions.

You’d have to rewind and replay the entirety of Joan’s experience for Jill in order to expose Jill to the identical environmental conditions in which Joan’s identity and preferences emerged.