Because Ehrensaft sees transgenderism as akin to homosexuality, she says, she thinks Zucker’s therapy ”” which seeks to condition children out of a transgender identity ”” is unethical.
But that isn’t how Zucker sees it. Zucker says the homosexuality metaphor is wrong. He proposes another metaphor: racial identity disorder.
“Suppose you were a clinician and a 4-year-old black kid came into your office and said he wanted to be white. Would you go with that? … I don’t think we would,” Zucker says.
If a black kid walked into a therapist’s office saying he was really white, the goal of pretty much any therapist out there would be to make him try to feel more comfortable being black. They would assume his mistaken beliefs were the product of a dysfunctional environment ”” a dysfunctional family or a dysfunctional cultural environment that led him or her to engage in this wrongheaded and dangerous fantasy. This is how Zucker sees gender-disordered kids. He sees these behaviors primarily as a product of dysfunction.
The mistake the other side makes, Zucker argues, is that it views gender identity disorder primarily as a product of biology. This, Zucker says, is, “astonishingly naive and simplistic.”
It’s a rather fine article. I do find that the APA having dual minds on the subject of gender in adults and children does not make me have much confidence in the APA.
Another thought comes to mind. If you sleep on a dragon’s hoard and think dragonish thoughts, you become a dragon. Why is such a thing as universal truth so hard for the APA (in general) to grasp?
After all these years I thought I had heard it all. The racial identity analogy was really new to me and I think it a brilliant analogy for assessing the issue. Thanks for this. Very helpful.
An important article from the former Head of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. A must read: http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=398&var_recherche=surgical+sex
subscribing for now!
Of course we would all like to make children comfortable with the “sex they were born with.” The problem is –very often we don’t actually know what that sex is, until years later. You can have genetically female infants with male genitalia there aren’t identified as “females” for a long time. You can have genetically male infants with semi-male genitals that have a genetic defect causing them to be unresponsive to testosterone but responsive to estrogen. In both cases these children grow up feeling inherently “female” while everybody around them is calling them “male.” Is a child’s gender assignment based on 1) genitalia? 2) chromosomal karyotype? 3) endocrine environment? or some combination of all three?
If a two year old boy felt incredibly strongly that “he” was really a “she” I’d be doing a LOT of medical investigation before I told “him” he wasn’t. (There are many of the opposite cases — a genetically female child with a retained testicle producing testosterone, etc.) This is a very complicated situation and I agree that it is in no way comparable to homosexuality issues.
I think Catholic Mom is right in that a complete physiological evaluation is needed before one runs to a psychologist. I would absolutely start with a thorough medical workup if I found myself in the same situation as these parents.
That said and assuming there is no medical reason for the abnormality (and that truly is what it is), I agree with Fr. Marx – the racial identity analogy is a much better way of looking at this. Kudos to Dr. Zucker for not being swayed by the current political winds blowing regarding this issue.
#5, I know its a hypothetical, but is a two year really going to feel strongly about anything, except whether or not they get their own way? Isn’t two, somewhat young, to express a strong opinion one way or another?
#7 Well, you would think so, but apparently there are cases of mis-assigned gender children who at a very early age have insisted that they were NOT the gender that everybody was calling them.
On the other hand, my (correctly gender assigned :)) oldest son was obsessively interested in beautiful girls when he was three years old. He had a harem of Barbie dolls he used to sleep with. (He used to select a chosen one each night.) And if you think it was because he was being culturally conditioned by me all I can tell you is that it took me a year to figure it out. I thought he liked Barbie dolls like all kids like Barbie dolls. I got him a “Swan Lake” Barbie prince and princess and he threw the prince in the garbage can and added the princess to his harem. That’s when I started to get a clue. 🙂
See the web site in three. This is hard to believe: People who have their legs cut off so that can get sexual excitement from stumps?
I can scarcely believe this, as I can scarcely believe there are surgeons who would undertake such an operation. This is beyond ghoulish.
LM
Isn’t the racial analogy reversed? That is, shouldn’t Zucker have used the example of a white child that wanted to be a black child? A black child who expresses a desire to be white may perceive the unsubtle advantages of being white in our culture compared to the disadvantages of being black.
It is also interesting that the examples in the story are boys who express a desire to be girls. Girls who play with boy’s toys and act or dress like boys are less likely to be stigmatized — “tomboy” has usually been a less pejorative term than “cissy.”
Would it be intrusive to ask Catholic Mom to tell us a little more about her family’s experience of this? I hasten to add that I quite understand if she does not, but she has shared with us something that may be helpful understanding this phenomenon.
Well, I don’t have any personal experience of the “bad” situation in which a child perceives itself to be a gender other than that what it is.
But, I do have two other experiences. Son #1, as I noted, was fixated on his role as a male long before he could express it properly verbally. He used to talk about his “favorite lady” in the neighborhood when he was less than three years old and I was thinking it must be some motherly figure and then I finally figured out that it was the cute teenage girl next door. Shortly thereafter he started asking me to buy him magazines that had pictures of beautiful women on the covers (like we’d be in the grocery store check out and he’s say “can you buy that?” and I’d say “why?” and he’d say “I like the picture”)and asking me to hang up the pictures above his bed! I told him that if he wanted pinups he was going to have to wait until he could afford to buy them himself. I won’t go into all the details but I’ve never seen anything like it. This was a kid whose gender identity and sexual preference was set in stone while he was still literally in diapers. So I could sympathize with somebody who said “I have a three year old son who is obsessed with being a girl, wearing girls clothing, etc.” I think it’s possible for a very young child to have a very strong sense of gender or sexual preference. (Bear in mind that my three -year old had zero idea of what “sexual preference” actually meant — he just knew that he REALLY liked beautiful girls. He would get upset watching Disney films where the prince got the princess at the end because deep in his little reptilian mind he knew that HE wanted the princess and the prince could drop dead. So we had to fast forward over those parts. 🙂 )
On the other hand, son #2, who never had the same obsession, has an endocrine condition that makes him produce too much adrenal androgen. So he was overly masculinized (physically) at a young age. The condition was diagnosed and is being treated (if it weren’t, he would experience premature puberty and premature cessation of growth) but at age 5 he has a little mustache that you can see clearly if you look closely (but fortunately only then!).
It’s no big deal for a boy– but the thing is that girls can have this condition too. In the mild form it only masculinizes them slightly (typically they are stocky and hairy) but in the severe form, it can cause them to be born with masculinized genitals. The severe form in girls is usually caught early because of the obvious anatomical problem, but the mild form can go totally undiagnosed. In such a case it might well be possible for the child to “feel” that she is really a boy since she has been flooded with male hormones since birth, while everyone around her is telling her that she needs to be more feminine.
So my point was just that if a little child expressed a strong gender identify other than what their physical appearance APPEARED to be (bearing in mind that their physical appearance may or may not correspond with genetic identity or hormonal situation), I would try to find out if there were an underlying genetic or hormonal problem before I decided that the kid needed pyschotherapy.
And if there were no (or appeared to be no — these things are tricky) underlying genetic or hormonal issues, I would still be willing to believe that a very young child could have a sense of themselves that might be impossible to change.
Catholic Mom, thank you for your insights