Moments When Gender Is Determined

I am currently trying to zoom in on the moments when, during early learning about gender, biological predisposition is expressed and determines congruent gender behavior in children. I am in search of science which helps us understand such moments. There has been some past scientific study of non-transgender gender learning but the study of trans kids is just beginning to open up with the intense study of transgender children in affirmative care. It is now possible to study trans kids who have less pressure to conform.

Review

I have summarized the causative factors involved in establishing congruent gender behaviors and I have summarized the relatively recent effort to actually provide affirmative supportive treatment of trans kids in previous posts. The four factors of causation that I have found are genetics, epigenetics, culture and early gender learning. These factors form functional structures in the brain that Julian Jaynes called aptic structures. This term simply means that based on biological factors and learning opportunities, a person is apt to perform or tends to perform particular behaviors. Once formed, these aptic structures are relatively permanent.

In previous posts I have indicated that affirmative treatment for trans kids is a relatively new phenomena and is an outgrowth of the development of affirmative treatment for adult trans people. We have only seen affirmative approaches for trans kids of moderate size in the past decade or so. Before that, providers were treating pre-homosexual kids under the guise of transgender diagnoses. Treating homosexual people as pathological had supposedly been ended in the 1970s but the unachieved holy grail of many providers was to “cure” children and adults of being homosexual. They have not given up; “reparative” or “ conversion therapies” are still unfortunately with us.

Classic Child Development

Jean Piaget

Of course, the big name in the descriptive study of the cognitive maturation of children is Jean Piaget who described four phases of development which typically progress with age. The phases were defined by the ability of children to successfully complete particular simple cognitive tasks. It was assumed that if the child was unable to perform a particular task, then they had not mentally matured enough to be in the next higher phase. Piaget left it for others to scientifically research brain mechanisms that might underlie these task performances.

Inspired by Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg specifically studied gender behavior as well as other behaviors under the heading of “moral behavior.” It is clear that learning gender behavior is one of the most important social skills and one of the earliest to be acquired in the 2-5 years old range.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Both Piaget and Kohlberg did not differentiate between sex and gender which makes their work confusing. Piaget and Kohlberg assumed cisgender normativity, or the traditional idea that sex and gender are one and the same. Most of their studies were before John Money popularized the idea that gender (role) behavior was different from sex. But Kohlberg did some intriguing studies on “moral behavior” that touched on children’s understanding of gender. When he asked children if they were boys or girls, those who were unable to “successfully identify themselves” to the investigators were thought to lag behind in cognitive maturation for their age. Success was, of course, defined by the investigators as the gender the children were supposed to be based on their birth sex. If they had studied the outliers in more detail, they might have run across some trans kids and learned something entirely new.

Study of Trans Kids in Affirming Care

There has been a rapid development of university and private centers which provide affirming treatment for trans kids and generate a steady flow of clinical medical studies. Studies of these trans kids show that their medical test are not different from children of their age in terms of health and physiology.

But there are also research psychologists studying these children and their behavior. Notably, Kristina Olson at the University of Washington who received a prestige MacArthur grant to perform longitudinal studies of trans kids in affirmative treatment, and their families. She plans to include about 200 such families in total. The studies use control groups of kids matched in age and congruent gender and also used siblings of transgender kids as environmental controls. Presumably the family environment was as similar as possible for both trans and non-trans sibling kids. (Of course, siblings are different and parents react differently to them, so there is no perfect control for environment.)

Olson set up her study to ask three questions:

• Are trans kids just pretending or are they just confused about their gender?
• Do trans kids show the same pattern of development for their congruent gender as cisgender kids?
• Are current trans kids different from previous generations?

First, trans kids are not just faking it. They respond as rapidly as cisgender kids do on reaction-time tests of gender words, pictures and concepts. The idea is that they would have to think about the questions longer if they had to make up a lie or were confused.

The answer to the second question is that most transgender kids develop in their congruent gender behavior that same way that cisgender kids do:

• They can verbalize their congruent gender, even if they do not know the word transgender.
• They dress appropriate for their congruent gender in girls or boys clothing. Trans girls dress in dresses and trans boys avoid pink clothing. (Gender non-conforming transgender kids are exceptions)
• They tend to prefer the company of kids in the same gender category
• They tend to play with toys associated with their congruent gender.

Olson is just now starting to reach back into family histories to answer the third question, so we will have to wait for results.

Kristina Olson

Kristina Olson also confirmed that affirmative treated trans kids had normal levels of depression and only slightly higher levels of anxiety than non-transgender controls. Their mental health is clearly not pathological as some have suggested.

Olson concludes: “. . .socially transitioned children’s gender development looks remarkably similar to their gender-typical, gender matched peers and gender siblings.”

Reduction in Social Stigma and Fear

Remember, these kids are being treated affirmatively and with reduced parental or social stigma and fear. When I was their age, I would not even think about crossdressing in public, even though I knew I was a girl and not a boy. It would have been devastating to the reputation of my family and I would have gone straight to the looney-bin at the State Mental Hospital in Ancora, New Jersey—which still exists. For those who have read my autobiography, when I was in kindergarten, I rebelled at being separated from girls in my class and got into all kinds of trouble because of it. I went AWOL from my kindergarten class and straight to my mother, who taught third grade in the same school. And I faced down the principal when she called me in to shame me for misbehavior.

Music!

The only overt sign of my congruent gender that I was allowed was my record player. I would listen to ballet music and Christmas carols. (That led to a fascination with radio and electronics to get more music.) Later, having some Welsh ancestry, I was featured as a soprano soloist in church, school and Christmas songs. I thought of myself as a girl when I was singing and took great pride that I could sing higher, stronger notes than the adult women in my church choir. But then my voice changed and I was thrown into adolescent chaos.

Your nails are fabulous.

There was a girl across the street that wanted to put red nail polish on me, but then she also put red nail polish on her dog’s toenails. He did not appreciate it as much as I did, and mine all had to come off before I went home but his stayed.

Future Work Needed

So that is the state of play of research on congruent gender behaviors and their aptic structures. It should be possible to set up situations in which kids verbalize how they feel about specific gender behaviors by using verbal probes or other experimental designs. Of particular interest is trans kids and non-trans kids reactions to exposure to new gender behaviors. Another approach is to study how children actively pursue knowledge about gender; they are not just passive learners. And finally, all these behavioral studies need to be compared with brain development over time. I hope such studies are in the offing for the near future and I will continue to suggest how they might be structured.

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Tags: featured, transgender research

Category: Transgender Science