Researchers found
There’s a study, you see. A study. Be impressed.
Transgender children may start to identify with toys and clothes typical of their gender identity from a very young age, a recent study suggests.
Children identify with their clothes? I think not.
They mean, of course, something like “identify with the role that is purported to belong to this sex as opposed to that,” but hey, that would make everyone stop reading.
And their confidence in their gender identity is generally as strong as that of cisgender children, whose identity matches their sex assigned at birth, researchers found.
Except that doesn’t mean anything. What shirt you wear is not organically connected to what sex you are in the way that fatuous sentence implies. It’s back to front. Toys and clothes are just things, and it’s a matter of social rules – stupid social rules, mostly – that says girls play with this and boys play with that. Liking the “wrong” or “other” toy doesn’t make a kid The Other Sex.
The Reuters/NBC article never says what discipline the study is in. I had to Google the lead author to find out. The study was at the University of Washington (a few miles from where I’m sitting):
The study, published Nov. 18 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, followed more than 300 transgender children from across the United States, as well as nearly 200 of their cisgender siblings and about 300 unrelated cisgender children as a control group. It is the first study to report on all of the participants in the TransYouth Project, launched in 2013 by UW professor of psychology Kristina Olson.
The transgender children in this study, all of whom enrolled between the ages of 3 and 12, had socially — but not medically — transitioned when they participated: They had changed their pronouns and often their first names, as well as dress and play in ways associated with a gender other than their sex at birth.
So what are we talking about here? Apparently about children who prefer the toys and clothes associated with The Other Sex…but does that really make them a magical thing called Transgender, or does it just make them kids who have their own preferences in clothes and toys?
In other words why are we interpreting preferences of that kind as a profound and meaningful difference as opposed to just part of the variety of people in general? It’s as if we’d decided pears are for boys and apples are for girls so anybody who likes pears more than apples is a boy.
Humans being dumb. Oh oh girls and boys must wear and play with radically different things; we must enforce these rules with all the advertising and discipline we can; if a child despite all the advertising and discipline fails to conform to even one of these rules, that must mean the child is In The Wrong Body.
“Trans kids are showing strong identities and preferences that are different from their assigned sex,” said lead author Selin Gülgöz, who did the work as a postdoctoral researcher at the UW and will start a new position this winter as an assistant professor at Fordham University. “There is almost no difference between these trans- and cisgender kids of the same gender identity — both in how, and the extent to which, they identify with their gender or express that gender.”
And that’s innate! It’s biological! They were born with it! It’s nothing to do with social rules, and simply choosing different social rules, no no, it’s an overpowering biological imperative which overrules what’s actually between the legs.
Hey, it’s a Study, what more do you need to know.
Where do parents enter into this? Or were these wild-caught, feral children they were able to snare in their natural habitat?
Also, how do they know their “control group” really is a control group? What sort of test, examination or questionaire do they give these kids? Are there any questions that do not revolve around stereotypical, socially- conditioned preferences in clothing choice and toys played with? Hell, they’d have probably thought I was trans because, along with astronauts and soldiers, I used to play with the little ceramic animals that came in Red Rose tea.
http://www.mikesgeneralstore.com/redrosetea.htm
Three-year-olds don’t change their pronouns — their parents change their pronouns. Three-year-olds don’t transition, their parents transition them.
So little boys who are enthusiastically told by their parents that they’re little girls are confident that they’re little girls? Imagine that!
“Study” after “study” like this. They’re all just patently obvious garbage designed to make their stupid religion look like science. Don’t they have any self-awareness? These people doing these studies, don’t they stop for one second and think, “isn’t the fact that I have to resort to ginning up deliberately misleading ‘evidence’ to back my claims strong evidence that there isn’t any legitimate evidence to be found?”
It’s a cult. Cult cult cult.
Right? It’s like academic policy laundering (see next post).
This is just so frustrating. It seems like a rare example of social progress going backwards. In the 1970s, if you were a girl who liked sports and cars and dinosaurs and playing in the dirt instead of Barbies and princesses and frilly dresses and tea parties…. well, you’re a tomboy. It’s fine. Maybe you’ll “grow out of it” when puberty hits, maybe you’ll always be that way, whatever. Of course, that attitude wasn’t universal — I’m sure there were plenty of tomboys whose parents were disappointed in them and tried to force pink dresses on them — and it didn’t apply quite so well to boys who liked “girly” things due to the latent homophobia. But at least there was a general acknowledgement that kids don’t all conform to gender stereotypes.
Now, the attitude seems to be: if a child doesn’t conform to gender stereotypes, we mustn’t question the gender stereotypes! Those are sacrosanct, handed down to us by… well, mostly by toy companies and the entertainment industry… over a period of… well, a lot of it in the last couple of decades… but they are clearly NOT TO BE CHALLENGED. Better to set your child on a path of drastic medical and surgical interventions to make sure they physically match (as best as modern science can accomplish) the gender whose toy preferences they conform to.
(Note: I’m not suggesting that all trans people are just tomboys or whatever the opposite equivalent is. I assume that in many/most cases it’s something a lot more profound than that. But the trans movement does itself no favors when it cites as support studies like these with their obvious design flaws and crude assumptions.)
More thoughts after submission of previous comment.
I wonder what their exact definition of “trans” is. I’d like to hear one that wasn’t a) based on circular reasoning, b) loaded with sexist stereotypes, or c) full of both. I’m afraid I can’t be bothered to look at this “study” to see how they define their terms, as the excerpts above do not give me any reason to believe they have avoided these fundamental difficulties. It wouldn’t suit their purposes if they were to discover that the phenomenon they wish to investigate doesn’t actually exist. The same with those who propose “explanations” for dowsing, or telepathy, or communicating with the dearly departed. Transness is simply assumed to exist, but apart from whatever small number of people who actually suffer from actual gender dysphoria or dysmorphia (as opposed to autogynophilic males and cool kids who climb aboard the EnBee bandwagon to be More Special than anyone else), I don’t think there’s a there there. The bits of the “study” quoted above sound a lot like people earnestly discussing the finer points of arcane aspects player characteristics of Dungeons and Dragons. It smells like they’re talking about things that only they have the required sensitivity and perception to recognize. The inability of the unitiated to perceive these phenomena is evidence of lack of sensitivity rather than evidence that the phenomena does not exist.
With regards my playing with animal figurines, even though I was young (8-10 years old? It’s been a long time…) I had been sufficiently socialized by the expectations of masculinity to know that my playing with them was somehow “wrong”. In those days, before the Great Trans Awokening, it would have made me gay rather than trans. I would have had no clue what it meant to be gay or homosexual ( I didn’t hear those terms until later anyhow) but I already knew that being a “fag” , whatever that was, was “bad.”
Children can sometimes be quite cruel, vicious animals.
Every single study that has ever been done on gender-dysphoric children, everywhere around the globe, over four decades and counting, has reached the exact same conclusion: the majority of these kids grow up to be homosexual, not trans. The evidence is firmly conclusive by now and it is not going to change. Trans activists, like climate deniers and anti-vaxxers, simply won’t accept the facts and will stop at nothing to bury them.
I would add one quibble with Screechy @ 4 and YNnB @ 5 – I don’t think it’s homophobia alone that makes it so much worse to be a boy who likes girl things. (I’ve been thinking about it the past day or two, or brooding about it.) It’s also got to do with the plain asymmetry of what girl v boy means. A girl who is boyish is strong, active, perhaps mouthy. A boy who is girlish? Weak, a crybaby, contemptible.
In this sense, weirdly, female people are much freer than male people. I had struggles as a kid about being made to wear dresses on formal occasions, but that was pretty much it. Boys don’t really have a comparable freedom to defy the conventions. Ironic but true that girls are somewhat more free to gender-bend because being a girl is so much more pathetic than being a boy.
Yes. “Tomboy” vs “Sissy.” There’s certainly an asymmetry there. I was reaching for the homophobia as the extreme end of the “spectrum of diapproval” towards insufficiently masculine boys, but it certainly was a sliding scale that could quickly jump to “faggot” (which I’ve received a number of times well into aulthood). A girl taking on “boyish” traits is moving out of the traditionally “submissive” female role. In the binary world patriarchal sexual stereotypes, it’s seen as a step “up”. And who wouldn’t want to move up in the world? What sane person would not jump at the chance to escape such limitations? It would be like turning down a promotion at work. A boy exhibiting traits and preferences coded as “girlish” or “feminine”, however, is seen as moving out of the masculine sphere of command, assertiveness and responsibility into the weaker, submissive, less responsible “female” sphere. This is seen as a step downwards in the value hierarchy, and a sign of weakness, failure or something else bad. Looking at these “traditional” values and roles makes me wonder all the more at the trans “rights” movement’s fervant embrace of them. Better to cast them away like the dead weights they are than to celebrate them and cling to them like life jackets. Just teach everyone to swim.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but so far as I can recall, there is no biblical injunction against lesbianism, is there? Faggots needed to be dealt with but lesbians weren’t worth the trouble of gathering the rocks to stone them to death? /s
I can’t access the paper because it’s behind a paywall and I’m not at work. The appendix has the methods and detailed description of how they collected the data and that’s all I really care about. I always read the methods first. If I think the methods are garbage then the paper is garbage and I can devote my valuable time to something else.
PNAS is a good journal and I’m a little shocked that the paper was published. Statistically, this paper is flawed in many ways. Firstly, none of the methods adjusted for confounders. Confounders are elements that you have not accounted for in a study that may be coincidentally correlated with the trait of interest.
Here, they report that an overwhelming majority of parents identified as “liberal”. This is a problem in a study like this. I’m sure you can all see it already, parental attitudes to the trans movement are highly correlated with their overall political stances. Conservative parents are much more likely to disapprove of any expression of difference in gender presentation and sexual orientation, even at a young age. So you have already introduced selection bias right from the beginning. It’s right there in the data, you can see it.
Next confounder: locations of recruitment. This is a problem in all studies, including the sort of work I do. But I adjust for it! Cities are more liberal than rural areas as well as being more populous (easier to recruit in big cities vs small communities) and San Francisco is very different to Oklahoma City, politically speaking.
There are others, but I think I’ve made my point.
The methods themselves are terrible for these kinds of problems. Tests like t-tests, chi-sqs and even the more complex tests like ANOVA are not capable of adjusting for confounders (ANCOVA would work, but they didn’t use it).
There are other problems with the statistics too; some of the tests are inappropriate because of the “small cell” problem, they can’t report odds ratios or betas because they didn’t do the right tests. But I don’t want to get into the weeds here.
Finally, they don’t seem to have the faintest idea of how hypothesis testing works. They state their null hypothesis (H0) and their alternate hypothesis (HA) as two separate hypotheses (1a and 1b and so on). This indicates a lack of understanding of what they are doing. They list several hypothese in this paper (not counting the whole weird H0/HA presentation) and this hurts them.
Statistical power is the probability you will correctly reject the null hypothesis, i.e. the alternate hypothesis really is true. But every time you add another test, you have to adjust for it, which reduces the power. Here they claim good power but do not present their power calculations.
I’ve only outlined a few of the most pressing issues with it; there are more but I don’t want to bore you all. This is almost certainly a terrible paper, based on the methods description. I tried to be as open and unbiased as I could, reading it as if I were a reviewer of a paper in my own field. If I had reviewed this paper, I would have been very concerned about the standard of statistical expertise in this study and probably written to the editor to ask it be improved before I was even willing to do the review.
There you go again, Claire, going all sciency and acting like somehow the study should have a level of rigor before it is breathlessly announced to the press. What would the world come to if everyone insisted things had to meet scientific standards before you announced they were scientifically “proven”? Tsk tsk.
Thanks for doing all that…I was moving that direction, but now I don’t have to spend the time on it, and can spend my day on more pleasant things – like alphabetizing the cans in my cupboard, color coding the clothes in my closet, and putting my new books on my Excel spreadsheet. Then I must develop a plan for my new research program, and read about quantum physics before I start devising a curriculum class for the new Theatre class I am teaching in the spring. (I defy anyone figuring out my preferred gender from that list of ‘games’).
[…] a comment by Claire on Researchers […]
Ophelia, I am happy to accept your @7 as a friendly amendment rather than a quibble!
I’ll not quibble with that.
Yep, a boyish girl may be looked upon as having worse marriage prospects. A girlish boy is human waste. Homophobia needn’t enter into it (but it certainly can and exacerbates the problem when it does) because the gender binary renders the girlish boy a reprehensible source of shame on his house. (It’s worth watching a few seconds of this as Andrew Doyle recounts a segment from a BBC documentary, just for Douglas Murray’s facial expression at the words “mincing about”.) The homophobia is certainly there, but it’s a function of Gender.
Regardless, the trans ideology is a repackaged conversion therapy. The difference is that instead of forcing the non-conforming person to change against his or her will, it convinces them that they want the conversion. It’s darkly sinister, to the point that it feels as though it came right out of a science fiction novel.
And this is exactly the reason that a lazy “privilege” analysis of the gender binary is generally so hopelessly simplistic. The normative binary constrains as it elevates and liberates as it degrades—and vice versa. Obviously degraded node definitionally has it worse in aggregate, but not acknowledging the complications renders us unable to correctly analyze and address the issues that are, well, addressable.
For a pedant like me, that’s just infuriating.
I have somewhat detailed family records going back some 200 years (much more in some cases). In them are a number of women who defied convention. My great-grandmother apparently spent most of her days in pants and riding boots. A first cousin-thrice removed was a spinster and suffragette who used part of her personal fortune to found a charitable organization.
There are no records of men who defied social norms.
And have none of the Trans ideologues noticed that this easy sorting of trans boys/trans girls by the clothes and toys and the activities they prefer is the exact opposite of their insistent, persistent, consistent assertion that ‘gender identity’ most certainly has nothing to do with sexual stereotypes? Oh, no, not at all — and then they trot out trans women butch lesbians and effeminate trans men who like to do drag from time to time (i.e. wear dresses.). Gender identity is just an inner sense of *knowing* unconnected to cultural expectations.
So where are the little 5 year old Michaels and Jakes who like to roughhouse with the boys and play with dump trucks in the dirt, scorning all the sissy girls with their sparkly dresses and fashion dolls — but they call themselves Michelle and Jessica because they’re really girls themselves? Apparently not in this study.
Most girls who read Little Women liked tomboyish Jo the best. She was clearly the most interesting of the four sisters.
I didn’t— it was between Meg and Amy — but I knew enough to keep that to myself, back in the ‘60’s. And the book had been written 100 years earlier. Being a tomboy even then was considered noble.
Little Lord Fauntleroy , on the other hand — a novel about a graceful, compassionate young boy with gentle manners — has not stood the test of time, though it came out within a few years of Alcott’s work.
Have you ever noticed when a major brand releases a new gender (neutral | fluid) clothing line there are no dresses or skirts?
Sastra – oh, that’s interesting. I wonder if it’s fair to think of, say, David Copperfield as a not conspicuously butch sort of boy. He’s stood the test of time better. And then there’s Edgar Linton – who as a boy seems to be feeble and whiny but Bronte pulls one of her many disconcerting switches on us with him. Are we supposed to see him as effete and bland compared to Heathcliff? Or as a rock to his daughter and a good man compared to the sadist Heathcliff becomes?
@Ophelia;
Probably depends on whether it’s the book, or the movie.
And in other news a study published today revealed that psychologists may not understand the concept of causality. (I’m only half joking. For whatever reason it seems to be a generic problem with the discipline.)
As a teen in Philadelphia- and Newark-area arcades in the early-90s, I was renowned for my prowess at playing with Chun-Li in Street Fighter. If only I knew this was a cry for my inner-woman to come out, my basketball career may have proved more lucrative!
I don’t suppose the study bothered to look at the parents to find out if they were up to their ears in trans dogma before Little Angel was “discovered” to be trans?
iknklast, #10. I may not guess your gender from that list, but if you are delving into quantum physics I’d suspect that you possess a streak of intellectual masochism.
Translation:
Children may start to have preferred toys and clothes – which may or may not match cultural expectations for their sex – from a very young age, a recent study suggests.
Wow, very amaze, a study found that kids start to have preferences for things as their brains develop, so let’s leap to the assumption that this speaks of some mental stamp of femaleness or maleness. Never mind the fact that cultural expectations of the sexes has varied over time and location, and that therefore whether a child’s preferences indicate ‘transness’ or not is culturally dependent and therefore definitely not biologically innate, just go right to mind body dualism.
Ophelia @7 and related comments, that is the thing about Patriarchy is it not? Patriarchy is a two edged sword. Yes it oppresses women and defines a role for them that is submissive, mild, kind and nurturing, centred on home making and child rearing. However, women have a secondary, unconventional route to acceptance. Being manlike. Sure this may attract abuse, or at least largely sotto voce tut tutting, but being strong, capable and direct is good. Men on the other hand are supposed to be strong, silent, aggressive, dominating, providers. Skilled with their hands. Crafty, but not to intelligent. If you’re into evo psych you pretty much stop there, but thanks to the enlightenment men are also supposed to be noble, kind, erudite and compassionate. But all in a manly way. There is no other route to acceptability. If a man displays intelligence, compassion, sensitivity or artistic tendencies without sufficient balancing by coarser male attributes, then he is effete, girlish, useless, contemptible.
In a patriarchy brute power and glory resides with men, but that path is perilously narrow with ravines on either side. Ravines in which women are forced to live. Thankfully, in some places the ridges have got lower, the valleys shallower and the paths for both sexes a bit broader. Not by much to be honest, but it’s something.
And if you happen to be a male who is a librarian with a strong artistic sense that can match colors…and unmarried, you must be gay.
People avoided my husband like he had the plague or something until we got married. Suddenly, this man in his 40s was acceptable, no longer suspect. He had a woman.
Yeah, patriarchy often sucks for men, too, especially those that are not the “right” kind of masculine.