Mayak wrote:I remember in my high school psychology class we watched a documentary about a boy who was raised as a girl. The reason for this was because the boy had a botched circumcision, resulting in the complete loss of his penis. By the advice of some famous psychologist (professor at Johns Hopkins?), the parents raised him as a girl. In the video the boy quickly rebelled against his parents attempts to change his gender identity, plus some pretty sick stuff the psychologist put him through. In the end, I think one of his brothers committed suicide and his sister tried to change her identity to that of a man but later she killed herself. Eventually, leaving him all alone, identifying himself as a male.
The case you describe is that of David Reimer. The professor in question was John Money. The whole affair isn´t informative either way about gender idntity having or not ahving a biological basis, mainly because Moneys experimental approach was so fucked up. Davids brother died of an overdose, possibly suicide. He shot himself a while later. He did not identify as male - he went to a male name because it represented the time prior to the botched circumcision and the abuse he faced from Money. It´s also worth noting that the rebellion against the "gender idntity" (put in parantheses here for the above reasons) was a rebellion mainly against Moneys methods and the notions of what having a female identity entailed. It´s not like prefering Jeans to Petticoats would have been terribly out of line for a girl in the 1970s and rarely did this invoke severe violence from psychologists.
Now, this whole notion of a gender identity seems weird to me. Supposedly one has to know whether one feels like a man or like a woman. However I don´t see any rational basis for making such a statement. I know how I feel, that´s after all what being myself entails. However I don´t know how other people feel. Sure people can tell me things, but when it comes to subjective emotional states there´s quite a difference between experiencing them or being told that somebody else expreiences them. So I don´t think I could generalize my subjective state to a wide class of people. As it turns out this simple bit of reasoning comes with a diagnosis.
I think the parents are right on to not force conformity on their kids. And it´s somewhat ironic that people attack them for "imposing their ideological values" on their kids, because of course "5 year old boys should not wear pink" is an ideological value in itself and one of those things that are definitely cultural. After all in victorian times pink was considered to be a boys color and if you didn´t clad your boy in pink you´d have gotten this reaction. Another irony is that the people screaming the loudest to stop the parents from letting their kids decide tend to be the ones who also think gender is hard wired. Of course if it was the parents wouldn´t need to do anything to get a boyish boy - no more than the state needs to enforce the law of gravity.
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