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[KaoteK]

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[xandaca]

We know that gender identity is pretty solid around the ages of 5 - 7. I and lots of other trans people have known from a really early age who we are despite our parents hating us for being trans. They certainly didn't manipulate us to be this way just so they have a reason to not like us. And I really don't appreciate someone calling my life "new age nonsense"

Nothing in the brain is fixed at 5-7 years old. The studies conducted have shown that most children who show signs of gender dysphoria will by puberty turn out to be gay, not transgender. However, if dysphoria persists into the mid-teenage years, at that point it is generally thought 'fixed'. None of that means transgenderism doesn't exist or that it's acceptable to abuse, manipulate or suppress the feelings of people suffering dysphoria. It might have been true that your gender identity and that of people you know was fixed at 5-7, but those are your experiences, not everyone else's. Making up that it's universal is dangerous and abusive to those who could be given treatment long before their brain has finished developing and they have any meaningful sense of self. Transgenderism is not new age nonsense, but it has to be handled with extreme care and caution given the life-changing effects of the treatment, which is why expecting infants and children to accurately categorise themselves and treating them based on what they say is a horrendous idea that puts their medium-to-term wellbeing at risk.

 

[Stumpokapow]

Nothing in the brain is fixed at 5-7 years old. The studies conducted have shown that most children who show signs of gender dysphoria will by puberty turn out to be gay, not transgender.

You linked a Wikipedia article, not studies. The Wikipedia article cites exactly two "studies" on this point. Allow me to recap the two studies and you can tell me how they fit in to the lecture you just gave a trans- person.

The first study (published in a journal for eating disorders perhaps because it is not an interesting case and because one of the children it involves has an eating disorder) by Hepp, Milos, and Braun-Scharm in 2004 is a case report. The authors found a set of two identical male twins, both of which reported gender dysphoria and homosexuality in childhood. Both twins were additionally developmentally delayed, a fact attributed to circumstances of the delivery and lack of a stable family life. In childhood, one of the boys identified as homosexual, while the other identified as heterosexual but showed primary attraction to men. Both cross dressed. The second twin, who identified as heterosexual, began living as a woman in late childhood (age 9) and adulthood and was eventually referred for hormone and surgical intervention. The conclusion is that because the two are genetically identical and one patient did not ultimately identify as trans, being trans must not be solely genetic.

The second "study" (not a study) by Cohen-Kettenis and Gooren is a meta review, written in 1999, of the research available up until that point. It is interested in the origins of "transsexualism" (I use the articles term to characterize the article, not because it is the language I would use). The bulk of the article recaps things we now know -- how gender dysphoria is identified in the DSM-3, that GID exists, that being a tomboy or playing with dolls is not GID, that no solid evidence exists for a relationship between the presence or absence of parents of a particular gender and GID. It notes that there is some evidence about in utero testosterone levels and sexual differentiation in the womb, it notes the best evidence by 1999 about the choice to use psychotherapy (i.e. to correct gender dysphoria by realigning mental gender self-identification with physical gender) versus sex reassignment (again, their words) -- and finds that psychotherapy is not effective. It talks about birth order and diagnosis. It talks about the best available evidence.

The only available paragraph in this study which discusses the claim you make proceeds as follows: It references four past studies (we'll be getting to those) that conclude that many individuals who display cross-gender behaviour later identify as cis heterosexuals rather than trans- persons. The conclusion here is not normative (i.e. they were really cis- homosexuals all along), it is descriptive. They note that there are many structural problems with these studies; first, that it may be a product of GID being a spectrum of behaviours with most of the cases that ultimately lead to "TS" being more severe GID; second, that the studies in question don't have enough data to actually wait for the kids to go into adulthood so the followup studies are those people as teens. It should not be a surprise that by 1999, most kids with gender identity disorders had not transitioned in their gender self-identification by the time they were teenagers, in part because society did not allow them to.

To make sure that this conclusion was accurate, I checked the four studies the meta-review cited.

1. Green - The Sissy Boy Syndrome and the Development of Homosexuality (1987) - Does not actually discuss transgender issues. We should not be surprised, it was 1987. The primary question of this study is whether "sissy" (effeminate) behaviours in childhood have a connection with adult male homosexuality. Again, it is not concerned with transgender persons. Because the book is out of print and it's midnight or whatever when I'm writing this, I was not able to read the whole book, so I caught up with an academic review of the book from 1987. The review quotes Green as saying the evidence is "artistic", not "scientific". The review suggests that the book establishes that some of the men who displayed feminine behaviour later ended up homosexual. Not only is the study not relevant to your assertion, it does not appear to display an understanding of gender identity disorder consistent with modern definitions -- nor should it, right?

2. Money and Russo - "Homosexual Outcome of Discordant Gender Identity/Role in Childhood: Longitudinal Follow-Up" (1979) - 11 kids were studied as kids and had gender identity disorders. Of those, 2 dropped out of the study. Of the remaining, 2 stayed in contact but wouldn't come in for a psych evaluation. Of the remaining, 2 dropped out of the study but they had some late teen results. Of the 9 (again, 5 of which were actually fully in the study), when they were studied in their mid-20s, 1 had begun to transition, 1 was an occasional transvestite but cis-identified, and the other 7 ended up at that point cis homosexuals. This does not support the premise that these people will not ending up transitioning. That young men in the mid-1970s had hangups about the perception of transitioning does not prove they grew out of being trans. Transparent deals extensively with this in the first season -- half the reason we have 60 year olds transitioning is because they had previously been cis-identified homosexual adults because they were told transitioning was impossible to begin with. It's not like Caitlyn Jenner woke up in her 60s and said "Well, I guess I'm a woman now".

3. Zuger - Early Effeminate Behavior in Boys: Outcome and Significance for Homosexuality (1985) - 55 young men with some cross-gender behaviours were studied. In a followup, it was possible to check the sexual orientation of 38 of them, 35 of whom were homosexual. The study has nothing to do with gender identity.

4. Zucker and Bradley - Gender identity disorder and psychosexual problems in children and adolescents (1995) - Also a book. I was able to skim the part of the book available on Google Books and to view an article version of the book published in a journal. This is a summary of past research. Most of the book is of no interest to our question at hand -- the process of changing the DSM label, how parents refer children to treatment, whether treatment is successful, methodological issues, etc. It cites that a minority of children with GID identify as trans-; for example, it cites a clinical study of 3 patients who identified as trans-. It notes that by adolescence, many cases of GID are not complete GID (i.e. having only some symptoms) in part because kids are socialized not to report GID to officials and parents. The researchers conclude that there's a puzzle: Why is it the case that most trans-people report childhood GID but most people with childhood GID do not report being trans? The best evidence at the point of 1995 was in part that GID is a full spectrum of behaviour and typically only people with severe GID self-identify as trans while less severe GIDs might resolve. The authors then go into full tilt 1995 mode and say [from the article version] "Our own preliminary follow-up data of children with GIDC (23) and our clinical experience with transsexual adolescents (24) have led us to believe that the risk for post-pubertal gender dysphoria is greatest among those children living in families in which their has been a high tolerance for the continuation of the cross-gender behaviour" -- i.e. the thing that predicts whether a trans- child will end up trans- is whether their parents shame them into submission and seek corrective therapies to avoid them identifying as trans-. YIKES. I suspect the authors would not have the same understanding today.

Complicating matters, the authors discuss that at the time, a credible concern was that homophobia was so bad that homosexual identified cis- people might present as trans- because they could not accept being homosexual. The opposite of the problem I describe in #2 where I note that many late trans- transitions occur from people who were forced to deny being trans- and settled through expressing themselves in terms of sexual orientation. It is clear that decades of hate and suppression did not help anyone deal with anything.

Of the four "studies", only #3 seemed to actually study children who identified as trans- as children and as I note above, is not sufficient to draw on even anecdotally. It basically says that in the 70s, of 9 kids who might have been trans- as kids, only one had begun to transition during followup in their 20s. None of them support the premise that trans-identified children go into remission. None make a real distinction between having symptoms of GID, meeting DSM-3R+ GID criteria, and being trans-
identified. All are decades old. Crucially, none of them say anything about how early therapeutic intervention like hormone blocking or delaying the onset of puberty affects anything. You describe this as "dangerous" and "abusive", but this is not something supported by the evidence you offered in support of your point.

Why did you link the Wikipedia article? What is your position? Don't you think it's -- what were your words -- dangerously irresponsible to form premature conclusions? And by the way, do you think as a matter of courtesy you owe any consideration to the person you were lecturing, who shared their own experience only for you to tell them to shut up with their anecdote, when it turns out most of your research doesn't say the thing you think it says and mostly are single digit patient case studies... in effect, clinically compiled anecdotes? I was shocked at how none of the studies referenced even in the sections of the articles and books NOT about the question at hand appeared to actually be quasi-experimental or even observational studies. Mostly they were small-n longitudinal patient files with no attempt to draw actual inferences about patterns in behaviour. Of course social statistics has come a long way since this research was done, but I'm not the one using the research to brow-beat a trans person into not speaking for trans people.

I think the more likely thing is that you have some vague concern about parents, like, forcing their kids to be trans, and some vague memory of reading something about that being bad. Then, motivated reasoning kicked in. You needed to evidence to support the conclusion you had already drawn. So you checked Wikipedia, and saw the summary paragraph. Assuming the paragraph was accurate and up to date, you linked it, saying "studies say" and assuming that no one replying would read the studies. Well, I did.

 

[LaNaranja]

 

[Morrigan Stark]

So you checked Wikipedia, and saw the summary paragraph. Assuming the paragraph was accurate and up to date, you linked it, saying "studies say" and assuming that no one replying would read the studies. Well, I did.

Goddamn.