• Kamirose@beehaw.org
    7·
    11 months ago

    Gender expression and gender stereotypes are societal constructs. A person’s sense of their own gender is (probably) not. There have been many times where people have tried to raise their child as a different gender than the child was assigned at birth, and the child 99% of the time identifies with the gender assigned at birth, at the same rate as the general cisgender population. There have also been studies of identical twins where if one twin is trans, the other twin often is as well, at a much higher rate than fraternal twins.

    There is a genetic component and a constructed component to gender.

    Edit: wording.

    Edit 2: See my comment below with sources on the twins study - it’s possible I was misinformed on this. The results of studies are mixed.

    • cumberboi (any/all)@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      This is really interesting if these stats are true. Just to comment on the raising child as different gender, I personally would put this down to wider societal influence as the parents of course dont have full control of what their child is exposed to - they can only control so much. This could be things like bullying, advertisements, minor subtleties present in society (such as the signs used on gendered toilets) and probably others. But just want to be clear that i dont think your conclusion is invalid by any means, just wanted to give my viewpoint on that specific stat in case you hadn’t considered it already and maybe we can learn from each other :)

      The identical twin study specifically sounds really interesting and I’d love to read about it if you get the time to link it, thanks!

    • FaeDrifter@midwest.socialEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      There have been many times where people have tried to raise their child as a different gender than the child was assigned at birth, and the child 99% of the time identifies with the gender assigned at birth, at the same rate as the general cisgender population.

      How many is “many”? 100? 1,000? 10,000? Where is the study on this?

      • crank@beehaw.orgEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        I wonder if @Kamirose@beehaw.org might be thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

        Reimer was an identical twin AMAB who was raised female due to his penis being mangled during circumcision. The gender was then reassigned as female and the infant had surgical procedures done to align the body with the new female gender. The case was overseen by John Money who made a lot of hay over it, publishing all about how this proved gender was a purely social construction. It was a very famous case study. Ultimately Reimar he felt himself to be male and transitioned to male as an adult. However he was very screwed up by the whole thing and my understanding is his death by suicide is attributed to this whole series of events. There was a lot of weird stuff.

      • Kamirose@beehaw.org
        3·
        11 months ago

        That portion is anecdotal. These stories come from either before there were ethics guidelines in psychology so people were studying their own children, or reviews of child abuse cases where the parent was forcing a different identity on their children. This is not something that is possible to (ethically) run an empirical study on, unfortunately.