While picking up some groceries, I ran into the mother of a child whom I had worked with many years earlier. This was delightful, because I got some quick details about her son who seems to have grown into a lovely, productive young man. But the most intriguing part of our conversation was what she said about her older son, “Oh, by the way, James is gay.”

I had helped this family with strategies to encourage their youngest son’s development. However, while visiting the home one day, the boy’s father asked a question about his older son, “Do you think it’s normal for a five-year-old boy to want to play dress-up with his mother’s clothes and makeup?”

The conversation was one that many families have had about their young children when they routinely demonstrate interests and activities that correspond with the ‘other’ gender. The real question that the father was asking was, “If I let my child play the wrong way – meaning as
the opposite sex plays – will he grow up to be gay?”

Indeed, most parents – me included – want their children to grow up ‘as they are’ – boys are boys and girls are girls. I already have my own little fantasies about giving away my five- and two-year- old daughters at their weddings. But how would I feel if it didn’t work out that way? What if my daughters brought home young ladies?

Did I let them do too much cross-dressing play as preschoolers? Or maybe there is nothing wrong with this picture and my children are just being ‘who they really are’.

DEVELOPING A "GENDER IDENTITY"
Almost anyone who is gay (or straight) will tell you that they have been like that for as long as they can remember. Most people are who they are, and have been for their whole life. There are various theories about the forming of our ‘gender identity’ that range from Freudian ideas about how we identify with our same-sex parents as toddlers, to social learning theories that make important points about how we are socialized and reinforced to conform to our gender from our earliest days of life. However, gender identity is unmistakably influenced by our biology. To think that child rearing or socializing children as one or the other sex can ‘change’ them into the other, without accounting for their hormonal makeup or the subtle differences in brain structure that have been identified between males and females, is simply ridiculous.

Take the tragic case of a Canadian man named David. He was born a male with all of the normal genitalia and hormones of a boy. But a horrible accident happened when he was being circumcised and his penis was severed. Reeling from the shock of this, the family was eventually directed to psychologist John Money at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland who had been a pioneer in the study of gender ‘reassignment’.

Dr. Money coined the term ‘gender identity’ and was largely responsible for bringing the academic community to the study of gender roles. His research altered our views about gender. An example is in our understanding that there are males and females, and then there are some people that are genetically, biologically and behaviourally ‘in between’. Money was one
of the first academics to support the idea that men and women who feel that they are in the ‘wrong body’ – having profound feelings of being a member of the opposite sex – may be correct!

Among his endeavours, Dr. Money worked with individuals who had ‘ambiguous’ genitalia at birth – a rare defect where a baby is genetically neither male nor female. Their gender-specific genitalia and hormonal balance is not quite either gender. Money worked with families in selecting a gender for their child and developing a set of medical, educational and psychological
strategies to raise the child in that gender.

David’s case was different. He had been terribly disfigured by a freak accident, but was genetically and hormonally a normal boy at birth. Yet the family, with Dr. Money’s counsel, made the painful decision to raise the baby boy as a girl named Brenda. By 22 months of age, they began with surgery to remove his testicles and to form his genitals to look like a vagina. ‘She’ was raised as a girl in all conventional ways of dress, activities and social interactions, with ‘her’ prior history known to few. Indeed, Brenda herself was not told the truth of what happened to her until she was 14 years old.

Author John Colapinto’s book, As nature made him: The boy who was raised as a girl (2001, Perennial Press), reveals an intimate portrayal of the family’s experience over the decades that followed the gender reassignment. As Brenda grew up, she showed stereotypically male behaviour and resisted her parents’ attempts to guide her toward behaving like a girl. Her twin brother – yes, she had an ‘identical’ twin brother – years later reported that Brenda looked like a girl until she moved or talked. Brenda’s brother Brian reported, “She walked like a guy and sat with her legs apart. She talked about guy things. She played with my toys: Tinkertoys and dump trucks”. While Brenda resisted pressures to act more feminine, she was teased by other kids for her boy-like ways. Her behaviour steadily worsened through childhood and into her teen years. She refused needed surgery to finish forming a vagina and sunk into depression when hormone therapy resulted in her developing breasts and female hips. At what seems to be
Brenda’s darkest hour, a new therapist in her life urged her parents to tell her what had happened. Brenda’s reaction was one of relief, as if everything just made sense. With changes to male hormone therapy and surgeries to remove developing breasts, Brenda took on the name David and became a boy again. He eventually married, adopting his wife’s three children from a prior marriage.

David’s life makes the point of how utterly crucial one’s own biology and the impact of fetal hormone exposure is to our gender identity. No child rearing or social situations could turn David away from who he was – a boy. We are who we are.

What we might learn from David’s story is hard to know. People do what they do for varied and complicated reasons. But the next time I find myself in a discussion with a parent about their child’s ‘gender-crossed’ behaviour, I think I’m likely to say something like – love them unconditionally, and accept them for whoever they may be. PC