Childhood Gender Identity … Disorder? Developmental,Cultural, and Diagnostic Concerns

Childhood gender identity development is reviewed in the context of biological, environmental, cultural, and diagnostic factors. With the upcoming 5th revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the authors offer a critical consideration of childhood gender identity disorder, along with proposed diagnostic changes. They argue that meaningful understanding of issues surrounding gender identity is necessary for a conscientious assessment and diagnostic process that does not pathologize human diversity.     

THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE OF SEX AND GENDER

Abstract: Several decades ago, feminists differentiated between the biologically given basis of sex identity (sex) and the socially constructed cultural practices anchored by sex identity (gender). In recent years, many feminists have challenged that distinction, arguing that biological sex is as much a social construct as are the practices comprising gender. I survey two examples from biological studies of sex identity that, by contrast (I maintain), warrant saving the concept of biologically given sex identity. The result is not antithetical to feminism, however, since these studies also suggest that sex identity proliferates beyond the rigid female/male dichotomy. If articulated carefully, this view can avoid metaphysically essentialist baggage while enriching feminist conceptions of sex identity.     

Trivial Personal Differences

Abstract

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit argues that personal identity is indeterminate and that identity is not what matters in personal survival. Parfit argues that traditional views of personal identity have counterintuitive consequences and that they violate a plausible requirement, suggested by Bernard Williams, that must be met by any acceptable criterion of identity. Parfit argues that, unlike traditional determinate views of personal identity, his view succeeds in accommodating intuitions and in meeting (an analogue to) Williams' requirement. I argue that Parfit's view has more counterintuitive consequences than do the traditional views of identity. Though the traditional views do seem to violate Williams' requirement, Parfit's view fares no better. In fact, it seems that any theory of personal survival that appeals to connections that may hold to a greater or lesser extent will fail to meet the relevant requirement. This is an important general point, since the requirement is a plausible one.     

An Autobiographical Fragment

In this article, I attempt to locate some of the personal and professional roots of my identity as a psychoanalyst. Theoretically and clinically, I have arrived at what I think of as a “radical middle-of-the-road perspective” that includes both what I see as the most important and enduring sensibilities of mainstream Freudian thinking and what I see as the most interesting contributions of the interpersonal/relational tradition. Institutionally, I advocate a kind of cacophony that encourages respectful but most likely irresolvable debate among adherents of different points of view. My training, as a psychologist interested in psychoanalysis during the 1970s, was steeped in pluralism and conceptual heterodoxy. However, I believe that my personal history prepared me to seek out and to embrace this psychoanalytic world, which was at the time and to some extent remains slightly outside the mainstream.     

The development of social networks from early to middle childhood: Gender differences and the relation to school competence

The purpose of this study was to examine gender differences in social network development from early to middle childhood and the relation of network characteristics to school competence. Maternal report of 75 children's kin, nonkin adult, and friendship networks were collected at 3, 6, and 9 years of age. Teacher ratings of school competence were obtained at 9 years. While children showed changes in their social networks over time, expected gender differences were not found in the extensive nature of the nonkin network. However, as expected, preference for same-sex friends was noted in early childhood and intensified with age into middle childhood. For girls, but not for boys, social network characteristics were related to teacher ratings of social competence in school.The preparation of this paper was made possible by the support of the William T. Grant Foundation.     

That All Children Should Be Free: Beauvoir,Rousseau, and Childhood

Simone de Beauvoir offers one of the most interesting philosophical accounts of childhood, and, as numerous scholars have argued, it is one of the most important contributions that she made to existentialism. Beauvoir stressed the importance of childhood on one's ability to assume one's freedom. This radically changed how freedom was construed for existentialism. Rather than positing an adult subjectivity that tries to flee freedom through bad faith, Beauvoir's account forces a recognition of a situated freedom that itself is also developmentally achieved. In this article, I explore the influence of Jean‐Jacques Rousseau on Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. By reading Beauvoir through Rousseau—who was one of her favorite authors—we see not just one but two accounts of childhood in Beauvoir's philosophical work. On the one hand is the idealistic childhood wherein the child is an apprentice to freedom. On the other is the constrained childhood whose product is apprenticed to the serious. I begin with a brief summary of Rousseau's Emile. Next, I offer some justification for reading Beauvoir alongside Rousseau before offering an account of Beauvoir's discussion of childhood. I end by exploring some of the implications of my reading for freedom.     

Childhood,Growth, and Dependency in Liberal Political Philosophy

Political philosophy presents a static conception of childhood as a state of lack, a condition where intellectual, physical, and moral capacities are undeveloped. This view, referred to by David Kennedy as the deficit view of childhood, is problematic because it systematically disparages certain universal features of humanity—dependency and growth—and incorrectly characterizes them as features of childhood only. Thus there is a strict separation between childhood and adulthood because adults are characterized as fully autonomous agents who have reached the end of their moral and cognitive development. I argue that this view is mistaken, and limits both the developmental abilities of adults and ongoing moral development within an organized state. I propose that we view dependency as a human condition. By doing so, children and adults form the kind of relationship with one another that encourages the growth and development of our moral sense in both childhood and adulthood.     

From Pink Frilly Dresses to ‘One of the Boys’: A Social‐Cognitive Analysis of Gender Identity Development and Gender Bias

In middle childhood, many girls go through a curious metamorphosis, in which their earlier embrace of all‐things‐feminine appears to transform into an identity as a tomboy. We believe this striking shift, observed in girls but not boys, signifies a critical development in children’s socio‐cognitive functioning, with implications for their understanding of gender as it relates to their identity and their social relationships. In this article, we review the evidence for this identity shift and present a theoretical account that integrates ideas from social cognition and social development. We argue that this identity shift involves the emergence of public regard and status awareness, with concurrent increases in the complexity with which knowledge associated with gender categories is represented in the mind. We then posit that these changes have important implications for the developmental trajectory of implicit and explicit gender attitudes and stereotypes, and we present a set of predictions generated by our theoretical analysis.     

性别同一性的形成及研究角度发展

性别的同一性是自我同一性的一部分,是人格和社会化发展的重要内容。性别的同一性概念已经从性同一性转移到性别同一性。对性别同一性的研究角度经过了概念认知、图式认知和社会认知的探索,目前开始进入人际关系角度的研究。最后,提出了对性别同一性未来的研究展望。     

Why thinking about feeling isn't the same as feeling about feeling,and why post-androgyny is dialectical not regressive: A response to Philibert and Sayers

These two papers make valuable contributions to a growing debate which seems likely to dominate thinking about gender development for the next decade. They are significant even though Sayer's paper is based on a misunderstanding of Gilligan's model and Philibert does not place enough importance on early adolescence and childhood in his critique.     

Genetic and environmental influences on sexual orientation and its correlates in an Australian twin sample

We recruited twins systematically from the Australian Twin Registry and assessed their sexual orientation and 2 related traits: childhood gender nonconformity and continuous gender identity. Men and women differed in their distributions of sexual orientation, with women more likely to have slight-to-moderate degrees of homosexual attraction, and men more likely to have high degrees of homosexual attraction. Twin concordances for nonheterosexual orientation were lower than in prior studies. Univariate analyses showed that familial factors were important for all traits, but were less successful in distinguishing genetic from shared environmental influences. Only childhood gender nonconformity was significantly heritable for both men and women. Multivariate analyses suggested that the causal architecture differed between men and women, and, for women, provided significant evidence for the importance of genetic factors to the traits' covariation.     

A follow-up study of girls with gender identity disorder

This study provided information on the natural histories of 25 girls with gender identity disorder (GID). Standardized assessment data in childhood (mean age, 8.88 years; range, 3-12 years) and at follow-up (mean age, 23.24 years; range, 15-36 years) were used to evaluate gender identity and sexual orientation. At the assessment in childhood, 60% of the girls met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders criteria for GID, and 40% were subthreshold for the diagnosis. At follow-up, 3 participants (12%) were judged to have GID or gender dysphoria. Regarding sexual orientation, 8 participants (32%) were classified as bisexual/homosexual in fantasy, and 6 (24%) were classified as bisexual/homosexual in behavior. The remaining participants were classified as either heterosexual or asexual. The rates of GID persistence and bisexual/homosexual sexual orientation were substantially higher than base rates in the general female population derived from epidemiological or survey studies. There was some evidence of a "dosage" effect, with girls who were more cross-sex typed in their childhood behavior more likely to be gender dysphoric at follow-up and more likely to have been classified as bisexual/homosexual in behavior (but not in fantasy).     

Sexual orientation and childhood gender nonconformity: evidence from home videos

Homosexual adults tend to be more gender nonconforming than heterosexual adults in some of their behaviors, feelings, and interests. Retrospective studies have also shown large differences in childhood gender nonconformity, but these studies have been criticized for possible memory biases. The authors studied an indicator of childhood gender nonconformity not subject to such biases: childhood home videos. They recruited homosexual and heterosexual men and women (targets) with videos from their childhood and subsequently asked heterosexual and homosexual raters to judge the gender nonconformity of the targets from both the childhood videos and adult videos made for the study. Prehomosexual children were judged more gender nonconforming, on average, than preheterosexual children, and this pattern obtained for both men and women. This difference emerged early, carried into adulthood, and was consistent with self-report. In addition, targets who were more gender nonconforming tended to recall more childhood rejection.     

A personal odyssey

In this autobiography, I tried to capture important aspects of my personal and professional development from my childhood in the ethnic ghettos of South Philadelphia to Pennsylvania State University and the University of Chicago and eventually to over 45 years on faculty at Yale. It has been a journey that I could never have anticipated and that has given me a sense of the unpredictability of psychological development. We all evolve in an open system and a significant portion of the variance of the outcome is determined by fate. But much is also determined by the ability to recognize opportunities and the willingness to take chances and to work hard when opportunities arise. As I reflect on my career of over 50 years, I have been delighted that I opted for a career as a clinical psychologist because it has provided me with opportunity to develop clinical skills and to combine these skills with scholarship and research. While I take considerable satisfaction in the recognition that my contributions have received, the most important aspect of my career has been my relationship with students and colleagues. These collaborations have clearly enriched my work; but more important, they have enriched my life.     

Instantiation as Partial Identity: Replies to Critics

One of the advantages of my account in the essay “Instantiation as Partial Identity” was capturing the contingency of instantiation—something David Armstrong gave up in his experiment with a similar view. What made the contingency possible for me was my own non-standard account of identity, complete with the apparatus of counts and aspects. The need remains to lift some obscurity from the account in order to display its virtues to greater advantage. To that end, I propose to respond to those who have grappled with it in print. There are various criticisms by commentators: that it is rendered absurd by the transitivity of identity, that it makes instantiation necessary instead of contingent, that it is unclear what counts are, that aspects are simply tropes, that my view does not capture multiple location, that I make an unclear reference to a theory of composition as identity, that the account suffers from problems with polyadicity, and that it is not a realist account of universals after all. I give responses to these objections.     

Blazing and Illuminating a Trail: The Career and Scholarship of Janet Taylor Spence

Janet Taylor Spence was a gender pioneer in her career as an academic psychologist and an important contributor to the psychological study of gender roles. That is, she both blazed a path for women in academia and contributed to our scientific understanding of the factors that produce and shape such paths. In this piece, I address both these aspects of her life and work. I begin by briefly highlighting Spence’s groundbreaking posts in academia and her influence on my own academic career. With respect to her research, I identify five aspects of Spence’s work that were innovative and made important, lasting contributions to theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding gender in the United States. I first describe Spence’s commitment to challenging the ideological beliefs about gender held by laypeople and scientists alike by engaging in empirical tests of commonly held beliefs. I next review Spence’s argument that within-individual variability of gender-typing of the self is normative rather than unusual. Third, I describe Spence’s beliefs about the relation between gender-typing of the self and gender-typing of others, and fourth, I describe Spence’s work concerning the mechanisms that support self-perceived femininity and masculinity. In the fifth and final section, I highlight Spence’s treatment of environmental contributions to gender role development.     

Toward the “overthrow of Platonism”: Processist critical social ontology and ameliorative discourse

In this article, I argue that, for the purpose of developing an effective critical social ontology about gender groups, it is not simply sufficient to carve gender groups at their joints: one must have in view whether the metaphysical categories we use to make sense of gender groups are prone to ideological distortion and vitiation. The norms underpinning a gender group's constitution as a type of social class and the norms involved in gender identity attributions, I propose, provide compelling reason to think critical social ontological discourse is more processist-orientated, rather than substantival-orientated. The advantages of a processist critical social ontology of gender groups are that, unlike substance-discourse, process-discourse recognizes how gender group talk and gender identity talk are often messy and therefore require a conceptual scheme that can transform vocabulary for the emancipatory purpose of ending oppression, domination, and marginalization.     

Why “Gender” disappeared from the gender gap: (re-)introducing gender identity theory to educational gender gap research

Educational gender gap research tries to explain the differential achievement of boys and girls at secondary school, which manifests in many western countries. Several explanatory frameworks are used for this purpose, such as masculinities theory. In this review article, the history of educational gender gap research in Anglo-Saxon literature and problems with the contemporary approach are discussed. It is argued that gender identity theory could prove valuable both in furthering educational gender gap research and mitigating several problems with masculinities theory. To this end, an overview of the history and recent developments in gender identity theory is given. The scarce research combining educational gender gap research with gender identity theory is reviewed. Possible contributions, assets and research questions from gender identity theory to educational gender gap research are discussed.     

Taxometric analyses of sexual orientation and gender identity

Taxa are nonarbitrary classes whose existence is an empirical question and not a matter of mere semantic convenience. Taxometric procedures detect whether numerical relations between purported indicators of conjectured taxa bear the hallmarks of true taxa. On the basis of theoretical considerations, the current study tested whether taxa underlie sexual orientation and related measures of gender identity. Two taxometric procedures, maximum covariance, making hits maximum (MAXCOV) and mean above minus below a cut (MAMBAC), were applied to Kinsey Scales and measures of childhood gender nonconformity and adult gender identity in a sample of nearly 5,000 members of the Australian Twin Registry. Results suggest that latent taxa underlie these measures. About 12-15% of men and 5-10% of women belong to latent taxa associated with homosexual preference. These percentages are greater than those of individuals who report homosexual preference, however, and hence it appears that an appreciable proportion of individuals in these taxa have heterosexual preference. An understanding of the origins of these latent taxa may be important to understanding the development of sexual orientation and gender identity.     

童年早期社会能力的发展：一个潜变量增长模型

对119名幼儿进行历时两年的三次追踪测试, 采用潜变量增长建模, 检验童年早期的社会能力是否呈线性增长, 并考察气质、性别、母亲受教育程度及其交互作用对社会能力发展水平与速度的预测作用。结果发现：(1)社会能力在两年中呈线性增长, 起始水平及发展速度均存在显著的个体差异; (2)女孩起始的社会能力水平高于男孩; 母亲受教育程度越高, 儿童起始的社会能力水平就越高; (3)气质节律性对社会能力增长速度的预测因儿童性别而异：节律性能够负向预测女孩社会能力的增长速度、正向预测男孩社会能力的增长速度。