Saturday, January 29, 2005

GENDER IS NOT AN ACCIDENT

Here's a fascinating article reprinted at Godspy about current psychological research into the whole area of sex-changes. Turns out, gender is something determined in genetics and is not just the result of a vast societally-based conspiracy. Again, of course, this insight has come from a scan of yet another wasted-life strewn battlefield of the "Sexual Revolution."

Here's a snip...

Reiner, however, discovered that [infant] re-engineered males were almost never comfortable as females once they became aware of themselves and the world. From the start of their active play life, they behaved spontaneously like boys and were obviously different from their sisters and other girls, enjoying rough-and-tumble games but not dolls and "playing house." Later on, most of those individuals who learned that they were actually genetic males wished to reconstitute their lives as males (some even asked for surgical reconstruction and male hormone replacement)-and all this despite the earnest efforts by their parents to treat them as girls.

Human sexual identity is mostly built into our constitution by the genes we inherit and the embryogenesis we undergo.

Reiner's results, reported in the January 22, 2004, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, are worth recounting. He followed up sixteen genetic males with cloacal exstrophy seen at Hopkins, of whom fourteen underwent neonatal assignment to femaleness socially, legally, and surgically. The other two parents refused the advice of the pediatricians and raised their sons as boys.

Eight of the fourteen subjects assigned to be females, had since declared themselves to be male. Five were living as females, and one lived with unclear sexual identity. The two raised as males had remained male. All sixteen of these people had interests that were typical of males, such as hunting, ice hockey, karate, and bobsledding. Reiner concluded from this work that the sexual identity followed the genetic constitution. Male-type tendencies (vigorous play, sexual arousal by females, and physical aggressiveness) followed the testosterone-rich intrauterine fetal development of the people he studied, regardless of efforts to socialize them as females after birth.

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