Numb Skulls
Subject: Natural Inclinations
From: John Colapinto
Date: Mon Feb 21
As the author of As Nature Made Him (click here to buy it), I was delighted to see a "Breakfast Table" discussion of my book. Natalie Angier asks, "What does it mean to say that a child's gender identity is innate?" This is the question I struggled with as I traced Bruce/Brenda/David's astonishing story.
What was clear and beyond question in my research was that despite a consistent upbringing as a girl from 19 months (and the lack of a penis from age eight months), David failed to acquire any feminine behaviors, tastes or inclinations whatsoever, beyond those which he consciously (and ineptly) aped in order to avoid parental castigation and peer rejection. Furthermore, despite his rearing as a girl, he manifested a full array of perfectly unequivocal masculine drives, tastes, behaviors and erotic leanings which he heartbreakingly tried to keep under wraps in order to fit in—that is, until age 14, when "she" got sick of the masquerade and simply stopped living as a girl.
The evidence of David's story suggests to me that "gender identity" is indeed innate—or rather, all those things that add up to our sense of ourselves as male or female, or that cue us to our degree of masculinity or femininity, are quite beyond our conscious control and certainly beyond the powers of doctors, psychologists and surgeons to change. Having spent so many years thinking about David's story, I guess I've also come to believe, to my own amazement, that there is something innate about toy choice—that, perhaps, there is something in the combustible, testosterone-charged muscles and nervous system of the little boy that yearns for the roar and movement of a toy car over the softer, gentler delights of cradling a doll. Certainly David never felt anything but the most horrendous frustration at being given a succession of dolls to attempt to extract some fun out of. Of course there are girls who don't much like dolls, and they're usually called "tomboys." But Brenda was more than a tomboy. Brenda was, by age 11, suicidal in her assigned sex; and indeed, she officially switched sex at the impossible-to-fathom age of 14, a fact which speaks to the degree of her rejection of her medically and surgically imposed identity.
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Subject: Political Sacrifices
Re: " Readme: McCain's High Horse"
