-
sponsorship
Ann, thank you for bringing up my Atlantic story on transgender children. When I was reporting, I felt the opposite: Culture weighed very heavily on the boys and not so much on the girls. A girl could go a long time in gym shorts and cropped hair before anyone thought she was anything but a tomboy. But a boy in a ponytail and a skirt? Totally unacceptable. The girls I talked to generally never showed up at a psychologist's office until about age 8 or 9, which is when their love of toy guns and spy gear suddenly seemed conspicuous and when puberty was looming. Boys showed up at age 4, with parents already worried that their sons played with Barbies or dressed up in tutus.
In this little slice of the world, feminists of the Hillary generation can look back and see what they have to be grateful for. In the simplistic, Free To Be You and Me view of gender relations, girls have come a long way. They can be doctors or bus drivers and they no longer do housework alone. But the boys seem stuck in a narrow retro space. William and his doll still raise a big red flag.
That said, maybe there is a stronger biological imperative for boys, as you say, because boys pay such a high price for wearing that skirt that something unstoppable must be driving them to put it on.
-
sponsorship
In the new Atlantic, Hanna has a fascinating, and unsettling, piece on transgender children, in which she examines how the issue is being reconceived by experts and parents. Following her through the maze of biology vs. culture, I found myself wondering what light, if any, history might shed on the debate. Girls spending at least part of their childhoods imagining, or wishing, they were boys seems a familiar—and culturally very explicable—drama. Greater freedom, more leeway for ambition and assertiveness, a sense of separateness from omnipresent mom: Certainly back in the day—and now, too—it's easy to see why energetic girls have seen advantages in being a boy—until the hormones kick in and other urges complicate the picture. I'm intrigued to know whether there is any data to suggest a more recent rise in boys wishing they were girls. If so, could that suggest anything about wider cultural, as well as family, influences—or does it perhaps point to possible gender differences in the transgender phenomenon? Could it be, say, that culture plays more of a role in "gender dysphoria," as it's called, among girls, and biology among boys?
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?