They recruited 17 birth-assigned boys with the diagnosis and 17 birth-assigned boys without it, all around the age of eight. In 1993 a group of researchers at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto set out to test his hypothesis that beauty and what was then called “gender identity disorder” were linked. Stoller’s observations motivated many of the psychological theories behind what makes people transgender. Researchers in this area appear to be in search of some objective truth, but the science is rooted in a subjective assumption: that we need to know what makes someone transgender so that they can be “fixed.” As a result, scientists have relentlessly pursued such questions, launching studies that promoted ideas that could hurt transgender children and their families. But studies focused on this particular question-those asking what determines someone’s gender identity-have led us down some strange and dangerous paths. Society treats them more like girls, he reasoned, and because of this experience, they start to identify as female.Īs a physician-scientist, I’m generally of the opinion that knowledge leads to progress. He asserted that people who were assumed to be boys when they were born but whose gender identity or expression did not match that assumption “often have pretty faces, with fine hair, lovely complexions, graceful movements, and-especially-big, piercing, liquid eyes.” Based on this observation, he suggested a theoretical model in which transgender girls become transgender because they are especially cute. In 1975 psychiatrist Robert Stoller of the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote something bizarre in his textbook on sex and gender.
0 kommentar(er)
