Melissa Hines is a researcher affiliated with Cambridge University. She has co-authored several important studies delving into the influence of prenatal testosterone on childhood behavior, as well as the relationship between gender nonconformity and sexual orientation.
In February, along with first and second authors Li and Kung, Hines published a longitudinal study of nearly 5000 adolescents in Developmental Psychology, on the topic of gender nonconforming behavior in childhood and its correlation with adolescent homosexuality: Childhood Gender-Typed Behavior and Adolescent Sexual Orientation: A Longitudinal Population-Based Study.
It will come as no surprise to 4thWaveNow readers that the investigators found a consistent and strong relationship between gender nonconforming behaviors exhibited between ages 2.5 years – 4.75 years, and later homosexual orientation.
Of course, the link between a gender-atypical childhood and being gay or lesbian has been known for a very long time; this is not a new insight, neither in terms of published research, nor in the anecdotal but very common reports of gay and lesbian adults who reflect on their own childhoods.
This study is important, though, because it may have the largest subject cohort to date (2169 boys and 2428 girls), and because of its thorough and systematic methodology. Please take the time to read it, along with previous works by Hines and her colleagues.
Although this post will not go into detail about the study, we will point out the obvious:
- It is impossible to find a media account of a young “trans” child that does not repeatedly mention the child’s gender-atypical behavior, expressed via toy choices, playmates, play behaviors, and hair and clothing preferences. These celebrity trans kid stories now routinely appear in print and broadcast media on a daily basis in the United States and the UK in particular.
While trans activists and gender doctors take pains to claim that the diagnosis of trangenderism in young children is “much more” than these gender-defiant behaviors, journalists (and the child’s parents), oddly enough, always and only focus on these behaviors as evidence that the child was “born in the wrong body.” Maybe that’s because they refuse to challenge the absurdity of a child claiming they “feel like” the opposite sex, for which there can be no actual evidence? How can one know what it “feels like” to be something they are not? But you won’t see a question like this posed by any of the “journalists” who create these puff pieces; “journalists,” after all, who have abdicated their duty of asking hard questions and actually informing the public so a nuanced debate can take place.
- With this large study pointing out that gay and lesbian people are much more likely to exhibit behaviors more typical of the opposite sex, it is painfully obvious that—even if embarked upon with the best of intentions—the contemporary practice of socially and medically transitioning young children leads inevitably and inexorably to the outcome of anti-gay eugenics.
It doesn’t ultimately matter if the practitioners of pediatric transition don’t intend to turn proto-gay children into sterilized facsimiles of the opposite sex; the impact of the practice of early transition leads to exactly that outcome.
Once you have read the Li, Kung, and Hines study for yourself, take a look at the latest slick bit of propaganda about “trans kids” and see if you can avoid the obvious implications.
A group of Canadian trans activists are manufacturing a “nesting doll” set, a “trans boy” named Sam. Sam, from toddlerhood, wants to play with trucks and have short hair, refusing the doll and pink dress Sam’s mom offers. The moments when Sam grabs the truck and gets a haircut are presented as obviously full of significance in the animated promo film (which was partially funded by the Quebec government).
With the daily onslaught of trans-kid propaganda, what chance will a girl who just happens to like trucks and short hair get to believe anything other than she is ‘really” a boy? This stuff is being actively and aggressively marketed to children and gullible parents.
With the financial supporter of the taxpayer.
The dollmakers want to “crush transphobia” before it starts. But what they are really crushing is the future of kids who once were allowed to grow up without tampering—many of them into healthy gay or lesbian adults. Now these kids are being transformed into sterilized, surgically and hormonally altered medical patients—living transgender dolls.
Sam is a little girl who wants to wear comfortable clothes and have short hair. Why does this make her a boy? Why does this mean she has to be sterilized? This is insane. This is sexism on steroids.
Did you notice in the haircutting scene that Sam and her brother looked really guilty when the dad walked in? How can “progressives” and “liberals” not watch something like this and see through it?
When I was about seven years old, I gently broke my mother’s heart by declaring I wanted short hair. I was the first girl in my class to show up to school with her hair bobbed. And yet there is a photograph of me that my parents treasure that shows me, post-haircut, in a sundress. Because it’s just a goddamn haircut.
Slightly less charming memories from my teens: I was butch. God, was I butch. I’m English, so wore a uniform to school, and was one of the two girls in the class who showed up in pants, not a skirt. I wore Doc Marten boots (it was the ’90s) and in photographs from my early teens one could have been forgiven for thinking my parents had two boys. No, I wasn’t trans. I was just a bisexual girl who, in all respects save the physical, was something of a late bloomer. When I was sixteen and my mother asked me, in scathing tones, if I wanted to be a boy, it hurt. I wasn’t trans. I knew I wasn’t anything close to trans. I was a gender non-conforming girl who preferred comic books to clothes and was taking a while to get her head round makeup, but I was also a budding feminist who knew in her bones that it didn’t stop me from being a girl.
I don’t know, if I was sixteen now, if I’d be so sure of myself. And that scares me, because my hair is now halfway down my back, I’m married to a man, only wear pants if I’m cleaning or gardening, and have been known to go back to the house to put in earrings.
It is not about being “gender defiant”, what it is about is the parent’s homophobic reaction to a child who they see as potentially being a lesbian. In most cases they are right and that is why we are now seeing gay conversion therapy of children in the form of transition.
The term “defiant” is used in the sense of “to defy expectations.”
The point of the Hines et al study cited in this post is that the vast majority of these kids–those who defy gender expectations–do grow up to be lesbian or gay. Parental homophobia can definitely play a part, but it sure doesn’t help that we are now bombarded, 24-7, with well-funded propaganda aimed at parents, telling them the only option for their little girl who likes trucks and short hair is transition; otherwise, the parent is an ogre who is risking their kid’s suicide. This propaganda push is new in the last 5 years, it’s slick, it’s relentless, and it’s scaring the crap out of parents. The video discussed here, promoting the “transgender nesting doll” is just one of many examples. Yeah, little “Sam” in the video would likely grow up to be an adult lesbian, but the purveyors of this propaganda are doing their damnedest to prevent that–terrorizing parents (homophobic or not) into trundling their own “Sam” off to the gender clinic.
Major article in “the stranger” in Seattle. http://www.thestranger.com/features/2017/06/28/25252342/the-detransitioners-they-were-transgender-until-they-werent
I have several article recommendations for this blog.
http://transascity.org/quality-of-life-in-treated-transsexuals/
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/family-support-boosts-transgender-kids-mental-health-uw-study-finds/
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/transgender-kids-show-consistent-gender-identity-across-measures.html#.WVr_CIjyvIU – Olsen-Kennedy at it again.
http://www.sebastianmitchellbarr.com/blog/2015/10/8/why-are-transgender-people-more-likely-to-attempt-suicide
It would be interesting to see commentary on these articles. They all take the gender affirmative approach.
I don’t think I am overly sentimental or hold unrealistically romantic ideas about the inner lives, or motivations or thoughts, of young children. Any parent, or really anyone who’s ever watched young children play together, knows that they can be as cruel, devious, and thoughtless as any teen or adult. There is a reason families need to socialize young children, and if they all were to remain in the state of nature, well, William Golding wrote a book about that.
However, what else is clear about young children in particular is that they have an extraordinarily difficult time, sometimes, ascertaining the parameters of reality. This can be one of their most endearing qualities and, other times, one of the most infuriating – as with the child who needs 20 minutes of bedtime ritual to dispel the monsters, or who loses a beloved comfort object and cannot be consoled. The recurring problem with these “trans-teaching” toys and other things (Lindsay Amer’s Queer Kids Stuff) is that they blur the line between fantasy and reality, and so instruct children. Kids have a problem, sometimes, telling what’s real and what isn’t. Kids engage in magical thinking all the time – “step on a crack,” remember?
Providing toys for pretend play, such as kid-sized versions of household objects or tools, or costumes, is one thing. But it seems to me that purposefully confusing a child about what his or her eyes can see is another thing altogether. This toy seems to be teaching children that if they wish for it hard enough, they can turn into the opposite sex, whereas adults know this is untrue. That is irresponsible.
Even if the aim of this toy is to “fight transphobia,” as its producers claim (and not to show that boys are “better than girls,” which I’m pretty sure would have been my takeaway), it seems that this value is perceived as superior to its potential negative mental impact on children. To the broader point, of course, this is what we see with the transgender activist movement as a whole: for example, it is better to set all potentially transgender children on the road to medical transition, even though the vast majority of them would eventually desist, rather than to “miss” the “true trans.” The welfare of the few (trans) outweighs the detriment to the many (non-trans) in all cases.
We cannot change our sex. We can be accepting of gender-atypical behavior and not make a big deal out of it. There are many ways to be a boy or a girl or a man or woman. The more “progressive” we become, the less accepting we are it seems.
I don’t understand why a progressive (or anyone else under a 100 years old) would have a problem with gender-atypical behavior. I don’t understand what the big deal is if a woman wants to be butch or a man wants to wear make-up and skirts. that works out great for some people. it’s certainly nowhere near as invasive as pumping your body full of unnatural hormones or cutting off body parts that can’t go back. or sterilizing a child and interfering with their brain devolopment by putting them on hormone blockers.
Yes, I agree. If a girl likes to play with trucks and wear “boy” clothes, why can’t she be a girl who likes to play with trucks and wear “boy” clothes. Why does she have to be told that she is “trans” and must mutilate her body in the future? She could grow up to be trans, lesbian or heterosexual. It is all illogical and weird. What about girls that like to play with trucks and dolls, and wear boys and girls clothes. Are they gender fluid or both genders? It’s all bizarre.
Trans converts theorise that all butch lesbians are repressed transmen. You can guess what butch lesbians think of that. Puts a new slant on gender wars. It is all plain ludicrous.
Yes, some adults do feel they are transgender, and they need to be respected and allowed to be who they feel they are. But leave those kids alone! They are in the time of identity formation. Leave them alone to find their way without putting labels on them, hormones in them and operating on them. Until the mid twenties ideally. Yes, kids who are exploring need to be protected from being bullied, but do not brainwash them that they will necessarily stay “transgender”. They need to be labelled as gender-exploring, and supported as such.
Children indeed do engage in magical thinking a fair bit, I’m interested in the overlap with that and OCD type thinking/behaviour (OCD commonly includes magical thinking. For example, feeling as though if you think of something bad, it might happen, and you must engage in rituals to prevent it – just like the kid with the bedtime rituals) as temporary phase (shouldn’t automatically be assumed to be temporary, in my own case it wasn’t temporary but actual OCD – some of the kids more prone to this type of thinking, and more deeply experiencing it with anxiety etc, may be neurodiverse? Maybe as the brain develops it usually resolves in NT children). As any adult who has had the same DVD inflicted on them over and over knows, many children can be quite obsessive! : D
The toy is actually triggering to my OCD even today, I’d have spent forever fiddling with it trying to get it to feel ‘right’ as a child, unable to deal with the unhappy girl still being inside the properly completed toy, given the toy seems about resolving unhappiness and that makes it still feel ‘wrong’ (I guess taking all the inner dolls out and leaving the heart in the happy one, but the others would still be sad and there’s no way to change it, um…you get the idea. Dratted wonky brain. >_<)… I wonder if it could make things worse for dysphoric children prone to magical thinking, and obsessiveness, by encouraging them to dwell on it further?
I don't understand how it's going to be that reassuring to any children, given it presents years of isolation and lack of acceptance for their personality as normal (as the explanatory video shows with the use of emoticon faces indicating the stages), to a greater extent than is even usually true in reality since it promotes such a highly restrictive idea of gender, and presents a lack of parental understanding. More sensitive younger children in particular might be quite upset by that idea and feel insecure, which might push them further towards trans-identification as the only way to be accepted, and it's a bit of a big ask to expect children to just understand what's intended with the depiction of rejection in the way an adult could. It seems the transnarrative and the emotional manipulation aimed at adults takes precedence.
I am firmly convinced that the stuff supposedly made to “support” these “oh so different” kids just serves to make them fixate on “gender gender different different strange wrong.” It doesn’t support kids. it supports BOXES and the inevitability/virtue thereof.
The ever-increasing rigidity of the boxes is the problem. Not the bodies of the kids who are being told they have to pick a side.
My kid’s taking a college anthropology class this fall on gender roles. I’m not super happy about this but honestly, I have some hope that it may highlight for her how culturally mediated and arbitrary these role-assignments are, an addition to being created to prop up patriarchal structures in a lot of societies. If the light can dawn regarding the fact that these roles are not biological but rather sociological, I think it could go a far way to helping her realize how self-destructive it is to mess up your health trying to comply with a sociologically mediated ideal.
At least, I hope it could work that way. Sigh.
Leo, thank you for this interesting comment. I think you’re absolutely right that this toy might very well have the (hopefully unintended) consequence of creating further insecurity and worry for children about their gender/sex. For all of us, whether we have OCD or not, it is all too easy to develop intrusive thoughts and compulsive ruminations, and for pre-disposed children that is doubly likely (especially when the toy is presented by an authority figure like a parent). I would like to think that most kids would simply become frustrated by a dopey toy they couldn’t understand, and use the pieces for digging tools or to see whether they could melt the plastic.
I honestly don’t know whether I would have been “okay” with the prevalence of the transgender ideology had it not descended into the ranks of children, or into girls sports, or involved Lupron. But it is hard to imagine that most thinking people would not be objecting to at least some of its aspects at this point.
I still fail to understand what would be so wrong about creating a female doll with short hair and a range of “masculine” outfits and accessories for different hobbies and careers? Why couldn’t “Sam” just be shown getting a haircut and some new clothes, playing with cars and construction stuff and growing up to be an ace engineer/pilot/astronaut with a lovely wife and proud parents?
And is the boy character in the video meant to be her brother or her imaginary friend? If it’s either, that’s not a healthy idea to have, turning yourself into another real or imaginary person.
Mamabear, The Stranger article is interesting. Has the transgender movement been so dumbified that finally the people who supported it 100% are realizing the absurdity? Yet, the providers are big believers.
This is getting off topic from the original post, but i’ve been reading a lot on this and related topics for the past week or so and have a lot of thoughts. i found out what colon vaginoplasty was about two days ago and am absolutely sickened that this inhumane kind of surgery is even legal. i found out about via a reddit post on jazz jennings, and yes his mother appears to be insane, sadistic, and selfish.
I also read the male wombs article, again I am just disgusted.
It get’s even worse, via reddit, I stumbled on this “writer” who identifies as trans since she identifies as genderless (no hormones or anything, but still identifies as trans); conveniently her daughter is now her son (this is a very young child).
What is wrong with the world???? How did it get so messed up?
Don’t look at the photos of fake penises. Those are even more disturbing, especially the part where they cut out part of an arm or leg to make it. How any person could think anyone would find that attractive is beyond me.
Those things don’t look realistic or attractive even after all three stages of the surgery! It’s rolled-up skin from a limb, and needs an implant to be used for sexual activities.
Also the orgasm comes from the buried clitoris so still normal reactions from a female organ. It’s a fucking farce. NOTHING male about this. It’s all just in the fantasy of the poor woman who has this thing attached to her. I also saw pictures with HAIR growing on the thing because surgeons used skin from an arm.
Some trans activists are claiming that “transing” young kids has nothing to do with gender stereotypes. However, in every case that has a lot to do with it. How many gender conforming boys are “transed” because parents think they are “butch” women? None, zero, zip, nada. Never has happened even once. If that isn’t a clue that this is pure bullshit, I don’t know what is
I’ve never heard anything but sexist stereotypes cited as a reason for transing kids!
Off-topic: I once did a search on transgender names trying to figure out why some were so strange (much more magical than a generic opposite gender) and I happened upon some sites for expectant parents who want to give their children a transgender name and raise them transgender. I am simply too old for this type of thinking.
I’ve noticed that adult trans, both MTT and FTT, often choose names that are nothing to do with their birth names, and also, reflecting a different ethnic background to that of their birth. They never claim to be transracial, but the suggestion is there.
Once again, this entire contemporary movement is so regressive! I’ve only heard a handful of trans people (all well into adulthood, NOT minors) cite things like an unexplainable feeling of homesickness, or a funny feeling that something wasn’t quite right, instead of trotting out the usual stereotypes like “I cried when my mom made me wear a dress to my junior high graduation” or “I always hated math and science.”
Children lack the metacognition adults have, not to mention years and years of life experiences. The book So Sexy So Soon has a section about how kids create movies in their minds as they gain more new pieces of information about something. Instead of totally revising what they thought they knew, they just add another scene as they try to make sense of everything. This ridiculous doll will just confuse them even more, and lead to a lot of convoluted movies in their minds.
I was not sure where to post this but I was glad to see it on Facebook! Check it out!http://dailysignal.com//print?post_id=342833
http://www.teenvogue.com/story/jazz-jennings-talks-to-parents-about-orgasm
Parents are surprised that their son who never had puberty also doesn’t have a libido. They call it “underdeveloped” when in reality – it never existed.
Jazz thinks that this is normal and healthy for young trans people because pre-pubertal genitals, castration and sterilization are so normal. He also thinks his libido comes back once he falls in love with a person. (I have bad news for you…)
This shows that the parents ignored all the consequences their son faces. They prevented his puberty and only NOW – years later they are worried. Omg his penis is too small for surgery! Omg he doesn’t have a libido! But it was so fucking obvious. But nope, neither them, nor doctors, nor trans activists cared. The child has to suffer for the stupid decisions adults who were supposed to care for him made.