The subscale of borderline personality disorder that was higher among them was “interpersonal conflict.” You don’t need to be the parent of a transgender child to imagine that raising your kid in an unaccepting community could create substantial conflict. What the researchers failed to discuss was that the mothers’ symptoms could easily have been caused by the way society treated their children. Sounds convincing, right? Children must become transgender because their mothers are mentally ill. They found these mothers had more symptoms of both. In one paper, researchers assessed whether the mothers of children with “gender identity disorder” had more symptoms of either depression or a condition called borderline personality disorder. These studies similarly asked if perhaps parents were to “blame” for their kids’ gender identity. Psychiatry has long been enamored with the theory of mothers harming the development of their children (for example, the refrigerator mother theory posited that autism was caused by a lack of maternal warmth). Researchers also studied the parents of such children. In the end, the study didn’t reveal much about what makes someone transgender, but it did promote an offensive theory with the potential to diminish the self-esteem of vulnerable transgender youth.
It seems more likely that these children simply cut their hair shorter, so the participants attached more masculine words to them. The children with “gender identity disorder” were rated as less beautiful, prompting the researchers to suggest that they may have been treated more like boys and thus identified as male. Though as the authors mention later in the paper, an equally plausible theory is that these children could have altered their appearance (long hair, et cetera) in ways that matched their identity, leading the college students to associate them with more feminine descriptions such as “pretty.”Ī few years later, researchers revived this line of investigation, using the headshots of young birth-assigned girls with “gender identity disorder.” A group of college students again rated how “ugly” or “pretty” these children appeared, compared with cisgender girls. The findings seem to suggest Stoller was right: perhaps, because of their appearance, people treated the youngsters in the former group more like girls, and consequently, they became transgender. The students were asked to rate the youngsters’ physical appearance on a scale from one to five with categories such as “attractive,” “handsome” and “beautiful.” In the end, the college students found the children with “gender identity disorder” to be “prettier” than the cisgender boys. The researchers then took headshots of the children and showed them to 36 college students. 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.