1 > Actually, the only sure way to tell boys and girls apart is by their _bodies_. If you're a boy, you have a penis, scrotum, and testicles. If you're a girl, you have a vulva, clitoris, and vagina.
3 > These male and female body parts that show on the outside are called your genitals. Boys' genitals are easier to see than girls', but both are equally important.
5 > —_What's the Big Secret? Talking About Sex With Girls and Boys_, Laurie Krasny Brown, Ed.D., and Marc Brown (published 1997)
7 child more eager to do grammar lesson after Mad Libs made it relevant—child would predictably be interested in girls at puberty, if getting a chance to go through puberty
9 https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/ij4npe/mommy_im_actually_a_girl/
11 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/before-2
13 https://childhood-transition.org/
15 Planned Parenthood on "How to Know If Your Kid Is Transgender": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJdafLVf6xo
17 Trans Kids: It's Time to Talk film: https://archive.org/details/TransKidsItsTimeToTalk
19 HBO documentary Transhood
21 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2016237/
22 > fifty-three percent of the mothers of boys with GID compared with only 6% of controls met the diagnosis for Borderline Personality Disorder on the Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines or had symptoms of depression on the Beck Depression Inventory
25 https://femalesexualinversion.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-problem-with-puberty-blockers-part.html
27 There was that time when M. wanted to see the medicines on the shelf and I was like, "Aw, why do you need to know this anyway" and E. was like, "He's curious"—people don't want to be blamed for hurting the child, and if you're living in an ideological bubble where it's presumed that telling the child the truth about what sex they are
29 E. on "Maybe C. is very competitive, and that's why she likes fighting, because it's something you can win". It's amusing that we have to posit that as an individual trait, whereas normies are allowed to say and think "duh, boys like fighting"
31 https://www.impactprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Kuper-2014-Puberty-Blockers-Clinical-Research-Review.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0Bmr_fS-ewLn1Y9XsA35zrk8X7f9CIJBhLd8pf3b6JttUi05SL41Ot2ao
33 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55282113
35 Tavistock study https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.01.20241653v1.full.pdf
37 path-dependent preferences: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3xF66BNSC5caZuKyC/why-subagents
39 "Cognitive theories of early gender development."
40 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-18663-003
42 https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/01/trans-kid-test-psychology.html
44 https://kathleenstock.com/highlights-of-trans-policies-in-uk-universities/
46 Symmetry: trans-booster parent thinks child is too young to know about TERFism (but isn't opposed to the idea of the child thinking for themselves when they're old enough to think critically); skeptic thinks child is too young to consent to transition (but wouldn't refuse to recognize an AGP teenager going in with open eyes)
48 "Cultural Components of Sex Differences in Color Preference" Davis et al. 2021 (shared on SEXNET) says that girl preference for pink was d=1.3 in a city, but not in trad cultures
49 http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/davis_et_al-cultural_components_of_sex_differences_in_color_preference.pdf
51 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243894
53 Kohlberg 1966 gender constancy (Maccoby p. 160)
55 "My Son Wears Dresses; Get Over It" https://archive.is/FJNII
56 note, "My Son Wears Dresses", and not, "My Daughter Is Trans"
58 The time I told an older boy in summer camp that I wasn't into women with big boobs ... but the reality was that I just hadn't hit puberty yet. A parent in today's ideological environment might transition their three-year-old, thinking, "I don't know what the future holds ... but if she doesn't want to go through male puberty, it would be cruel to force her to." But the kid has no way to _know_ that puberty is going to be terrible in advance (I didn't know what it was going to be like, to like breasts), but if the social environment is grooming the kid to be trans, he's likely to _assume_ it's terrible. When I wasn't doing well at Santa Cruz at first, Mom suggested that I take time off or at DVC, and I said, "Are you _trying_ to sabotage my education?" Because I had been groomed to believe in education.
60 https://www.aboutkidshealth.ca/Article?contentid=716&language=English
61 > Caregivers can help by not connecting sexual biology to gender (e.g., say "people with penises" or "people with vaginas").
63 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1351 claims:
64 > Sex differences in facial morphologyare apparent in six-month-old infants [15], and increasesteadily across childhood [16].
66 * "A longitudinal cephalometric study of transverse and vertical craniofacial growth" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8237899/
67 * "Ontogeny of facial dimorphism and patterns of individual development within one human population" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16596605/
69 "Puberty blockers do not alleviate negative thoughts in children with gender dysphoria, finds study"
70 https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n356
72 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem
74 https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/when-your-epistemic-bubble-pops-unlocked
76 Shrier says, "It is not uncommon for young children periodically to express the desire to be the opposite sex" footnote goes to: Zucker Bradley Sanikhani "Sex Differences in Referral Rates of Children With Gender Identity Disorder: Some Hypotheses"
79 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.632784/full
81 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56601386
83 https://segm.org/NICE_gender_medicine_systematic_review_finds_poor_quality_evidence
85 https://acesounderglass.com/2021/04/02/antidepressants-and-medical-uncertainty/
87 my CAH table is derived from the "Developmental Endocrinology" book in /papers/
89 "The Magnitude of Children’s Gender-Related Toy Interests Has Remained Stable Over 50 Years of Research"
90 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-01989-8
92 Degree of religiousness is genetic, but the specific religion is environmental—
93 Koenig, L. B., McGue, M., Krueger, R. F., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (2005). Genetic and environmentalinfluences on religiousness: Findings for retrospective and current religiousness ratings.Journal ofPersonality,73(2), 471–88. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.2005.00316.x.
95 Hines, M., Golombok, S., Rust, J., Johnston, K. J., Golding, J., Parents and
96 Children Study Team, A. L. S., & the Avon Longitudinal Study of
97 Parents and Children Study Team. (2002). Testosterone during preg-
98 nancy and gender role behavior of preschool children: A longitudinal,
99 population study. Child Development, 73, 1678 –1687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00498
101 Frisén, L., Nordenström, A., Falhammar, H., Filipsson, H., Holmdahl, G.,
102 Janson, P. O., . . . Nordenskjöld, A. (2009). Gender role behavior,
103 sexuality, and psychosocial adaptation in women with congenital adrenal
104 hyperplasia due to CYP21A2 deficiency. The Journal of Clinical Endo-
105 crinology and Metabolism, 94, 3432–3439. http://dx.doi.org/10.1210/jc
108 Snow, M. E., Jacklin, C. N., & Maccoby, E. E. (1983). Sex-of-child differences in father–child interaction at one year of age. Child Development, 54(1), 227–232. https://doi.org/10.2307/1129880
110 Goy, R. W., Bercovitch, F. B., & McBrair, M. C. (1988). Behavioral masculinization is independent of genital masculinization in prenatally androgenized female rhesus macaques. Hormones and Behavior, 22, 552–571.
112 Lamminmäki, A., Hines, M., Kuiri-Hänninen, T., Kilpeläinen, L., Dunkel, L., & Sankilampi, U. (2012). Testosterone measured in infancy predicts subsequent sex-typed behavior in boys and in girls. Hormones and Behavior, 61(4), 611–616. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2012.02.013.
114 Munson, B., *Crocker, L., Pierrehumbert, J., Owen-Anderson, A., & Zucker, K. (2015). Gender Typicality in Children's Speech: A comparison of the Speech of Boys with and without Gender Identity Disorder. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
116 Blakemore, J. E. O., LaRue, A. A., & Olejnik, A. B. (1979). Sex-appropriate toy preference and the ability to conceptualize toys as sex-role related. Developmental Psychology, 15, 339–340
118 Perry, D. G., White, A. J., & Perry, L. C. (1984). Does early sex typing result from children's attempts to match their behavior to sex role stereotypes? Child Development, 55, 2114–2121
120 Wu, T., Mendola, P., & Buck, G. M. (2002). Ethnic differences in the presence of secondary sex characteristics and menarche among US girls: the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 1988–1994. Pediatrics, 110, 752–757.
122 physiology can't account for throwing differences
123 Clark, J. E. & Phillips, S. J. (1987). An examination of the contributions of selected anthropometric factors to gender differences in motor skill development. In J. E. Clark & J. H. Humphrey (Eds.), Advances in motor development research (Vol. 1, pp. 171–178). New York: AMS Press.
125 motor differences!! (compare to Kay Brown's cites, which I recall not impressing me?)
126 Johnson, K. L. & Tassinary, L. G. (2005). Perceiving sex directly and indirectly: Meaning in motion and morphology. Psychological Science, 16, 890–897
127 Hayes, S. C. & et al. (1981). The development of the display and knowledge of sex related motor behavior in children.
128 Child Behavior Therapy, 3, 1–24.
130 Gleason, J. B. & Ely, R. (2002). Gender differences in language development. In A. McGillicuddy-De Lisi & R. De Lisi (Eds.), Biology, society, and behavior: The development of sex differences in cognition (Vol. 21, pp. 127–154). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing.
134 notes from The Pre-School Activities Inventory: A Standardized Assessment of Gender Role in Children by Golombok and Rust
136 toy pref.s as early at 18 mo. and established by 3 years
138 How was the PSAI developed? Ask mothers to identify 10 aspects of sex-typical behavior, and 10 aspects of somewhat sex-atypical behavior. That was 153 items, which got pruned to 90 (10 masc/fem/neutral per toys/activity/temperment). The 90 item version got piloted on a sample, then do item analysis to maximize within-sex variance while only choosing items that discriminated among the sexes
140 question: what is the theoretical justification for maximizing variance?—maybe it's that (as mentioned later), can measure differences within girls and within boys. Confirmed in a later paper ("Developmental Trajectories"): "During the construction of the PSAI, items that, while discriminating between the sexes, failed to differentiate between masculine and feminine boys, or between masculine and feminine girls, were excluded."
142 pooled test-retest reliabiliy (after 1 year) .64
144 validity: ask daycare teachers to rate boyishness/girlishness, and correlate with mother's PSAI responses: 0.48 for girls, 0.37 for boys
146 samples from UK, Netherlands, and Minnesota
150 30-35. (59.70-39.74)/((9.72+9.84)/2) d= 2.0408997955010224
151 36-47 (3 y.o.) (60.58-39.38)/((9.91+9.68)/2) d= 2.1643695763144457
152 48-59 (4 y.o.) (60.14-40.62)/((10.94+11.03)/2) d= 1.7769685935366413
153 60-71 mo. (5 y.o.) (59.2-40.03)/((10.36+10.09)/2) d= 1.8748166259168706
157 notes from Childhood Gender-Typed Behavior and Adolescent Sexual Orientation: A Longitudinal Population-Based Study by Li, Kung, and Hines
159 retrospective studies (as reviewed by Bailey & Zucker) find that gay adults remember nonconforming behavior as children, but those might be biased by memory
161 Rieger, Linsenmeier, Gygax, and Bailey (2008) collected home videos and got independent raters—same result
163 then there's gender clinical referals
165 there had only been one other prospective study
167 retrospective and clinical samples have limitations
169 this paper is based on the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children that recruited English families in '92, 7K each of girls and boys
171 caregivers evaluated the PSAI at 2.5, 3.5, and 4.74
173 computing d values from Table 1—
174 2.5 years: (59.87-40.99)/((8.46+8.24)/2) = 2.261077844311376
175 3.5 years: (61.54-37.08)/((8.69+9.31)/2) = 2.717777777777778
176 4.75 years: (63.42-35.28)/((8.78+9.51)/2) d = 3.0770913067249865
178 GNC and gay were _monotonically_ related; there are similar findings about CAH
182 notes from Developmental trajectories of sex-typed behavior in boys and girls: A longitudinal general population study of children aged 2.5–8 years. by Golombok, Rust, et al.
184 another paper based on the Avon Longitudinal Study. Modified "Children's Activities Inventory" administered at age 8.
186 CAI is completed by the child
188 sex-typical toddlers grow up to be sex-typical children
192 notes from Hines, M., Golombok, S., Rust, J. "Testosterone during pregnancy and gender role behavior of preschool children". http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00498
194 T and sex hormone-binding globulin were measured in pregnant women
196 T but not globulin were linearly related to gender behavior in girls, but not boys; other obvious factors (brothers, father presence, maternal education) didn't make a difference
200 notes from "Is it a he or a she? Behavioral and computational approaches to sex categorization"
202 d'= 3 for adults, d'= 0.36 for infants
204 d' from signal detection theory is basically the same thing as Cohen's d
205 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_index
209 notes from "Recognition and Sex Categorization of Adults' and Childrens' faces", Wild et al.
211 younger children (1st grade) couldn't sex child (7-10 y.o.) faces (without hair &c. cues), but older children and adults could with some accuracy
213 people's tendency to guess male might be due to a higher cost of mistaking M for F?!
217 notes from "Genital Knowledge and Gender Constancy" by the immortal Sandra Bem
219 Sebley–Frey questions: "If you wore [opposite-sex] clothes, would you be a girl or a boy?", "If you played [opposite-sex] games, would you be a girl or a boy?", "Could you be a [opposite sex] if you wanted to be?"
221 (Modern progressives fail these!!)
223 In less artificial contexts (actually photograph a classmate), 3-5 year olds get it right: Miller 1984
225 > Both the liberation that can come from having a narrow biological definition of sex and the imprisonment that can come from not having such a definition are strikingly illustrated by an encounter my son Jeremy had the day he naively decided to wear barrettes to nursery school. Several times that day, another little boy insisted that Jeremy must be a girl because "only girls wear barrettes." After repeatedly asserting that "wearing barrettes doesn't matter; being a boy means having a penis and testicles," Jeremy finally pulled down his pants as a way of making his point more convincingly. The boy was not impressed. He simply said, "Everybody has a penis; only girls wear barrettes."
229 "Gender differences in children’s singing voices: Acoustic analyses and results of a listening test"
230 https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.3372730
231 > The listeners correctly identified the gender of the singer in 66.0% of the cases, i.e., far better than chance.
233 "Listeners' Identification Of Gender Differences In Children's Singing"
234 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1321103X050240010301
235 > 71.57% of identifications were positive
239 notes from Gender Development textbook—
242 > Although there is some debate about whether this relatively rare condition should be considered a disorder at all (Bartlett, Vasey, & Bukowski, 2000), there are certainly some children who, from a very young age, show discomfort with their gender category.
243 citation goes to Bartlett, N. H., Vasey, P. L., & Bukowski, W. M. (2000). Is gender identity disorder in children a mental disorder? Sex Roles, 43, 753–785.
246 > sometimes even before they know that the toys are gender stereotyped (Aubry, Ruble, & Silverman, 1999; Blakemore et al., 1979; Perry et al., 1984)
249 > So, is a person without a penis always a girl? It turns out that there are some boys who do not have a penis.
251 Because this book was written in 2009, I assume they mean David Reimer-like cases
253 p. 47: estrogen doesn't really play a role in sex differenitation; both sexes of fetus get exposed to a bunch of it
255 Typical T levels for men: 265-800 ng/dL, women: 10-40
257 SRY was discovered when discovered in an XX male
259 CAH occurs is autosomal and occurs in both males and females, but the reason we only talk about CAH girls is that the effects on boys are less noticeable
261 > CYP21 is on chromosome 6 and encodes an enzyme normally present in the adrenal gland called 21-hydroxylase (21-OH). Individuals with CAH due to 21-OH defi ciency are unable to produce enough cortisol to suppress the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH). This results in an accumulation of products that normally become cortisol, which in turn results in increased production of androgen from the adrenal gland. This excess androgen has many of the same effects as testosterone produced by the testes in males
263 There's a gradation in CAH—you can have a little 21-OH, or none at all
265 5α-reductase of the famous 5α-reductase deficiency is what converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone (DHT)
267 That's why 5aR virilize at puberty: puberty turns on enough testosterone for them to make a little DHT
269 > It is about as meaningful to ask "Which is the smarter sex?" or "Which has the better brain?" as it does to ask "Which has the better genitals?" (Halpern, 1997, p. 1092)
272 > It is almost as though some people seem to feel that differences between males
273 and females must be minimized to avoid judging males as superior.
275 > Throwing speed and throwing distance were found to have a still different pattern, with large sex differences even among preschoolers. For example, d for throwing distance was 1.5 by the age of 2 years, and was just as large for throwing speed by age 4. By adolescence, both throwing speed and distance were at least 3 standard deviations greater in boys
278 elementary school activity level d=0.64
280 > Despite the diffi culty in looking for sex differences using tests specifi cally designed not to have them
282 > even though there are no differences in the structure of the vocal chords in childhood, boys speak with a lower pitch than girls do. This difference is probably related to children's unconscious matching of their voices with gender norms (Gleason & Ely, 2002).
284 p. 82 The verbal fluency (word-generation) diff favoring ♀ is d > 1!!
286 p. 82 Shitpost: Women are more valuable under the utilitarian calculus because they have more subjective experience per unit physical time!!
287 Block, R. A., Hancock, P. A., & Zakay, D. (2000). Sex differences in duration judgments: A meta-analytic review. Memory and Cognition, 28, 1333–1346.
289 40% of college women fail the water-level task! (How many men fail?!)
290 Liben, L. S. & Golbeck, S. L. (1984). Performance on Piagetian horizontality and verticality tasks: Sex-related differences in knowledge of relevant physical phenomena. Developmental Psychology, 20, 595–606.
293 > Compared to the girls, the boys sound considerably more aggressive or at least active in defending themselves.
294 Not to mention that everyone assumed the dragon was male ...
296 (I skimmed some of the earlier chapters, but from here on the whole ToC looks super-relevant to my research project)
298 Table 5.1 claims no meta-analysis is available on rough-and-tumble play!! WTF?! (If it exists, you'd expect these textbook authors to have found it)
301 > There is a very consistent set of findings that boys engage in more R & T play in virtually every culture in which it has been studied (Boulton, 1996; Braza, Braza, Carreras, & Munoz, 1997; DiPietro, 1981; Finegan, Niccols, Zacher, & Hood, 1991; Hines & Kaufman, 1994; Pellegrini, 1990; Pellegrini & Smith, 1998).
303 > boys are often drawn to such play styles as soon as they see others doing them, whereas girls are more likely to avoid those activities