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.
132 Giles, J. W. & Heyman, G. D. (2005). Young children's beliefs about the relationship between gender and aggressive behavior. Child Development, 76, 107–121.
134 Pellegrini, A. D. (1988). Elementary-school children’s rough-and-tumble play and social competence. Developmental Psychology, 24, 802–806.
136 Pellegrini, A. D. (1995). A longitudinal study of boys’ rough-and-tumble play and dominance during early adolescence. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 16, 77–93.
138 Pellegrini, A. D. (2002). Perceptions of playfighting and real fighting: Effects of sex and participant status. In J. L. Roopnarine (Ed.), Conceptual, social-cognitive, and contextual issues in the fields of play (pp. 223–233). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing.
140 Gaulin, S. J. C. & Fitzgerald, R. W. (1989). Sexual selection for spatial-learning ability. Animal Behaviour, 37, 322–331.
146 notes from The Pre-School Activities Inventory: A Standardized Assessment of Gender Role in Children by Golombok and Rust
148 toy pref.s as early at 18 mo. and established by 3 years
150 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
152 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."
154 pooled test-retest reliabiliy (after 1 year) .64
156 validity: ask daycare teachers to rate boyishness/girlishness, and correlate with mother's PSAI responses: 0.48 for girls, 0.37 for boys
158 samples from UK, Netherlands, and Minnesota
162 30-35. (59.70-39.74)/((9.72+9.84)/2) d= 2.0408997955010224
163 36-47 (3 y.o.) (60.58-39.38)/((9.91+9.68)/2) d= 2.1643695763144457
164 48-59 (4 y.o.) (60.14-40.62)/((10.94+11.03)/2) d= 1.7769685935366413
165 60-71 mo. (5 y.o.) (59.2-40.03)/((10.36+10.09)/2) d= 1.8748166259168706
169 notes from Childhood Gender-Typed Behavior and Adolescent Sexual Orientation: A Longitudinal Population-Based Study by Li, Kung, and Hines
171 retrospective studies (as reviewed by Bailey & Zucker) find that gay adults remember nonconforming behavior as children, but those might be biased by memory
173 Rieger, Linsenmeier, Gygax, and Bailey (2008) collected home videos and got independent raters—same result
175 then there's gender clinical referals
177 there had only been one other prospective study
179 retrospective and clinical samples have limitations
181 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
183 caregivers evaluated the PSAI at 2.5, 3.5, and 4.74
185 computing d values from Table 1—
186 2.5 years: (59.87-40.99)/((8.46+8.24)/2) = 2.261077844311376
187 3.5 years: (61.54-37.08)/((8.69+9.31)/2) = 2.717777777777778
188 4.75 years: (63.42-35.28)/((8.78+9.51)/2) d = 3.0770913067249865
190 GNC and gay were _monotonically_ related; there are similar findings about CAH
194 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.
196 another paper based on the Avon Longitudinal Study. Modified "Children's Activities Inventory" administered at age 8.
198 CAI is completed by the child
200 sex-typical toddlers grow up to be sex-typical children
204 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
206 T and sex hormone-binding globulin were measured in pregnant women
208 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
212 notes from "Is it a he or a she? Behavioral and computational approaches to sex categorization"
214 d'= 3 for adults, d'= 0.36 for infants
216 d' from signal detection theory is basically the same thing as Cohen's d
217 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_index
221 notes from "Recognition and Sex Categorization of Adults' and Childrens' faces", Wild et al.
223 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
225 people's tendency to guess male might be due to a higher cost of mistaking M for F?!
229 notes from "Genital Knowledge and Gender Constancy" by the immortal Sandra Bem
231 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?"
233 (Modern progressives fail these!!)
235 In less artificial contexts (actually photograph a classmate), 3-5 year olds get it right: Miller 1984
237 > 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."
241 "Gender differences in children’s singing voices: Acoustic analyses and results of a listening test"
242 https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.3372730
243 > The listeners correctly identified the gender of the singer in 66.0% of the cases, i.e., far better than chance.
245 "Listeners' Identification Of Gender Differences In Children's Singing"
246 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1321103X050240010301
247 > 71.57% of identifications were positive
251 notes from Gender Development textbook—
254 > 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.
255 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.
258 > sometimes even before they know that the toys are gender stereotyped (Aubry, Ruble, & Silverman, 1999; Blakemore et al., 1979; Perry et al., 1984)
261 > So, is a person without a penis always a girl? It turns out that there are some boys who do not have a penis.
263 Because this book was written in 2009, I assume they mean David Reimer-like cases
265 p. 47: estrogen doesn't really play a role in sex differenitation; both sexes of fetus get exposed to a bunch of it
267 Typical T levels for men: 265-800 ng/dL, women: 10-40
269 SRY was discovered when discovered in an XX male
271 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
273 > 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
275 There's a gradation in CAH—you can have a little 21-OH, or none at all
277 5α-reductase of the famous 5α-reductase deficiency is what converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone (DHT)
279 That's why 5aR virilize at puberty: puberty turns on enough testosterone for them to make a little DHT
281 > 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)
284 > It is almost as though some people seem to feel that differences between males
285 and females must be minimized to avoid judging males as superior.
287 > 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
290 elementary school activity level d=0.64
292 > Despite the difficulty in looking for sex differences using tests specifically designed not to have them
294 > 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).
296 p. 82 The verbal fluency (word-generation) diff favoring ♀ is d > 1!!
298 p. 82 Shitpost: Women are more valuable under the utilitarian calculus because they have more subjective experience per unit physical time!!
299 Block, R. A., Hancock, P. A., & Zakay, D. (2000). Sex differences in duration judgments: A meta-analytic review. Memory and Cognition, 28, 1333–1346.
301 40% of college women fail the water-level task! (How many men fail?!)
302 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.
305 > Compared to the girls, the boys sound considerably more aggressive or at least active in defending themselves.
306 Not to mention that everyone assumed the dragon was male ...
308 (I skimmed some of the earlier chapters, but from here on the whole ToC looks super-relevant to my research project)
310 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)
313 > 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).
315 > 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
318 > daughters complied with their mothers' requests 99% of the time, whereas sons complied only about 25% of the time
321 > Hyde (1984, 1986) reported the overall difference between males and females was about half a standard deviation (d = 0.50); but the difference was greater in children (d = 0.58 in preschoolers) than in adults (d = 0.27) [...] also greater when observed in naturalistic settings than in the laboratory
323 p. 114 Table 4.3, aggression effect sizes
325 It's weird that the discussion of aggression in relationships doesn't mention physical strength differences (which are massive)?!
327 > In intimate relationships, by adolescence both males and females think that
328 male violence against females is worse than the reverse.
329 "both males and females think", without any mention of why they might think that?!
331 > Preschoolers are also able to identify relational aggression as being associated with girls and physical aggression with boys (Giles & Heyman, 2005).
333 p. 117 fewer constaints on gossip and social exclusion as kids get older
335 p. 120 Carol Gilligan's different voice: interpersonal care vs. abstract justice
338 > small difference favoring females in the care orientation (d = ⫺0.28), and an even smaller one favoring males in the justice orientation (d = 0.19).
341 > If you were asked to pick a single psychological characteristic that differentiates boys and girls, you could not do better than the toys and activities that engage them
343 > This is critical because if children do not know if they
344 are boys or girls, or that toys are identifi ed as being for boys or for girls, they cannot be using this information to guide their toy preferences
347 > Some of the "neglect" regarding meta-analysis may reflect the lack of controversy about whether the differences exist
350 > evolutionary explanations are generally concerned with factors that apply to all members of a group—that is, factors that make all boys and men similar to each other and different from all girls and men
351 Not if sexual dimorphism is a matter of shifting the mean of the distribution, rather than a discrete mechanism?
353 p. 139 we know that the Y chromosome doesn't do much because of CAIS (although studies have been limited), but some studies of mice whose Sry gene was limited showed effects
355 p. 143 organizational/activiational hypothesis; p. 144 org/act is actually a spectrum
356 androgen needs to be present at about weeks 7-8 of gestation, later androgen levels don't do the same thing
358 giving androgens to female guinea pigs in 1959 gave them male-like behavior
360 mounting vs. lordosis are two discrete behaviors, as opposed to a continuously varying disposition to rough play
362 guinea pigs get manipulated before birth, rats and mice afterwards
365 > controls for castration would be surgery but no removal of the testes
366 What useless surgery do they do??
368 intrauterine position in animals that have litters