> 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. > > 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. > > —_What's the Big Secret? Talking About Sex With Girls and Boys_, Laurie Krasny Brown, Ed.D., and Marc Brown (published 1997) https://www.reddit.com/r/Parenting/comments/ij4npe/mommy_im_actually_a_girl/ https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/before-2 Planned Parenthood on "How to Know If Your Kid Is Transgender": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJdafLVf6xo Trans Kids: It's Time to Talk film: https://archive.org/details/TransKidsItsTimeToTalk HBO documentary Transhood https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2016237/ > 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 Research notes— https://femalesexualinversion.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-problem-with-puberty-blockers-part.html 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 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" https://www.impactprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Kuper-2014-Puberty-Blockers-Clinical-Research-Review.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0Bmr_fS-ewLn1Y9XsA35zrk8X7f9CIJBhLd8pf3b6JttUi05SL41Ot2ao https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55282113 Tavistock study https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.01.20241653v1.full.pdf path-dependent preferences: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3xF66BNSC5caZuKyC/why-subagents "Cognitive theories of early gender development." https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-18663-003 https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/01/trans-kid-test-psychology.html https://kathleenstock.com/highlights-of-trans-policies-in-uk-universities/ 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) "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 http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/davis_et_al-cultural_components_of_sex_differences_in_color_preference.pdf https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0243894 Kohlberg 1966 gender constancy (Maccoby p. 160) "My Son Wears Dresses; Get Over It" https://archive.is/FJNII note, "My Son Wears Dresses", and not, "My Daughter Is Trans" 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. https://www.aboutkidshealth.ca/Article?contentid=716&language=English > Caregivers can help by not connecting sexual biology to gender (e.g., say "people with penises" or "people with vaginas"). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1351 claims: > Sex differences in facial morphologyare apparent in six-month-old infants [15], and increasesteadily across childhood [16]. Those cites are: * "A longitudinal cephalometric study of transverse and vertical craniofacial growth" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8237899/ * "Ontogeny of facial dimorphism and patterns of individual development within one human population" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16596605/ "Puberty blockers do not alleviate negative thoughts in children with gender dysphoria, finds study" https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n356 https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/trapped-priors-as-a-basic-problem https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/when-your-epistemic-bubble-pops-unlocked 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" new Zucker article! https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.632784/full https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56601386 https://segm.org/NICE_gender_medicine_systematic_review_finds_poor_quality_evidence https://acesounderglass.com/2021/04/02/antidepressants-and-medical-uncertainty/ my CAH table is derived from the "Developmental Endocrinology" book in /papers/ "The Magnitude of Children’s Gender-Related Toy Interests Has Remained Stable Over 50 Years of Research" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-01989-8 Degree of religiousness is genetic, but the specific religion is environmental— 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. Hines, M., Golombok, S., Rust, J., Johnston, K. J., Golding, J., Parents and Children Study Team, A. L. S., & the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children Study Team. (2002). Testosterone during preg- nancy and gender role behavior of preschool children: A longitudinal, population study. Child Development, 73, 1678 –1687. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00498 Frisén, L., Nordenström, A., Falhammar, H., Filipsson, H., Holmdahl, G., Janson, P. O., . . . Nordenskjöld, A. (2009). Gender role behavior, sexuality, and psychosocial adaptation in women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia due to CYP21A2 deficiency. The Journal of Clinical Endo- crinology and Metabolism, 94, 3432–3439. http://dx.doi.org/10.1210/jc .2009-0636 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 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. 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. ---- notes from The Pre-School Activities Inventory: A Standardized Assessment of Gender Role in Children by Golombok and Rust toy pref.s as early at 18 mo. and established by 3 years 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 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." pooled test-retest reliabiliy (after 1 year) .64 validity: ask daycare teachers to rate boyishness/girlishness, and correlate with mother's PSAI responses: 0.48 for girls, 0.37 for boys samples from UK, Netherlands, and Minnesota table 5: d by age 30-35. (59.70-39.74)/((9.72+9.84)/2) d= 2.0408997955010224 36-47 (3 y.o.) (60.58-39.38)/((9.91+9.68)/2) d= 2.1643695763144457 48-59 (4 y.o.) (60.14-40.62)/((10.94+11.03)/2) d= 1.7769685935366413 60-71 mo. (5 y.o.) (59.2-40.03)/((10.36+10.09)/2) d= 1.8748166259168706 ---- notes from Childhood Gender-Typed Behavior and Adolescent Sexual Orientation: A Longitudinal Population-Based Study by Li, Kung, and Hines retrospective studies (as reviewed by Bailey & Zucker) find that gay adults remember nonconforming behavior as children, but those might be biased by memory Rieger, Linsenmeier, Gygax, and Bailey (2008) collected home videos and got independent raters—same result then there's gender clinical referals there had only been one other prospective study retrospective and clinical samples have limitations 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 caregivers evaluated the PSAI at 2.5, 3.5, and 4.74 computing d values from Table 1— 2.5 years: (59.87-40.99)/((8.46+8.24)/2) = 2.261077844311376 3.5 years: (61.54-37.08)/((8.69+9.31)/2) = 2.717777777777778 4.75 years: (63.42-35.28)/((8.78+9.51)/2) d = 3.0770913067249865 GNC and gay were _monotonically_ related; there are similar findings about CAH ----- 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. another paper based on the Avon Longitudinal Study. Modified "Children's Activities Inventory" administered at age 8. CAI is completed by the child sex-typical toddlers grow up to be sex-typical children ----- 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 T and sex hormone-binding globulin were measured in pregnant women 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 ---- notes from "Is it a he or a she? Behavioral and computational approaches to sex categorization" d'= 3 for adults, d'= 0.36 for infants d' from signal detection theory is basically the same thing as Cohen's d https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_index ----- notes from "Recognition and Sex Categorization of Adults' and Childrens' faces", Wild et al. 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 people's tendency to guess male might be due to a higher cost of mistaking M for F?! ----- notes from "Genital Knowledge and Gender Constancy" by the immortal Sandra Bem 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?" (Modern progressives fail these!!) In less artificial contexts (actually photograph a classmate), 3-5 year olds get it right: Miller 1984 -----