You're Teaching My Child What? (24 page)

Rubbish, says neurobiology.
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He goes for the truck primarily because of his boy-brain. The toy provides an opportunity for movement, something he's predisposed to enjoy. Sure, it's socially reinforced, but his masculine brain circuits precede any cultural messages. For similar reasons, he's partial to competition and rough-and-tumble play, but unlikely to be drawn to babies. He'll have a stronger sex drive, and be less likely than a girl to change his sexual preferences during his lifetime. To explain these differences, and others, neuroscience leads us away from social cues like blue blankets. His boy-brain existed long before birth, due to a very different sort of message.

It comes from a gene that instructs the testicles to produce and secrete testosterone.
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Unless directed otherwise, the prenatal brain grows in a female direction. If testosterone is released during critical periods of development, that changes. The hormone travels through the blood, targeting cells whose surfaces have matching receptors. Like a key in a lock, when a hormone molecule fits a surface receptor, a “door” opens, allowing entry. The hormone makes a b-line for the control center. In the nucleus it instructs the DNA: turn these activities on, and those off.

Think of each cell as a factory. A hormone breaks through security, finds the foreman, and directs him to change the work orders. Make hats instead of shoes, it demands. The machines grind to a stop and change course. When the order comes from the top, everyone complies.

Testosterone inhibits the development of a feminine brain, with larger centers for communication and emotional memory, and establishes a masculine course—more brain space devoted to centers for action, aggression, and sex drive.
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The cascade of hormonal effects are global and permanent. Although some manifestations will not be seen for years, such as the changes that come with puberty, the boy-brain trajectory is set at eight weeks, when the gene directs the testes: get to work!
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Not eight weeks after birth; eight weeks after
conception—
seven months before the pink or blue blanket. That's right, a fetus has a boy-brain or girl-brain before some women are even aware they're pregnant—when it is the size of a kidney bean.

The research supporting that fact is voluminous, but to SIECUS and all the rest of them, it doesn't exist.
Gender is man-made
, they still insist in 2009;
cultures teach what it means to be a man or a woman.
Are they stuck in a time warp like the March Hare—at a tea party where clocks stand still? Instead of force-feeding kids 1960s ideology, modern sex ed curricula should describe studies done in
this
century—on infants in their first day of life, on Japanese kindergarteners, and on juvenile monkeys.

These studies indicate that genetics and pre-natal hormones predispose boys and girls to have—among other things—specific toy preferences, play styles and activities, and peer relationships.
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Simply put, science in the twenty-first century supports the stereotypes SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, and other sex educators are telling kids to reject.

Let's discuss babies first, then their blankets. Abundant research indicates that sex differences in social behaviors—girls' and women's increased sensitivity to emotional nuance, for example—are related to early brain development. At one day of age, presumably before the child has received any messages about conforming to a gender stereotype, boys look longer at a mobile, while girls show a stronger interest in the face.
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At one year, girls are drawn to a video of a face moving; boys to a video of cars moving.
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And at both one and two years of age, girls make more eye contact with their mothers than boys. Remarkably, the amount of contact is inversely correlated with the prenatal level of testosterone. The higher the testosterone level was before birth, the lower the amount of eye contact.
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Now what about those blankets?
gURL.com
considers them part of “gendering,” a message for the baby about social expectations based on identity. Color preference, they insist, is a result of socialization.
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The color pink is mainly associated with females,
says
gURL.com
.
If a boy painted his room pink, people might think it was a little weird.
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But those people would be right; it
is
weird to find a boy who prefers pink, and not only because of what others might think. How do I know? I read about it in the medical journal
Hormones and Behavior
.

Researchers in Japan examined the drawings of 252 kindergarteners.
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They found significant differences between the drawings of girls and boys. Among them: boys drew a moving object twenty times more
than girls. Girls included a flower or butterfly seven times more than boys. Then they examined the crayons each child had used over the course of six months, measuring how much of each color remained. Overall, girls decidedly preferred pink and flesh colors. Boys used two colors more than girls: grey and blue.

Okay, you're thinking, but girls are supposed to like flowers, butterflies, and pink; boys are dressed in blue and expected to enjoy things that move. These preferences aren't innate, they were learned.

To control for that, the researchers analyzed the drawings of a third group—eight girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia. CAH is a genetic disorder in which the fetal brain was flooded with high levels of male hormones. Girls with CAH may have an enlarged clitoris; they may even be identified at birth as males. They are treated medically and surgically, and raised female. In the nature/nurture debate, these girls are intriguing, because nature signaled “you're a boy” to the fetus, but nurture has been saying “you're a girl” since birth.

Clearly, the people over at
gURL.com
aren't reading
Hormones and Behavior
. Otherwise they'd know the astonishing results: CAH girls drew cars and buses, not butterflies. And the cars and buses were blue, not pink.

Gender is
culturally
assigned? I don't think so. And neither can any person who follows neuroscience in this century.

In a radio interview in 2000,
⁴¹
David Reimer laid bare the horrors of the years spent as Brenda. “I was betrayed by the medical profession... they put my life on the line so that they could hold onto their theories.” David has since been lost to suicide, but the betrayal continues. Other lives are on the line, but hard science is scorned, and phony theories canonized.

The educators who have enshrined Money's gender theory and now foist it on our youth need to understand that John Money's preoccupation with hermaphrodites and sexual reassignment was related to his own inner struggles. His belief in gender plasticity was wishful thinking. Gender identity is separate from anatomy and chromosomes? It's
based on feelings, learned from experiences? Baloney. In what's probably just the tip of the iceberg, twenty-first century science indicates that the tendencies to typical boy or girl behaviors—yes, gender stereotypes—are innate. We're not psychological hermaphrodites at birth, potentially masculine or feminine—we are wired for one or the other in the womb.

“Step on to any playground anywhere on the planet and you will see boys and girls playing in different worlds. They differ in what they are doing, with whom they are doing it, and how they are doing it.”

So begins a chapter in a 2008 book by an international group of experts,
Sex Differences in the Brain: From Genes to Behavior
.
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We learn here that “across cultures, girls more than boys are interested in and engage with dolls and doll accessories, arts and crafts, kitchen toys, fashion, and make-up, whereas boys more than girls are interested in and engage with transportation toys, electronics, blocks (especially complex building sets), and sports.”
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These preferences are pervasive and consistent.
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They begin to emerge at nine months,
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and are stable by eighteen months.

Yet we're suppose to believe that when a two-year-old girl passes up the set of Hot Wheels, choosing the Dora the Explorer doll instead, it is because of cultural expectations—because she has learned girls play with dolls, not cars? This is what gender theory would have us believe, and what your child learns, but it's unlikely. You see, at that age, she doesn't know she's a girl. That awareness comes later.
⁴⁶

Until at least two and a half years of age, children are unable to consistently label themselves—or discriminate between—male and female. That's a year or more
after
showing a preference for the doll or the truck. How can children choose particular toys based on what's expected of them as a girl or boy, before grasping the
concept
of girl or boy?

That's a problem for those who argue that kids are socialized to prefer one toy or activity over the other. A more likely explanation, consistent with data collected in the past two decades, is that preferences relate to the toy's use or function. Prenatal hormones wire a girl's brain to be interested in nurturing, and a boy's to enjoy motion. Children then choose the doll or the car for the opportunities they provide for the respective activity.
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In support of this theory, girls with CAH show increased preference for male playmates and toys typically preferred by boys.
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Studies conducted on young male and female monkeys produce similar results. Juvenile male monkeys, both rhesus and vervet, prefer playing with balls and vehicles. Female monkeys like dolls and pots.
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. . .
Pots ?
Researchers suggest the female monkeys' increased interest in them was due to their red color. The faces of infant vervets are reddish-pink, so the color may act as a cue signaling an opportunity for nurturance. Are animals oppressed by gender stereotypes too? The author of one study, a psychologist, notes: “They are not subject to advertising. They are not subject to parental encouragement, they are not subject to peer chastisement.”
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The female monkey chose a doll while the male chose a truck.

I wish this were the end of the story, but the principles of Genderland have gone far beyond Money's pseudoscience—
we are born gender-neutral; cultures teach what it means to be a man or a woman.
That's old. Like an angry adolescent testing limits, pushing the envelope harder each day, the agendas have become increasingly radical. But how radical can you get, how far from the truth can you move, before falling over the edge and losing touch with reality?

In step with Money, sex ed curricula define gender as separate from biology. They take his theory a step further, however. When gender and biology don't “align”—you've got boy genitals but feel like a girl, or the opposite—they say that's normal. “Being transgender is as normal as being alive,” kids are told by Advocates for Youth.
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“It's not uncommon for a person to identify strongly with the other gender,” says Planned Parenthood's teen site. “Many people, including teens, have non-traditional feelings about gender roles and sexual identities and that is normal, too.”
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Let's say the experts are right, and it's “normal” for a boy to insist he's a girl. It's a “variant” that he loathes his genitals and wears dresses. What about other cases of “misaligned” identity? Are they “variants” as well?

Consider a rare condition called Body Integrity Identity Disorder. Its victims, according to a recent
Newsweek
article,
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have “an overwhelming desire to amputate one or more healthy limbs or become paraplegic.... They describe a persistent, tortuous chasm between their mind's image of their own body, and the physical body they
inhabit.” Only after they're disabled—by self-inflicted mutilation, or with the help of an underground surgeon—do they feel complete.

The similarity of their condition to that of transgenders is apparent. The “amputee wannabees” also suffer with a “misaligned identity.” What causes this strange affliction? Some speculate it's due to an abnormality of the area of the brain involved in constructing a coherent body image.
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These people need our understanding, support, and help. Should that include extreme measures, like amputation of a healthy limb, or sex reassignment surgery? I'm not sure.

I am sure however, that a boy who persistently and intensely feels he's a girl, like someone distressed about having two healthy legs, has an illness. The goal should be to help him find relief. Normalizing transgenderism—called Gender Identity Disorder by mental health professionals—is, again, based on an ideology that wishes to blur the distinctions between male and female. Having this disorder is not “as normal as being alive,” as Advocates for Youth want young people to believe.