You're Teaching My Child What? (23 page)

Well, welcome to Genderland, where the madness of sex education reaches a peak, and everything you know is turned on its head.

If you're like most people, you assume someone with a Y chromosome and affiliated genitals is male, and the rest of us, with two X chromosomes, are female. You are certain that girls become women and boys become men. Can anything be more obvious than that? But for sex educators, this is a thorny subject requiring pages of clarification.
There's more to male or female than DNA and anatomy, they explain to kids. There's also gender.

Sex, gender—is there a difference? You bet, and you need to know what it is. Ditto for distinguishing a cross dresser from a transsexual, and knowing why our “bipolar gender system”
²
is flawed.

Genderland is a dumbfounding departure from reality. Here, male and female are arbitrary identities based on feelings, not biology. Here it's normal for, say, your adolescent son to wonder what he is—a boy, a girl, or neither? That's right, in Genderland the idea that he must be one or the other is an arbitrary, oppressive paradigm—another noxious “ism,” like racism. Citizens of Genderland reject that model—some insist they're male
and
female, others claim they're neither. Hence words such as “ze” (another option aside from “he” and “she”), and “hir” (an alternative to the oppressive “his” and “her”).

Have I already lost you? It's okay. Trust me, I've been there.

What's the difference, you wonder, between
sexual
identity and
gender
identity? The former refers to the sort of person you're attracted to. The latter refers to whether you experience yourself as male or female (more on what that means later). Sex ed dogma claims the two are unrelated; in other words, gender identity does not necessarily determine sexual identity.

Yes, Genderland sure is a peculiar place. I discovered it on websites and in books recommended to teens. With each visit, I feel like Alice lost in Wonderland—confused and disoriented. My jaw drops, my eyes open wide.
What the heck is this?
I keep asking, as I inspect what experts teach our kids.

Every parent needs to visit Genderland, ahead of his child, and carefully observe the landscape. Many will feel, as Alice did, like they've fallen down a black hole and landed in a truly bewildering place.

We owe it all to psychologist John Money, who in 1955 introduced the concept that humans develop an internal sense of maleness or
femaleness, separate from chromosomes and anatomy.
³
Infants are born gender-neutral, he claimed, without a predisposition to think, feel, or behave in a masculine or feminine manner. “[M]en impregnate,” Money wrote, “women menstruate, ovulate, gestate, and lactate.”
⁴
All other distinctions are due to socialization.

According to Money's scheme, while Baby Jill has two X chromosomes, she has the potential to feel like a man. Little Jack has a penis, but if he's dressed in pink, given Barbies, surgery, and estrogen, he'll do fine as Jacquelyn. Jack and Jill's gender identity will depend on messages they receive in the first years of life from family, friends, school, religion, and media. Money taught that until two and a half to three years of age, gender remains vulnerable to environmental influence. After that, the feeling is fixed.

You should not be surprised to discover that, like Alfred Kinsey, John Money had some—well—unconventional views. This is not a 1960s version of Dr. Phil we're talking about. For one thing, like the good Dr. Kinsey, John Money believed sex between adults and children could be beneficial.
⁵
He was a proponent of adult–child love,
⁶
even incest.
⁷
For another, Money crusaded against traditional morality, arguing that ancient taboos were destructive.

Kinsey and Money appear to have been kindred souls in another way: from John Money's writings about childhood and abuse at the hands of his father, we see evidence of deep emotional wounds and (you guessed it) gender issues.

“I suffered from the guilt of being male,” he wrote. “I wore the mark of man's vile sexuality....I wondered if the world might really be a better place for women if not only farm animals but human males also were gelded (neutered) at birth.”
⁸
That's troubling, isn't it, coming from someone who ended up advising parents to have their sons castrated?

Money was fascinated by hermaphrodism
⁹
—a rare medical disorder in which a baby is born with both male and female reproductive organs. And he dedicated his life to proving to the world that psychologically, we are all hermaphrodites.

For real hermaphrodites, and their parents, the condition is not some ideal psychological state, but a serious dilemma. Boy or girl? That's the first of many urgent questions that follow the birth of these unfortunate children. Blue blanket or pink? What about a name, and what should parents tell family and friends? Money's Ph.D. thesis, completed in 1952, was on this medical condition and its treatment. Afterward, he pioneered the work in “sex assignment”—the complex decision of whether to raise a particular hermaphrodite as male or female. He established the country's first clinic for hermaphrodites' surgeries at Johns Hopkins University. Money's clinic later became the first in the United States to provide sex-change surgery for adults.

Money didn't confine himself to deciding the sex of hermaphrodites. Bruce Reimer, Money's most famous patient, was born a full-fledged boy, with an identical twin named Brian. In a ghastly medical accident when he was eight months old, Bruce's penis was destroyed. Bruce's parents heard Money holding forth on TV about how all it took was a little estrogen, a few Barbie dolls, and some surgery to make a boy into a girl, and they turned to him in their desperation over their son's plight. At twenty-two months of age, Bruce was castrated, renamed Brenda, and dressed in frilly clothes. He would be raised alongside his twin, who would be given trucks and GI Joes instead of Barbies, as the perfect test case for Money to prove to the world that nurture, not nature, determines gender identity.

The twins' story became a landmark case, widely cited as proof that the sense of male or female is learned, not inborn. Money's theories were accepted and taught as dogma; because of them, parents all over the world facing similar circumstances—due to trauma or a medical condition—were advised to castrate their sons and raise them as girls.
¹⁰

Fast forward to 1996. Dr. Money had not seen or heard from the twins for about twenty years; nevertheless, he republished
Man & Woman, Boy & Girl
, in which he described the experiment as a complete success.

But a year later, “Brenda” came forward and revealed that “she” was now David,
¹¹
a janitor in a slaughterhouse, married and father to three adopted children.

The public learned that the whole thing was a hoax,
¹²
and a fiasco ensued. Contrary to Money's published results, far from accepting the gender reassignment, David had fought against it tooth and nail from the very beginning—refusing to play with dolls, preferring wrestling over cooking, and even urinating standing up whenever possible. She was teased relentlessly for the boyish way she moved, spoke, walked, and gestured. Kids called her “cavewoman.” In second grade she wanted to be a garbage man, and in eighth, an auto mechanic.
¹³

In short, Bruce/Brenda/David endured years of agony, exacerbated by the “therapy” Money put him and his twin brother through. During their yearly visits,
¹⁴
Money firmly, loudly, and angrily told the children to take off their clothes, look at each other's genitalia, and act out sexual intercourse.
¹⁵

After years of this nightmare—not only for Brenda but for the whole family
¹⁶
—Brenda's psychiatrist urged her parents to reveal the truth: Brenda was male. Despite Money's warning never to do so, they gave in.

The twins were 14 when “Brenda” was told that she'd been born a boy. His reaction? “I was
relieved
. Suddenly it all made sense why I felt the way I did. I wasn't some sort of weirdo. I wasn't
crazy.
”
¹⁷

And how did Dr. Money respond? He didn't. The esteemed professor simply stopped mentioning and writing about the case.
¹⁸

So while the pretense ended, the misery did not. The damage had been done. Both David and his twin eventually were lost to suicide.

Apparently, David's story—and the doubts it raises about Money's gender theory—hasn't penetrated the hearts and minds of today's sex educators; they remain loyal to that theory. In the same matter-of-fact way your daughter is taught multiplication or geography, she's told a
girl's preference for pink, her interest in dolls, and her tendency to empathize are due to cultural messages she's received about how a girl is supposed to feel, think, look, and behave.

What cultures teach about gender, your daughter learns early on, is wrong and harmful. Most cultures endorse “gender stereotypes” and expect everyone to fit them. Like racial and ethnic stereotypes, she learns, gender stereotypes are unsubstantiated and destructive. They prevent people from being who they really are.

According to
gURL.com
, society expects females to be “emotional, delicate, domestic, nurturing, creative, introspective, meterialistic (sic), patient, moody, concerned with looks, not assertive, catty.”
²⁴

If she fails to meet these expectations, your daughter learns, the consequences can be grave. Chances are she'll be scorned and called names: dyke, butch, or tomboy. She might be assaulted and raped. She could even be murdered. That's what happened to Brandon Teena, a woman who chose to live as a man.
²⁵
If your daughter wants to know more about gender, instructs
gURL.com
, she should check out Brandon's story in the film
Boys Don't Cry
.

In the 1960s Money's theory of infant gender neutrality may have been plausible, given what was known at that time, but in this century it is not. Fifty years ago, the predominant view was that the Y chromosome
²⁶
carried little important information; aside from the genes for male genitalia, it was considered a “genetic wasteland.” If males and females essentially had the same genetic endowment, went the thinking of that time, differences between them must be due to society's messages and expectations.

That was before the biotechnology revolution. Now we can scrutinize DNA and carefully map out each twist and turn. Today we know the Y chromosome is teeming with units of DNA that are unique to males.
²⁷
There are distinct male and female blueprints created from the moment of conception.

“The striking quantity and diversity of sex-related influences on brain function indicate that the still widespread assumption that sex influences are negligible cannot be justified, and probably retards progress in our field,”
²⁸
reports Dr. Larry Cahill from the University of California, Irvine's Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. “There has been a renewed emphasis on the direct actions of the X and Y chromosomes in bringing about sex differences,” state a team of neuroscientists at the Isis Fund for Sex Differences Research; “Cutting-edge discoveries are revolutionizing our concepts of what makes a male or female brain.”
²⁹

Consider a boy's preference for rough play with other boys, and for vehicles and building toys. According to Money—currently echoed by SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, Heather, and the rest—these result from messages received from his environment, starting with the blue blanket.
You are a boy. Boys like blue, they are active and physical, they love construction, trains, cars.
So when a boy picks a Thomas the tank engine instead of a Barbie, they claim, he's conforming, albeit unknowingly, to those expectations.