Chapter 2
 
VARIATIONS OF MALE/FEMALE SELF-DESIGNATION: TRANSSEXUALISM:
I AM A BOY; I AM A GIRL; I AM A MAN; I AM A WOMAN
     
     By the time we begin to talk in childhood,             
most of us clearly know that we are boys or girls.  
We might not be able to articulate just what the differences are, 
but we are certain that there are two kinds of children in the world 
and that we belong to one of those categories—boys or girls.   

     From an early age, we can distinguish male and female faces.
And as we learn to speak, we learn different pronouns 
for the two sexes: he, him, his; she, her, hers. 

     Years later we learn the genital differences between the sexes.
When we learn that boys have penises and girls have vaginas,
we add this to the differences we already knew about boys and girls. 

     Our male/female self-designation is imprinted rather than learned.
Imprinting means that our sense that we are either boys or girls 
becomes a part of our psyches so quickly and so permanently 
that it is nearly impossible to change this belief later.  

     What other things are imprinted rather than learned?  
(1) one’s handedness—whether one is right-handed or left-handed, 
(2) one’s first language, & (3) one’s sexual fantasies [Chapter 5].       

     But most of our personal identity is learned, not imprinted.  
We will explore how we acquire our gender traits in Chapter 4.   

     In the vast majority of cases, 
the sex we believe ourselves to be is the same as 
(1) our biological sex,  (2) our announced sex, & (3) our sex of rearing.
Males are imprinted with the belief that they are boys.      
Females are imprinted with the belief that they are girls.  
And as we mature into adulthood, we carry this imprinting with us.
We remain convinced that we are either men or women,  
that we always have been one sex or the other,  
and that we will always remain that sex. 

     But for a very small minority of people 
a mistaken male/female self-designation is imprinted shortly after birth.  
Sometimes this happens because of anomalous external genitals at birth 
and the parents and doctor just guess at the sex of the child.
But most individuals who have mistaken male/female self-designations 
are not biologically ambiguous in any way.  
They are biologically normal males or females 
who somehow got imprinted with the belief that they are the other sex.   

Ch. 2    VARIATIONS OF MALE/FEMALE SELF-DESIGNATION: TRANSSEXUALISM     by James Park     9



Created 1-11-2009; Revised


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