Transvestia

ourselves, practically all differences between sexes are seen as sexual, transfer of this information to mankind makes our differences seem to be sexual too. The con- sequence of this is that since sex itself is biological and immutable so the behaviour patterns exhibited by males and females are considered to be biologically determined, inseperable from sex and unchangeable. This is simply not so! Gender roles are learned responses. They are culturally determined and largely artificial. They are not biological in origin. They vary greatly from one culture to another and from period to period in the same culture. (cf. clothing and manners in the time of George Washington)

From the day the doctor comes in and tells the mother that she has a "bouncing baby boy" she and the father begin to treat it in the manner considered proper for a male child and vice versa if it is female. Since the growing child is exposed to a limited set of permissible patterns and is hauled up sharply if he strays too far away from them, he or she gradually learns to be a boy or a girl and then a man or a woman. Or to use the descrip- tive terms, he or she "learns" to be masculine or feminine. It does not come automatically with maleness or female-

ness.

Work done at Johns Hopkins University by Drs. Money and Hampson on pseudo-hermaphrodites (persons whose external genitalia appears to resemble in some ways both kinds of sexual organs) showed that the sex of assignment was far more important in determining the final person- ality structure than were the external genitalia, the in- ternal organs, the hormone balance, the sex chromatic characteristic or the chromosomel pattern. Further they found that if the child had been mistakenly assigned to the wrong sex (and therefore was brought up in the wrong Gender) and it was not discovered until after the 2nd year of age that attempts to reassign the Gender role caused profound personality upsets.

Now, although this work was done on pseudo-hermaph- rodites it has important implications for everyone else. Obviously if a child could be misassigned and grow up in the wrong Gender and make a go of it, he could also have made a go of it if he had been correctly assigned in the

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