Posted by:
Finally Free!
(
)
Date: May 10, 2016 01:35PM
"So basically, if society treated boys and girls exactly the same, there would be no transgender folks?"
A very interesting question and based on what I've seen so far, I believe the answer that there would still be "transgender folks", but I don't have the time to research the science for that at the moment.
The male brain and the female brain is different. I know it's not exactly your question, but there's a case where a baby was born male, but due to a botched circumcision, the doctors and parents decided to make the baby female and raised it as such. The boy's brain told him otherwise and eventually he started living life as a male (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer)
So, it seems, you can't raise a baby in a role that it's not meant to be in.
There are all kinds of websites out there today regarding raising your child "gender-neutral", but those are more towards letting your child decide... i.e., they still live in a gendered society, so it's not as if a child could realistically be raised in a truly gender-less manner today, not ethically anyway. It is interesting that it seems (again, I don't have a proper reference for this at the moment, sorry) that if you raise your child gender neutral, they will decide for themselves.