MONEY: Nurture, Not Nature

John Money, a rather controversial figure in sexual development, theorized that the sex a child was raised in was more influential than their biological or genetic sex. Money and his colleagues at John Hopkins theorized that gender identity was somewhat fluid before the age of three, and that after that time the culture in which the child was nurtured supported a certain gender identity. He advocated the surgical assignment of intersexed babies based on the idea that as long as rearing was consistent in the gender of assignment, children would be comfortable in their gender identity. This theory has come under criticism in the past few years, as many surgically assigned children have come forward to dispute these ideas with their own life experiences (Colapinto, 2000; Kessler, 1998).

KOHLBERG: Cognitive Development

Kohlberg did not see children's gender development as emanating from external socialization, but rather from cognitive processes within the child and he identified three developmental cognitive stages. According to Kohlberg, children are active agents in recognizing the differences between males and females, and identifying his or her own gender status as originating from their biological body. Gender identity is established early in life and is thought to be relatively impervious to change. Children begin to identify their gender as young as two years old; the sense of gender identity generally stabilizes within the first few years of life. First is a stage called gender identity, where children around two years old are able to label themselves and others as boys or girls, but this is based on gendered physical characteristics like clothing styles; the child assumes that gender changes if clothing is changed. By 3 or 4 years old children enter the second stage called gender stability and with it the understanding that gender remains the same throughout time and that little girls will grow up to be women and not men. Stage three, which children reach at about age 5, describes the developmental process whereby children understand that gender remains the same throughout time and situations; this is called gender consistency.

Like the proverbial question about the chicken and the egg, searching for which "came first," researchers continue to argue about the development of sexual orientation and gender identities. For instance, Green proposes that gender identity develops first, influencing gender role and then sexual orientation and Isay suggests the exact opposite developmental sequence-that early sexual preferences affect the development of gender role and identity. Nicolosi hypothesizes that faulty gender identity impacts the progression of homosexuality; however, there is little evidence to support the thesis that children with atypical gender identities in childhood or adolescence grow up to be transsexual.

Research has consistently shown that many children diagnosed with gender identity problems in childhood often grow up to be, not transsexual, but homosexual. Indeed, many children who grow up to be lesbian, gay, or bisexual, acknowledge or remember cross-gender behavior in their own childhood in both retrospective studies and anecdotal reports of homosexual adults report gender nonconforming behavior to be common in children who grow up to be LGB identified, although this may, of course, present problems of selective recall. It is possible that cross-gender identity and homoeroticism are both manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon (perhaps prenatal hormones?) with neither one causing the other. The search for etiological roots often implies a search for a "cure" and it focuses on those who diverge from normative development, labeling them pathological, rather than simply manifesting a normative part of human diversity.

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