Stunting Their Growth

Delaying the Onset of Adolescence

So you’re standing outside of the Planned Parenthood one day, wearing your clinic escort vest and waiting for a patient to show up needing protection from the ghouls shouting from the curb, when your fellow volunteer says:

“I’m so glad kids who might be trans can pause their puberty until they know for sure if they are trans.” On the verge of peaking, you look at her and say to her (aware that she is a mental health nurse,) “What is that?”

Switching to the first person because this is as far as the Letterkenny cold open needs to go.

She explained that there are drugs that are used to hold off puberty for kids who are questioning their gender identity. It gives them time to think about it before there may be too many physical changes that make it difficult to transition when they are older and can make a more mature decision. That is when they are through adolescence they don’t want to have too many secondary sex characteristics that would betray their birth sex if they decide on a course of surgeries and hormones to become simulacrums of the other sex. ¹

This all seemed kind of hinky to me, because even though I have a degree in business and not psychology, I did study developmental psychology during my aborted first attempt at college. I studied the stages of mental development necessary for children to transition to adulthood, and frankly that was among the worst periods of my life. I hated adolescence and young adulthood in large part because I did not fit into the social expectations of a teenage male in a small town. I was not athletic, not as competitive as my brothers, was interested in the arts, liked girls as friends but was awkward around them if I was interested in them sexually. I was not considered masculine, even though I tried to present myself as masculine as possible just to get along. There were all those zits and the oily hair, and body parts growing at uneven rates. It was kind of a rotten time. I had some fun, don’t get me wrong. I wasnt’t suicidal, but I would have preferred not to have to go through it.

I could understand why there are kids who want to avoid puberty, especially if they are gender non-conforming. The whole masculine - feminine gender expectation thing is very hard to navigate. It is for everyone, because it’s hard to understand exactly what is going on when it comes to gender. Kids are taught through examples of their family, external socializing and through all of the media they have access to, that boys and girls are different. They learn not only the phsyical differences, such as the external genitals, but the toys they have available to them and the choices in dress they are presented. They learn that girls wear bows and boys wear caps.

They learn that girls are made of sugar and spice, like pink, and carry dollies around. Boys are made of snakes and snails, like blue, and play with toy tractors. They are learning that masculinity comes with expectations, but also with benefits. Boys are favored by adults and receive privileges over girls, even among those adults who try to avoid sexism. I’ve heard many parents they work hard to avoid trapping their children into sexist preferences for toys and playtime activities. Even my own parents, or at least my mother, tried to avoid preferences for us boys. I grew up with a twin sister, and there were many toys that were given to us that we were happy to share because they weren’t particularly boyish or girlish. I even played with her when she was playing with her tea sets and dolls, I just didn’t want any of my own.

The parents who are fully committed to avoidig gender-based play for their kids are not doing so in isolation. Children play with other children, meet other adults, watch television, listen to radio, overhear parents talking, have older brothers and sisters. Gender has social momentum with millenia propelling it. These expectations for boys and girls are not innate, they are learned. That being said, kids do have their own personalities, and they may not match the gender expectations that have been set out for them.

Girls whose desires for play and activity tend towards the masculine get frustrated because they are branded as tomboys, and boys whose desires for play and activity tend towards the feminine get frustrated because they are restricted by social mores and they are branded as “pussies.” Wanting to dress in the clothing styles set aside for the other sex is a social taboo, and such children are early labeled as being either gay or lesbians. They may be sexually oriented towards their own sex, but not necessarily so. But it does cause stress for them to realize that they don’t fit socially with who they are supposed to be, and it’s difficult.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s there were several attempts to get a broad message out that gender non-conformity is not the social sin that it has been assumed to be. Marlo Thomas produced “Free to Be, You and Me” fifty years ago. 50. FIFTY. Yes, I feel old, because I was 12 at the time and the number fifty attached to an event that seems like relatively recent history to me is jarring.

Thomas explained that she produced it because she had gone looking for children’s music that didn’t enforce gender stereotypes, especially directed towards girls, and didn’t find it.

Thomas just wanted to create something for her niece that wasn’t like the song “Someday My Prince Will Come” from “Snow White.” “It wasn’t like I woke up one day and said, ‘I know what will be a successful thing,’” she said. “There was a need. I asked my sister [Terre] why she was giving Dionne all these old-fashioned books and she told me she couldn’t find anything else. I assumed she hadn’t looked hard enough. When I went to the bookstore, what I found was even worse.”

There were color-coded book sections: pink for girls, blue for boys. The title of one book, Whitney Darrow Jr.’s “I’m Glad I’m a Boy, I’m Glad I’m a Girl,” gave her pause. When she read it, it “almost gave me a heart attack,” she recalled with a laugh. Each page spread delineated gender roles and expectations: “Boys are doctors. Girls are nurses.” “Boys fix things. “Girls need things fixed.”

This project, which included books and tv shows, was showing something radical: feminine and masculine roles are not innate. Gender is taught both implicitly as well as through socialization, and that kids who do not fit within its limitations are not abominations. There is nothing wrong with them. This was an encouraging time, because women seemed to be making some feminist progress and the success of “Free to Be, You and Me” was a good omen that as the 21st century approached, girls would be broken free of the limitations of gender.

Boys would benefit, too, of course, because the social ostracization of not conforming to the masculine ideal would be lessened. ²

There have been attempts to study how gender is affirmed by the choices of toys made for children, and this study (open access) challenges the assumptions that parents are as egalitarian as they believe they are. As with all studies, further research is indicated.

The present study shows that parents judge gender-typed and gender-neutral toys as more desirable for their children than cross-gender-typed toys regardless of the parents’ gender, age, and educational level. This indicates that even boys and girls from highly educated families are still confronted with differential expectations regarding roles, interests, and skills that may lead to unused chances and limited action repertoires for both girls and boys. Implementing interventions for parents is challenging because parents are hard to reach.

Fifty years ago I was twelve, and thought it was cool because I didn’t conform. I guessed that there would be pushback, but I didn’t think that the backlash would be this pronounced. It does make sense, if you think about it. The social order is structured after millenia of social evolution, in a manner that benefits males. There is likely going to be huge resistance to any revolutionary change in a social order as strongly held as patriarchy. Subconsciously most of us think that masculinity is an innate property of human males, and that femininity is an innate propery of human females.

The backlash has been fierce, and it manifested itself in Men’s Rights movements, which have been largely seen as regressive and sexist. Seeing how that’s largely been laughed at except in socially conservative circles, the backlash has taken the form of transgenderism. It’s a backlash against feminism and especially against the idea that children are free to follow their own non-conforming personalities.

The message now is that “If you are a kid whose gender expectations don’t align with your sex, then you were born in the wrong body. If you are a girl who likes blue, and want to play with boy’s toys, we can fix you by making you a boy.”

This is long enough for a single article and there is much more to be said. I’m supposed to be working. Enough with the pitter patter and chitter chatter, let’s get at’er for now, a follow up article is forthcoming.

Maybe tonight.

Here ye be:

Stunting Their Growth, Continued

And beyond:

Stunting their Growth (end of series)

1. She didn’t say that. It’s my interpretation of what she said. She just said “until they are old enough to decide.”

2. It’s a side benefit of feminism, but that is not the focus of feminism. As men, we often have a hard time understanding that women are not required to work for our benefit.