A new book about America's new national sex-regulation obsession

The Boston Review:



Once I asked a three-year-old girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. Without hesitation she said, “A pony!” All the adults laughed, but her answer reflected two things we know about child development. First, more than a few kids develop obsessions that can stay with them for weeks, months, or even years. These can be as quirky as a fascination with blenders or as commonplace as an intense interest in dinosaurs. Before my little friend outgrew her equine interests, her parents indulged her with pony books, movies, and stuffed animals. They did not, however, buy her a live pony. Second, the pony incident illustrates the fact that children do not begin life with a sense of body permanence. At first they don’t even see their future as species specific. Gradually during their first five years or so, they come to understand that, except for increasing in size, their bodies will not change into something utterly different.

Sometimes instead of obsessing about blenders, dinosaurs, or ponies, a child obsesses about gender. Consider JeongMee Yoon’s pink-obsessed daughter who inspired the Pink and Blue Project. The child’s obsession led her mother to create an art project, but neither Yoon nor the mother of the girl who wanted to be a pony took their children to see a psychologist. If, however, the pink-obsessed child had been born with testes, a scrotum, and a penis, he might indeed have been brought to a therapist. This is because gender obsessions are often medicalized in a way that other obsessions are not.

Indeed we are in a moment of national panic about children who transition from the sex into which they were born to the sex/gender with which they identify...