Well yes, this one case does manage to prove no, because the fact of the matter that is possibly most defining was that David Reimer was not a transsexual. He was someone who would have grown up as a perfectly normal cis male, had he not had a botched circumcision. This didn't start of with a potentially androgynous child, this was a male who was forced to live as a female, it is about as 100% definition of transsexuality that you can get. This single experiment basically proved the lack of upbringing and environment as being a determining factor because all aspects of the example were taken to absolute extremes.
1. That still wouldn't prove that psycholinguistic causes of transsexuality don't sometimes occur. If that were the case for even 1% of cases then that would be important to identify and separate.
2. David Reimer was born a male, he had XY chromosomes. Chances are being a male would greatly increase any inclination to imitate other males, so this doesn't disprove my hypothesis that instead of "innate gender identity" it could be "innate role modeling" giving rise to "gender identity".
Give children some credit. While the example you gave of injuries meaning glasses is unique, children figure out the basic difference between boys and girls at an extremely young age. They may not understand the full sexual complexities of that meaning, but they know enough to not have some strange confusion like you are implying.
Please show this somehow. The two facts that make me doubt you on this are:
1. Children are not born with a dictionary in their head. They must learn words by being exposed in their environments.
2. Nudity is taboo, so noticing through enough contexts to figure out that a male has a certain body and a female has a certain body at a very young age is not a guarantee, and indeed by the time they have figured it out they've likely already heard "boy" and "girl" and their synonyms attached to so many other situations, including ones referring to themselves or to their friends that they link it more to "behaviors". A child may even mistakenly think an adult was referring to them as a "girl" and then if they have enough feminine behaviors they associate with "girl" they are likely to accept this as the reality, engrain it as part of their identity, and then feel like it means their body is wrong when they learn that "girl" really means you have to have a certain body type. For such a child the healthy thing would be to come to realize he is effeminate, not a "girl", to accept his personality but to come around to accepting that he is a "boy". That may not be all of the cases that result in a person feeling "Trapped in the wrong body", but it's certainly a possible complication that could lead to it.
Even in the case where there was some initial confusion, such confusion is removed relatively quickly during childhood.
Assuming you mean the second confusion, the confusion of "maybe I have the wrong body" that would come about after learning the words "boy" and "girl" and synonyms actually refer to body parts then how exactly would it be removed quickly? What would guarantee the child realizes they aren't really trans?
Especially if they express this to their parents and then get encouragement from parents and counselors who miss the signs that it's not real transsexuality (which is especially likely since psycholinguistics is just starting to get big i.e. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, enough experiments have not been done to determine what sort of specific problems people may face from misinterpretations of what words mean during childhood).
Of course the best example to prove that this has no impact or effect is to simply ask transsexuals if they ever encountered such a scenario. I can tell you on my side I know I never had such a problem.
That would prove nothing. That isn't scientific. I would have to ask hundreds of them in a randomized fashion. And even then they might not remember how they came to identify themselves as "male" or "female" even if it was because of how they associated the words and not innate gender identity if it started happening early enough in their lives.
Additionally, role model has no effect because if it did we would be seeing problems with single parents, or single sex boarding schools. Neither of these scenarios have had any influence on either the occurrence of homosexuality or transsexuality. If anything what you are describing, influences learned gender roles which have already been proven to be unrelated to transsexuality by the behaviors of transsexuals themselves.
1. It's "role modeling has no effect" otherwise the sentence doesn't make sense.
2. You have a highly simplified view of how "role modeling" effects people.
Sometimes people can be influenced by society in ways society does not intend. Just because something looks rebellious, or looks anti-mainstream doesn't mean the influence for it did not come from other people. Look up "contrarian". I'm not saying transsexuals are mostly contrarians or ODD, although I'd hope that's something the doctors try to look for to make sure they are for real.
But other than that people can be confused about society's expectations, and people may give more weight to certain members of society than others and even then more weight may be given to some people on their fashion sense, others on the nature of reality, others for one's views on morality, others for one's politics. If a person's innate tendency is to give more weight to the opposite gender in trying to learn what games to play or what clothes are best and they keep hearing the word "girl" next to it they may conclude that liking it means they are a "girl". If they ever dress the way society expects the opposite sex to dress and get mistaken for a girl they are more likely to think they are a "girl" and then by the time they learn that "girl" means you have to have certain body parts they may think there's so much other stuff as evidence showing they are a "girl" that they have to have the body parts.
Again this was addressed in my previous post. The current cis and hetronormative environment and society would only encourage children to act like their birth sex and to fight against their cross gender feelings. Further, with societal pressures being what they are, any early confusion would be quickly resolved, I even gave the example of how I was chastised for feminine behavior and that led to me stopping such behavior.
1. Each individual is influenced differently. Otherwise with societal pressures being what they are why would anybody voluntarily do anything "different"? But people do and it's not always "contrarianism" and it's not always "genetics", sometimes they are conforming to a subset of society or to a misinterpretation of society or a misinterpretation of a subset.
Furthermore, being chastised for feminine behavior reinforces the idea that gender means you act a certain way rather than it meaning you have certain body parts. What would've happened if they didn't care about you acting like a girl, and maybe even let it go that you liked calling yourself a girl. And then when you're like 10, showed you what "girl" means in the dictionary, what "boy" means, and then what "feminine" means. Maybe today you would be a feminine male rather than an mtf transsexual. Or maybe you still would be trans. Unfortunately, we can't construct a time machine and go back and figure it out.
This piece is just plain rubbish, while the argument can be made that children will rebel against excessive pressure from a parent
Not what I was arguing at all. Pointing at certain behaviors and saying "boys can do this" and "girls can do that" would reinforce the notion that these things are part of "what it means to be a boy" and "what it means to be a girl". Looking at what he would prefer to do it would be the logical thing, given the information he had to identify as a "boy".
Society as a whole tends to do this, and the effects on the individual interacting with society would more likely than not be uneven because every individual is exposed to different messages, even down to what they were watching on tv one day.
We'd really have to purposefully create a gender-neutral society where the view that boys can do girl things and they are still just as much boys and girls can do boy things and they are still just as much girls is pushed and any media that would suggest otherwise is censored and the way children are taught things is construed in a careful manner to prevent psycholinguistic confusion of any kind(I think we should do this already, why adults expect children to understand context as well as they do when they've been at for so long compared to the children has always puzzled me) see how many people still want sex change operations as adults.
, the case of David Reimer proved that was not the case. There are plenty of cis children who are pressured both socially and environmentally to fit gender roles. These children do not rebel against such actions to the degree where they develop a gross gender identity. They are you more typical hyper-masculine males for example.
Some of them do, most of them don't. However, most people don't grow up to be transsexuals.
Even if some cases or even most cases are legitimate, to me it just seems too easy for a kid to come to strongly associate a set of traits with a word, any word including "boy" or "girl" and then come to feel like he/she needs to change their physical sex once they learn their body doesn't fit in with which word they prefer to think of themselves as. Too easy for it not to make up at least a small fraction of the cases.
Lastly, gender roles and term definitions have nothing to do with trans-people. As I already pointed out, the scope of the significant gender dysphoria only manifests during puberty.
Then why are people always so believing the kid is really trans instead of cautious about it whenever there is a kid who says he thinks he is a "girl" and she thinks she is a "boy"? The fact that significant gender dysphoria only manifests during puberty is a red light that it's even more likely to be from reasons other than innate gender identity if it happens earlier.
When a young child, like 5 or 7 says they are the wrong gender do doctors currently consider the potentiality of psycholinguistics in shaping their worldview of what things like "boy" and "girl" and "sex" and "gender" mean? Do they consider that words that may seem commonsense to adults sometimes have totally different meanings to children? If not, then this could mean there are an awfully large number of mistakes being made.
By that time gender roles would be primarily focused on ensuring that the child follow their birth sex's roles and they will also have an accurate understanding of what the term boy and girl means.
Um, no focusing on gender roles means it's more likely to lead to things like the child thinks the word "girl" means "wears dresses". As to "accurate understanding" an accurate understanding would be "boy"="male body parts" "Girl"="female body parts". Think about how squeamish parents are about even talking about sex to their children. Plenty of parents will never verbalize to their children that boys have penises and girls have vaginas, and even then it will likely be after all the times they say "boys/girls play with...".
I've noticed the "children can't know any better" argument doesn't seem to apply when a child is cisgendered or straight.
Just a thought.
I think the main reason for this is really just statistical numbers. Homosexual and trans people make up a small percentage of the total population. Hence in any given situation is it assumed that the majority would be cicgendered and straight. Further the very existence of the closet with regards to homosexuality proves that non cis and heterosexual people will attempt to fit the norm of being cisgendered and straight.
Because if the child "makes a mistake" about being cis here they can correct it (as much as any transsexual) with surgery. If the mistake is about being trans and they go through with surgery they can only half-correct it.
Although to be honest, for someone to actually come out as such, given all the pressures to remain in the closet, they should be given more credit for their statement.
Based on that logic whenever someone says they think they are supposed to be a minority race and want treatment since that just seems so weird we should give them more credit.
There are plenty of homosexual and transsexual children who would swear they are normal, simply because they don't understand or know about the meanings of the feelings they have.
Talk about an abstraction. Them saying they think they are "normal" and what that means depends on their understanding of the term in context.
How society interacts with the individual is extremely complex, not a simple society says something and the individual does it or rebels. It's how does the individual perceive(doesn't matter what society says, all that matters is how it is perceived) society and its various parts(such as girls or religious preachers) and in various ways(such as fashion tips even if you don't care what their opinions are on right and wrong or vice versa) applying to various aspects of life and how does the individual respond to it?