Sandra Pertot
Bad old days
When my parents were married in 1945, my mother’s best friend couldn’t come to the wedding because she was obviously pregnant at the time and it was considered socially inappropriate for her to be there.
This embarrassment about our sexed bodies and how they relate to reproduction meant that children were taught nothing at all about normal bodily functions such as menstruation and ejaculation, and the process by which a baby was made was a well-kept secret from not only children but older adolescents as well.
It made first menstruation and first ejaculation terrifying for many pubescent children. What did this mean? Were they dying? Boys had the better deal because most learnt that the ejaculation process was quite pleasurable, whereas girls were left dealing with the bloody mess with uncomfortable sanitary pads and often painful cramps.
Adults also suffered from this embargo on discussion of sex and reproduction, which left some couples with no idea what to do and how to do it: many women had no idea that the penis could become erect, many men weren’t sure where to put it. When I began practice as a clinical psychologist in the early 1970s, I saw many couples who had ongoing sexual problems from the trauma of their wedding night.
Over the years, sex education thankfully improved, and effective contraception allowed couples to explore sex for pleasure without the threat of an unwanted pregnancy. The classic book Where Did I Come From?, first published in 1973, gave parents a clear, age-appropriate explanation of how babies are made, with illustrations that were sensitively drawn.
All about trans
But now, unbelievably, talking about how babies are made is once again fraught with a range of social, ethical and political judgements. In today’s world, transgender issues get far more attention than sex education. The first requirement is to deny any association between a person’s sex and their stated gender, which makes any discussion about sex somewhat challenging.
The book recommended by trans advocates, What Makes a Baby, for ages 4-8, is likely to give a young child nightmares. It is described as a “gender-neutral, inclusive picture book explaining where babies come from that works for every kind of family”, without relying on traditional gender assumptions. There are no humans portrayed, instead there are figures that look like ghostly apparitions floating in the air. No genitals, and no description of intercourse, instead:
“When grownups want to make a baby, they have to get an egg from one body and sperm from another body … When an egg and a sperm meet, they swirl together in a special kind of dance … When their dance is done they are not two things anymore …”
Even an adult might find that confusing, so I shudder to think what a child takes from it.
The same focus on gender rather than sex is the dominant feature of a book You-ology: A Puberty Guide for Every Body recommended for older children. It is determinedly gender inclusive, puberty is described in terms of the function of hormones rather than related to the sex of the individual:
“During puberty there are hormones that tell your body to grow faster, hormones that tell your breasts or testes (also known as testicles or balls) to start growing, hormones that tell your hair to sprout in new places, and hormones that cause new smells to creep out of your armpits” and “during puberty, most girls and kids like Oliver start to develop breasts”.
The main message is clearly to reinforce gender beliefs, and like the first book, it avoids any clear explanation of how babies are made.
Blurred lines: Gender ideology confuses young children. This discussion features therapist Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, lawyer Vernadette Broyles, and paediatrician Dr Nikki Johnson of the group FAIR in Medicine, which combats the distortions of identity politics.
Indoctrination
The personal development programs of earlier times covered a range of topics, not just sex. They certainly weren’t perfect and had an agenda that was pushed: the sanctity of marriage and protecting the society from immorality. However, in my view the current programs are just as alarming and potentially damaging.
Many parents are concerned that programs across Australia are teaching a point of view that is highly contentious, yet attendance at these sessions is often mandated and complaints from parents are dismissed.
The National Respectful Relationships Education Framework is a guide for Australian primary and secondary schools and school systems to plan and deliver “age and developmentally appropriate, evidence-based and expert-developed respectful relationships education”. Each state can adapt the guidelines for their own education system. As a result, there is variation in the programs developed by each state.
Victoria is one state that has taken a politically motivated framework for their personal development and sex education program, presenting trans ideology as uncontested facts that all students and parents are expected to embrace without question. This approach denies any suggestion that an individual’s gender identity is based on their biological sex. The two essential, non-negotiable tenets of trans ideology are that if a child says they are trans, they are, and that gender derives from an internal sense of self, not body characteristics.
One of the contentious issues is the use of “inclusive language”, which has the determined goal of breaking any sex/gender connection. For example: presenters are told to avoid “gendering anatomy” because “not all boys have penises, not all girls have vaginas: Instead [one should] use: bodies with penises, testicles, bodies that produce sperm, bodies with vaginas, uteruses, ovaries, bodies that menstruate, etc”.
Contempt for parents
When parents express concern about any aspect of the program, for example that 5-year-old children are being taught that a person’s sex and gender are not necessarily the same and may change over time, they are labelled “reckless” and “irresponsible”.
In Victoria, the Parents of Adolescents with Gender Distress (PAGD) group disagrees with the approach taken by the Resilience, Rights & Respectful Relationships program:
“Our issue with the Victorian ‘Resilience, Rights & Respectful Relationships’ (RRRR) materials, particularly the components dealing with gender is that gender identity and ‘transgender’ in particular is not only presented as fact, but also as a complete state of being that requires no other explanation than a feeling about one’s body parts. The RRRR program components that address gender identity are dangerously simplistic and fail to address the complexity of our children, particularly the impact of neurodiversity on identity development.
“[We protest] the failure to acknowledge or hear concerns about damage inflicted on some of the most vulnerable students in the system, the complete lack of accountability or evidence of benefit after years of implementation and millions of dollars, and the utter arrogance of dismissing parental concerns as “resistance and backlash.”1
Add to this the education policy in some states that allows a child to be socially transitioned at school without the parents’ knowledge and consent, and it is understandable why so many parents are challenging the assumed authority of the government to take control of the child’s understanding of sex and gender identity.
Gender evolution
Early human survival required a practical division of labour. Since only women could bear and nurse children, they were often tied to camps, leading to a specialisation in the gathering of food and childcare. Men, who lacked these physical constraints, generally specialised in hunting and defence. Over time, different societies assigned different expectations and values to these gender related roles. An issue frequently overlooked is that the availability of safe and effective contraception allowed women to participate in society on a more equal basis, leading to a merging of social roles and expectations.
So how does “identity” develop in an individual? Is it innate and immutable as trans advocates claim?
What is identity? One resource states:
“Identity refers to our sense of who we are as individuals and as members of social groups. It also refers to our sense of how others may perceive and label us. We develop ideas about our identities and the identities of others through our interactions with people close to us, like our family and friends, our schools and other institutions, the mass media, and our encounters with other individuals …Our ideas about our identity are also influenced by the social groups to which we belong.”
Captive children
Cases of people raised in a race different to their own demonstrate the power of group influence on identity. During the colonial era of US history, many young white captives of American Indians fully assimilated, came to prefer Indigenous communal life over European society, and frequently resisted returning to their biological families when found. Only young people who were past adolescence at the time of capture hated their captors and sometimes risked their lives to escape.
A humanised chimp
I have thought a lot about whether to use the following examples, but I am doing so to make a point central to the argument about the interaction between biology and society.
Lucy was a chimpanzee adopted in 1964 by psychologists Maurice and Jane Temerlin, who raised her as a human daughter to study nature versus nurture.
It became apparent that because she was never taught chimpanzee behaviours, Lucy believed she was human. When Lucy was shown photos of humans, other chimps, and objects and asked to identify herself, she would consistently point to the humans, demonstrating that she viewed herself as one of them.
This confusion about her identity extended into her everyday life and habits. Raised completely like a human daughter, she learned to eat with silverware, dress herself, and even drink gin and tonics. She reportedly would look at other chimpanzees in magazines and identify them as “others” or “bugs”.
Because she had no chimp role models growing up, she rejected or was indifferent toward other chimpanzees, preferring human company. She was terrified of male apes and sexually attracted only to humans.
When she reached adolescence at age 11, she grew too strong and destructive to live in a suburban home. In 1977 the Temerlins, along with graduate student Janis Carter, took her to a wildlife reserve in The Gambia, West Africa, to rehabilitate her into the wild. Carter stayed in the jungle with Lucy for years to help her integrate. Over time, Lucy successfully learned to forage and bond with wild chimpanzees.
However, her trusting nature proved dangerous. Because Lucy had no fear of people, she was later killed by poachers in the jungle.
So, was Lucy ape or human?
The Kellogg experiment
The earliest cross-rearing experiment was staged in 1931 by comparative psychologist Winthrop Kellogg, who wanted to see if an animal’s genetic boundaries could be completely rewritten by environment.
Kellogg brought a 7-month-old female chimpanzee named Gua into his home to be raised alongside his 10-month-old infant son, Donald. The two babies were dressed in identical clothing, fed the same diet, given the same toys, and spoken to in the exact same manner.
While Gua initially excelled—learning to walk upright, use a spoon, and respond to verbal commands faster than Donald—the experiment had to be abruptly cancelled after just nine months. Instead of Gua becoming more human, Donald began behaving like a chimpanzee. The human infant began imitating Gua’s vocal grunts, barking for food, and biting his parents. Gua was quickly returned to an anthropoid research station, where she died of pneumonia just a year later.
Feral children
A feral child is a young person who lives isolated from human contact from a very early age. They lack human care, social skills and language. The Britannica definition of feral children details how these individuals grow up with minimal human interaction due to extreme isolation, severe abuse or abandonment.
Research into the impact of this experience suggests that these young people may not identify specifically as animal or human but are caught somewhere in between.
What do these cases tell us about identity?
They demonstrate that an individual’s sense of self, including what race they are and, disturbingly, what species they are is not innate and immutable. One publication states:
“Social influence is the process by which an individual’s attitudes, beliefs and/or behaviour are modified by the presence or action of others. This phenomenon is studied extensively in social psychology and includes various theories and types of influence, such as conformity, compliance, and obedience.”
Educators and health practitioners should be concerned about the dramatic take-up of a trans identity by adolescents from the early 2010s, the majority of whom are female. Instead, these two professional groups are party to facilitating the attraction of this identity rather than advocating for caution and sound evaluation.
These professional groups see at first hand the emotional turbulence that young people moving towards adolescence experience. Their search for autonomy and identity makes them particularly susceptible to any newly developed youth subculture. The Raising Children Network says:
“During adolescence, young people are working out who they are and what they stand for. That is, they’re working on identity. Experimenting with subcultures is a way of doing this because it helps young people decide what they identify with. It gives them a way of exploring new values and deciding how these fit with their family values.
“Also, subcultures can offer a set of unspoken guidelines about beliefs, behaviour, clothing and more. Beliefs, behaviour and clothing can be clear ways of signalling identity. They can also give young people a sense of belonging and a way to express ideas. The sense of identity, friendship and belonging that young people get from subcultures can help them feel good about themselves.”
Some of these subcultures are benign—the Goth period, for example—but others pose a significant threat to the young person’s wellbeing. I had direct clinical contact with adolescents suffering from anorexia who had online groups to share ideas and encourage members to continue to limit food intake. In a similar way, deliberate self-harm spreads by peer group contact and through websites that normalise this behaviour as a coping method for emotional distress. These conditions are resistant to treatment and usually involve a team approach.
Unfortunately, the development of platforms such as TikTok, Tumblr and Instagram has dramatically escalated the exposure of young people to discussion about and portrayal of a range of mental health conditions. This has created a new type of identity that has led to a dramatic increase in presentations to mental health professionals, some of whom recognise that the young person does not actually have the condition. The chosen disorders involve behavioural characteristics that can be observed by others, conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; dissociative identity disorder; functional tic-like behaviours; Tourette’s syndrome.
For educators to not only deny the role of social influence in the rapid growth of young people declaring they are trans, but to actively promote it via enforced school-based programs is beyond my comprehension. The increasing number of detransitioners should give those in charge pause for reflection.
Dr Sandra Pertot retired not long ago after 50 years of practice as a clinical psychologist specialising in human sexuality, including sexual dysfunction, sexual orientation and gender diversity.
Personal communication.
Brilliant article by Sandra Pertot. How is it possible that psychology—which, in deliberate contrast to psychiatry, attempted to base itself as a profession on scientific research—suddenly forgot everything ever established about child development and instead ran after the bright shiny bauble of gender ideology?
It boggles the mind, but more than that, it inspires deep mistrust and disgust with our major social institutions.
Surely no parent would indulge their child in such nonsense:
……For example: presenters are told to avoid “gendering anatomy” because “not all boys have penises, not all girls have vaginas: Instead [one should] use: bodies with penises, testicles, bodies that produce sperm, bodies with vaginas, uteruses, ovaries, bodies that menstruate, etc”.