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Behavioral Endocrinology

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Submitted By May20
Words 677
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Behavioral endocrinology
Psych 309
March 8, 2016
Assignment # 1

This article had many points that I found to be interesting. One point that was made in the article was that the gender identity along with sexual orientation is permanently programmed in the fetal brain is irreversible (Swabb 2011). To emphasize the point, the authors used John Money’s theory to show how devastating a sex change can result in the long run. Money believed that children could only learn their specific gender roles after the age of one. He spent most of his life trying to prove that gender identity was a result of society, that it was something that would be learned, and not wired in the brain. His famous John/Joan experiment involved a boy who lost his penis due to a circumcision, and his parents chose to raise him as a girl. To everyone’s dismay, after childhood “Joan”, in spite of having hormonal treatment at puberty and therapy chose to live his life and a man, eventually leading him to committee suicide. This shows that social construction does not lead an individual to find their gender identity, that in fact that there is other factors that play. Society has formed an idea in individuals that you can either be male or female. Society has left out people with ambiguous genders. People like things to be categorized; it’s easier for people to process information that way. So of course, it’s would be simpler to assign two genders with no in-between. For example, when infants are born with intersex circumstances, parents are given the option to have their child be “corrected” by surgery to either male or female. Doing this is very risky and dangerous. These individuals that had surgery to “correct” them in infancy, often end up feeling alone and out of place. They feel like they don’t belong in the body that was given to them. This can lead to many problems down the line. For

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