Atypical gender development

Gender Identity disorder

• A small minority of males and females experience a mismatch between their bio sex and their gender identity
• Individuals with GID identify much more with the opposite sex than the one they were identified as at birth
• GID is a source of distress and discomfort, it is recognisd as a psychological disorder in DSM-5 
• Many individuals with GID will identify themselves as transgender

Biological explanations

• Brain sex theory
  • Suggests that GID is caused by specific brain structures that are incompatible with a person's biological sex
  • Particular attention has been paid to areas of the brain that are dimorphic (take a different form in males and females)
  • Ning Zhou studied the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, which is assumed to be fully developed at age 5 and is around 40% larger in males than females
  • In post-mortem studies of six male-to-female transgender individuals, the BSTc was found to be a similar size to that of a typical female
• Genetic factors
  • Evidence suggests that GID may have a genetic basis 
  • Coolidge assessed 157 twin pairs for evidence of GID using clinical diagnosis of criteria in DSM-4
  • The prevelance of GID was estimated to be 2.3% with 62% of these cases said to be accounted for by genetic variance. Suggests there is a strong heritable component to GID
  • Heylens compared 23 MZ twins and 21 DZ twins where one of each pair was diagnosed with GID
  • They found that 39% of the MZ twins were concordant for GID compared to none of the DZs which would indicate a role for genetic factors in the dev of GID

 Social-psychological explanations

• Psychoanalytic theory
  • Ovesey and Person have argued that GID in biological males is caused by the child experiencing extreme separation anxiety before gender identity has been established
  • The child fantasies of a symbiotic fusion with their mother to relieve the…