I do not believe that the sense of oneness with mother encourages even a primordial sense of maleness in the first months of life but rather that this oneness with a female mother must be counteracted. Only if a 'mother supports the development of masculinity will the oneness be pretty much overthrown as ego development proceeds. She will do this first because she wishes for and enjoys a masculine son; given that underlying motivation, she will encourage the development of behavior she considers masculine and discourage that she considers feminine, a process going on endlessly all the moments of the day and night. To the extent that she has less than warm feelings for her son’s becoming masculine, she will communicate to him her disapproval of those of his behaviors she considers masculine. (We need not be concerned here with a definition of masculinity suitable to us; what counts is what this mother, as a result of her life history and present dynamics, responds to as masculine in her child.) The precise styles she uses to roward and punish his behavior will shape his disturbances in masculinity, in the same way as other mothering styles shape *3®
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qualities in infants that become character traits in children (for example, 17, 38, 39, 90-93, 95, 96).
If some masculinity develops—and it will begin to show as early as a year of age—then the earlier hypothesized stage with its feminizing capacity will be covered over; and, since the behavioral surface of the infant’s felt femininity does not show up before about a year of age (that is, masculine or feminine behavior is not distinguishable much earlier), then that earlier phase will never be manifested to an observer. To confirm the hypothesis that a protofeminine phase exists, we need an experiment in which a feminine phase of earliest infancy in the male is prolonged enough to be seen and measured. If we find such an experiment, we can look to see what might have been done to create femininity that has persisted long enough for us to observe it. There is one: the transsexual male.
The Transsexual “Experiment”
I hesitate to report these findings one more time, having done so too often (for example, 112, 137, 138, 144, 148), but it will help the reader unfamiliar with the data and hypothesis to review them again, for they are related to factors useful in understanding masculinity and perversion. Condensing greatly, the following describes the development of male transsexualism. (Female transsexualism has, I believe, a different etiology [141], not applicable here.) The first factor in this construction is the need to separate out from the many conditions in which men put on women’s clothes that one I would call transsexualism. Its essential feature is not, as others feel, that the patient requests “sex transformation,” for other sorts of patients do that. It is, rather, that there has been no significant phase in life that either this anatomically normal male or an observer could recognize as masculine. (There are rudiments, built on the transsexual’s
knowledge that he was and always shall be anatomically male and that his mother, who gave him a masculine name, never denies his maleness [148]). Thus, from those days of childhood when any sort of gender behavior makes its first appearance, this boy has appeared as if he believed himself a girl (not a female but a girl). His behavior has always been feminine; and in it there has been no more quality of imitating or acting than in undeniably feminine girls. The behavior in the boys treated, from age four or five* into adulthood, springs from a feeling of femininity expressed as the conviction that one ought to be a female (although transsexuals do not actually claim they are females; they recognize their anatomy as male). There is no effeminacy in their behavior, from earliest childhood on (effeminacy here implies mimicry or caricature, in other words a hostility and envy toward women that has to be minimized or denied; femininity here implies naturalness and no caricature). Rather, transsexuals have a conscious, open, undefended envy, comparable to that of a person born without limbs toward those more fortunate. The naturalness of this femininity is noted by all observers: family, relatives, peers, neighbors, teachers, strangers, and us who observe the transsexual child and adult in our research. By the time these boys are three or four, strangers are already confusing them with girls, regardless of the clothes worn. When playing, these boys wish to do as if they were girls; they take only girls’ roles and are accepted almost immediately by girls when playing girls’ games from which other boys are excluded. As childhood progresses and passes into adolescence and adulthood, the femininity does not diminish, the desire to have a female body persists, and no amount of threat can
*1 have seen none younger, but my colleague. Green, has recently been studying larger numbers of feminine boys, not necessarily transsexuals, for his research (58); four out of forty-five have been ages three to four.
make the transsexual able even to imitate a masculine person for a few moments (137).
The condition is rare, far rarer than the number of patients requesting “sex change.” Perhaps for this reason, theoreticians state that transsexuals are not as those described above. Except for mine, in almost all papers written on male transsexualism, clinical data are reported revealing episodes or long stretches of time in which the patient looked masculine, behaved in a masculine manner, and had heterosexual experiences or overt sexual perversions, and other signs that the femininity was not of the same sort as that reported above. This should be emphasized: almost all men have profound feelings for, concern about, and pleasure from their genitals. These organs are both a direct source of sensations and a confirmation that one’s sex assignment is correct, his gender identity inevitable, and his masculinity valuable. If these positions are threatened, almost all males will set up defenses—but not true transsexuals. They simply do not want, need, or cherish their male genitals, and they make no effort to preserve these organs in reality or symbolically. Perversion, on the other hand, is intensely sought-for, a preferred gratification of those very genitals, not a rejection of them.
Only with the foregoing picture are the following etiological factors present, and, conversely, only with the following etiological factors will one also see this sort of femininity.* I have found the following in all cases that fulfill the clinical criteria given above for male transsexualism; whenever these factors show up in weaker form or when some are missing, the degree of femininity is less, and the patient no longer has the appearance of the classic transsexual.
•There is, however, another type of marked femininity in boys, even rarer, I believe, than that descnbed above, in which the mother consciously sets out to feminize her son, having wished for a girl throughout the pregnancy and having given the boy a bisexual name to mark her wish that he nad been a girl (147).
First the mother. In her own childhood, she had little sense of worth for her femaleness and femininity. Her own mother treated this girl as if she were a neuter; her father, more admiring, encouraged her to identify with his masculine interests. Between early childhood and puberty, the girl so accentuated the masculine qualities that she wished to be a male and for several years dressed only in boys’ clothes, had her hair cut like a boy, and played games only with boys, competing with them successfully and as an equal, especially in athletics.