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From the endless list of ways we can grow to misperceive ourselves and the outside world, I extract one I have been studying: distortions in the development of masculinity and femininity (gender identity). I have tried, in working with people with the grossest disturbances in this development, to find clues to some of the factors also present, but less obvious, in more normal people. The impression reached so far will not startle you: to the observer who studies origins of behavior in neurophysiology and psychodynamics, all identity—behavior and belief—is illusion.
However, by majority vote, we accept as correct our opinion that a male is distorting reality when, while acknowledging his body's maleness in all its parts, he nonetheless says he is a female. How that comes about, and how similar is the process by which the rest of us arrive at the conclusion—defined by the majority of us as not illusion—that we are, say, males in a male body, is the subject of this paper. By the time I have finished, I shall suggest that we are brought to our conclusion that we are suitable for our bodies by forces as much external to us and beyond our capacity to shift (even by unconscious decisions) as those that occur in the bizarre people now to be discussed.