Young children do not have the luxury—or perhaps the burden—of intellectualizing about their bodies. They live in them, and the discovery of what their bodies feel and have and do is among the preeminent fascinations of their first few years of life. It is hard for us to remember what it was like for our physical selves not to feel like givens. What it was it like, for instance, to notice for the first time that one of the most pleasurable zones of our bodies, our genitals, looked different on some people and similar on others. And what it was like to try to piece that bit of information together with all the other powerful messages we were receiving about gender.

Doris Bernstein goes to the heart of this matter in her book Female Identity Conflict in Clinical Practice. The project Bernstein set for herself was to radically reconsider the fact that boys and girls enter the world with different genitals, and to articulate what