Author's Response

It is a pleasure to have had this report discussed by people whose admirable work has been a continuing source of knowledge for me. Several of you know how indebted I have been to you in the past; the others have also now added to my thinking in ways from which I shall continuously benefit. In this Author's Response, I shall not be taking up point by point what each discussant has said, but, except for a comment or two aimed at each of you, will rather generalize these remarks to all.

As different from when we speculate informally together in agreement, I must, for this moment, keep some distance from you whose discussions are physiologically minded. The new animal work and the advances in the laboratories are major discoveries. None of us proposes that they do not—roughly speaking—extend through the whole of the animal kingdom, including man. However, we also know that while many of these findings will apply to humans, this belief is not yet proven. We ought not push the data too hard; where uncertainty lies, we should encourage it and protect it from the attacks of the confident.

Mine has been a simple report. It does not say that gender identity is caused by anatomical, physiological, biochemical, electrical or genetic processes; it does not say that gender identity is not caused by these biological forces. It does not say that gender identity is caused or not caused by infantile experiences (object relations), imprinting (in the ethological sense), castration anxiety or penis envy, identity crises or society's attitudes. (That I do believe that all these may contribute to the development of gender identity was not the subject of this paper.) The paper says that I unexpectedly found, among all the

patients I have ever seen with or without aberrations in their masculinity or femininity, those whose gender identity turned out differently from what I would have expected.

What I would have expected. This is an “I” who expects to find that:

1. Biologically normal men hav