Healthy Parental Influences on the Earliest Development of Masculinity in Baby Boys

This is an interim report on work and thinking in progress. The data that are the source of these ideas require more confirmation, but I feel that the tentative findings may be strong enough that it is not a waste of time to present them.

Although research on gender identity in our Clinic1 has been conducted exclusively on people with marked aberrations of masculinity and femininity, the purpose of this research has been to understand the development of masculinity and femininity in more normal people. Though possessing a body of information to which the contrasting scales of common sense and psychoanalytic theory can be applied, for some years I could not get the perspective into more normal development that severe psychopathology can so dramatically give. Recently, however, it has been possible to observe certain processes at work in families that produce children with severe problems of gender identity, processes that are skewed versions of forces which in happier circumstances produce masculine boys and feminine girls. Although most of these observations confirm what others have long since reported, there are some new findings.

The reader should know the ground rules for this report. First, the question of biological forces contributing to masculinity will not be considered, although this is the focus of much exciting and controversial research. There is still argument as to whether and to what extent biological factors contribute

to masculinity; I will not review the subject but wish only to indicate that my not discussing it here does not mean that I consider it irrelevant.

Second, the data are from a relatively culturally homogeneous group of patients; thus, whatever conclusions are reached cannot be shown to apply to more than white, middle-class Americans of the last 30 years.

Third, there are too few cases for the findings to