Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity

by Andrew Solomon

The debate over gender identity was once framed as a nature-nurture divide; nowadays, it’s an intractable-tractable divide, which is equally hard to call. Clearly nature is involved, but the question is whether nurture enables it, whether it can and should disable it. The answers are frustratingly vague. Psychodynamics has proposed a range of contradictory explanations for cross-gender identification; as Amy Bloom wryly pointed out in her book Normal, it’s either absent fathers and overinvolved mothers, or dominant fathers and submissive mothers; it’s parents who encourage cross-gender identification and play, or who forbid and thereby mystify cross-gender identification and play. Some little boys may want to wear dresses because they have brutal fathers who scare them and loving mothers with whom they identify; others may have a condition determined by genetics, brain development, or the uterine environment.