So, was a while in rabbit holes this weekend. Won’t go into many details aside from the tangent I did want to post about. Essentially, someone elsewhere is referencing the studies on how AFABs with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH, intersex condition, elevated prenatal testosterone) exhibit more male-like than female-like preference for things-vs-people, and note this as an argument for why this preference largely is not culturally driven. I wanted to place somewhere online a relevant counter-argument to this claim from the recent CAH literature itself, especially interesting because of how it also pertains to transness.

See thus this paper from out of Melissa Hines’s lab: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26833843 where they have an absolutely gorgeous setup; they design gender stereotypes for neutral actions or objects by having actors stage it in front of children. It works: children will mimic the behaviour of the same-sex actors and later, for example, note they prefer a green rather than silver balloon beause the one or the other is for boys/girls. At least some conditions randomized. Essentially this demonstrates a tendency to absorb gender stereotypes and apply them to oneself that is independent of the content of those stereotypes, in line with what Cordelia Fine suggested in “Delusions of Gender“.

Now, for the CAH AFABs, they recognize and can accurately recount the created stereotypes, but they reproduce them significantly less than all other tested groups. So prenatal hormonal exposure does something which determines to what extent a person learns from role models from the one or the other sex, which seems awfully much like a component of gender identity that has nothing to do with the specifics of gender roles and stereotypes by themselves.

This then is interesting for two reasons. First, it casts doubts on whether one can actually conclude from CAH thing-vs-people preferences that that is not culturally mediated. It may just be that CAH AFABs tend to be less receptive to social signals to act like girls or women. Second, it is relevant in trying to understand some examples of mechanisms that may be operative in forming trans identities.