The Fate of Gender: Nature, Nurture, and the Human Future by Frank Browning

Author:Frank Browning [Browning, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General, Gender Studies
ISBN: 9781620406212
Google: BTMgDAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01FA2CJI8
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2016-06-06T22:00:00+00:00

By the early years of the current century, data began to trickle in about the well-being of the children of same-sex parents. A variety of conservative reports, including one from University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus, claimed that such children suffer everything from heightened birth disorders to unstable gender identity in adolescence. And indeed there is plentiful psychological research detailing childhood developmental deficits in broken families where a gay or lesbian parent had been present; in nearly all those cases, however, the homosexual parent had ceased to be a full-time member of the household. But there was a more serious flaw in Regnerus’s research. As with a number of other anti-same-sex parenting claims, several different kinds of family formations were blended into a single category and compared with traditional mom-and-pop families. Single parents who had been divorced following a “coming out” of the other, mostly absent parent were lumped together with heterosexual single parents of both genders, and those were blended with same-sex parents, all of which were collectively contrasted with “traditional married two-parent heterosexual households.” Other critics have cited Freud’s early belief that early gender identity begins to be formed as the child develops a distinct sense of self in contrast to his or her opposite-sex parent. Girls understand themselves as girls when they see themselves as different from their fathers; boys understand their masculinity in their difference from their mothers. Unfortunately for these critics, Freud’s views shifted frequently across his lifetime on exactly these issues of gender identity formation until, late in his life, he wrote that he saw no particular influence, positive or negative, on children raised by two mothers or two fathers.

Freud, however, concerned himself mostly with case analysis of particular individuals and especially individuals who had come to see him because of their existing psychological distress. Nothing in Freud’s work addresses large groups of population or even pretends to speak to general psychological or social modalities. Since the opening of the 1990s, however, several dozen psychologists and sociologists have addressed the consequences of same-sex parenting on a broader scale, and their findings are remarkably consistent. Two major meta-studies, one conducted in Britain and Europe and a second a few years later in the United States, have shed considerable light on the question. The first, published in 2007, is an exhaustive examination of the literature on childhood development and parental gender. Authors Charlotte Patterson and Paul Hastings surveyed the ever-expanding varieties of family structure in the Western world, and they reported one outstanding difference in family structure and childhood well-being: “Children growing up in economically impoverished families are at greater risk of encountering problems in development. These range from poor nutrition and housing to inadequate access to health care to coercive parenting and family instability. Family economic circumstances are related to children’s health, behavior, and educational opportunities, and those whose families have fewer economic resources are likely to suffer on all these counts.” They went on to say that in social settings where racial and gender

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