Falcon (imported) wrote: Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:01 pm
I'm a bit concerned about this boy's age ! Ten seems inappropriate for this site.
As reassurance to the concerned members here, Puberty Prevention Club is a sex education book produced by the Sexual Health Network (
www.sexualhealth.com), a consortium of sexual health professionals and sex researchers. Their site has everything from data on sexual development through the life span to sexual toys for sale. Their great FOUR volume handbook, Sexual Health has an introduction written by Dr. David Satcher, the Surgeon-General of the United States under Bill Clinton. The group is completely legitimate and I know and have talked with or worked with many of the chapter authors in the handbook. I will be having lunch with David Satcher next week....
To give a better feeling of the nature of the group, here are the beginning paragraphs from Volume 1, Chapter 9 of the Handbook:
Gender Identity. From Dualism to Diversity
Dallas Denny and Cathy Ann Pittman
Almost from inception, the sex of an expected child is a subject of conversation and speculation by friends, coworkers, and family. When the baby is born, the first words spoken by those in attendance will nearly always be, Its a boy! or Its a girl! The infant will be assigned a sex, male or female, generally as the result of a hasty visual inspection of the external genitalia (Kessler, 1988, chapter 3).
These assignments of sex will in most cases last throughout life and will have a profound effect on the way the individuals are treated by their family and society (Cooper, 1999; Mercurio, 2003). The children will be given names, and gendered pronouns will be used accordingly. Their assigned sex will determine almost every aspect of their lives, including the clothing they will wear, their playmates, their speech and behavior patterns, and even their hopes and dreams. Rigid expectations will be placed on their interests, their career, and their sexual orientation and behavior (Burke, 1996, p. xv).
For most of us, this assignment of male or female seems natural and easy. Our bodies match our internal sense of masculinity or femininity, and our families and societies reinforce our own beliefs. We feel confident and secure in our sense of being male or female, and we assume others are similarly comfortable with their own sex of assignment. For some people, however, sex assignment is problematic. For any of a variety of reasons, their sex of assignment does not match their inner views of themselves. The rigid expectations placed on them by society can and do cause external conflict and inner pain.
In this chapter we talk about the development of the child in the womb, the assignment of sex at birth, and what happens thereafter. In particular, we discuss gender identitythe sense of oneself as male or female, man or womanand gender role: the expectations society places on individuals on the basis of their sex of assignment. We begin with a discussion of the way in which sex is assigned in American society, and we follow with background information on intersexuality and transsexualism because we use these conditions to inform the ensuing discussion of gender identity and its formation. We include also a discussion of the newly developed term transgender and the community it defines. We draw upon these definitions and discussions in the last sections of our paper.
Sadly, I'm too old for membership now! :O
