> http://etransgender.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=331 :
>
> New research provides more evidence that boys will be boys -- even if
> they're raised as girls.
>
> Eight of 14 sexually malformed children who grew up as females later
> declared themselves to be male, a new study says.
>
> All the children were born with a defect that left them without normal
> male genitals. Surgeons removed their testes, which were inside their
> bodies, and their parents chose to consider them to be girls.
>
> Experts say the findings support the controversial notion that
> environment alone doesn't determine whether humans consider themselves
> to be males or females. "It just shows that nurture is not able to
> overcome nature in many cases," says Dr. Eric Vilain, who studies so-
> called "intersex" children at the University of California at Los
> Angeles.
>
> An estimated 1 percent of babies are born with malformed genitals,
> usually minor problems that can be fixed surgically, such as
> undescended testicles or malformed openings of the urethra. But some
> have a more serious problem -- severely malformed or so-called
> "ambiguous" genitalia. The gender of the child may not be obvious; in
> some cases, the babies appear to be both male and female.
>
> In past decades, psychologists tried to "fix" the children by
> assigning them a gender, even if it didn't match the gender determined
> by their chromosomes. Surgeons then operated on their genitals to make
> them match the assigned gender.
>
> Many intersex children went on to rebel against their "gender
> assignments." In a famous case documented in the book As Nature Made
> Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl, a Canadian boy who suffered a
> botched circumcision was operated upon and raised as a girl. He
> suffered through a tortured adolescence and later chose to live as a
> man and get married.
>
> In the new study, researchers talked to 16 children, aged 5 to 16, who
> were born with a defect known as cloacal exstrophy that left them
> without normal penises. All the children are genetically male.
>
> The findings of the study, which followed some of the children for
> years, appear in the Jan. 22 issue of the New England Journal of
> Medicine.
>
> Two children in the study were raised as boys and continued to think
> of themselves as males. The other 14 had surgeries to remove their
> testes and create female genitalia. They were raised as girls, and
> even their birth certificates reflected their new genders.
>
> Eight of the 14 later declared themselves to be male, and six of them
> said they wanted prosthetic penises. Even the children who consider
> themselves to be females appeared to have some male traits. All said
> they have trouble fitting in with other girls (although none said the
> same about boys), and they reported little interest in playing with
> dolls or playing house.
>
> The findings suggest gender identity "looks to be pretty much hard-
> wired" into the brain, says study co-author Dr. William G. Reiner, a
> pediatric urologist at University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.
> But he adds that environment -- the way children are raised -- plays a
> role, too. "Nature interacts with nurture constantly in ways that are
> complex and difficult to understand. They constantly change each
> other."
>
> So what should be done with babies with the defect described in this
> study? "If there's a question about the child's sexual identity, we
> need to be very careful," Reiner says.
>
> While it may make sense to choose a gender for a such a child early in
> his or her life, "how are you or I going to know what they want until
> they tell us?"
>
> Dr. Melvin Grumbach, a pediatrician and professor emeritus at the
> University of California at San Francisco, also supports caution and
> patience when it comes to untangling questions of gender in these
> children. "It is not one size fits all," he says.