Female-typical play, on the other hand, would include dolls, playing house, and playing with other girls. Parents observed and reported various aspects of their children's behavior, which Hines and her Cambridge colleague, Gu Li, analyzed for what they call male-typical or female-typical play.Īn example of stereotypical male-typical play, as defined by the study, would include playing with toy trucks, "rough-and-tumble" wrestling, and playing with other boys. The study includes thousands of British children born in the 1990s. Seeking to improve on this earlier research, Melissa Hines, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, turned to data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. But these have largely been criticized for their small sample sizes, for drawing from children who exhibit what the authors call "extreme" gender nonconformity, and for various other methodological shortcomings. In the decades since, other studies have reported that whether a child plays along traditional gender lines can predict their later sexual orientation. He was influential in the development of the term "gender identity disorder" to describe stress and confusion over one's sex and gender, though the term-and Green's work more broadly-has come under fire from many psychologists and social scientists today who say it's wrong to label someone's gender and sexuality "disordered." The new study builds largely on research done in the 1970s by American sex and gender researcher Richard Green, who spent decades investigating sexuality. "That being said … they're still not answering questions of how these preferences for toys or different kinds of behaviors develop in the first place." The fact that it looks at development over time and relies on parents' observations is a big improvement over previous studies that attempted to answer similar questions based on respondents' own, often unreliable, memories, she says. "Within its paradigm, it's one of the better studies I've seen," says Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor emerita of biology and gender studies at Brown University. The investigation, which tracked more than 4500 kids over the first 15 years of their lives, seeks to answer one of the most controversial questions in the social sciences, but experts are mixed on the findings. The American bioethicist Daniel Callahan, for instance, writes for The Hastings Center Studies (Callahan’s own institution) that “one of the grandest games” in the field of medicine “is that version of king-of-the-hill where the aim of all players is to upset the World Health Organization definition of ‘health.’ ”Ĭiting the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism “meaning is use,” Callahan goes on to rehearse a handful of well-known problems with the WHO definition, including: (1) that it is hopelessly vague (2) that it casts “the medical profession” and “the psychological profession in the role of high priests ” and (3) that it has the potential for misuse in the hands of Savonarola-style moralists, who will simply reframe their agendas in the language of “mental and social well-being.The objects and people children play with as early as toddlerhood may provide clues to their eventual sexual orientation, reveals the largest study of its kind. However, the WHO definition has been the target of criticism in the medical literature since its first appearance in that organization’s constitution in 1948. A Curious Reader asks: What’s the definition of health?Īccording to the World Health Organization, health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” The apparent fullness of this definition carries a powerful intuitive appeal: A comprehensive definition of health should cover all aspects of life, it would seem.