My name is Walter Meyer. I’m a physician from Galveston, Texas. I am an endocrinologist, a pediatrician, a child psychiatrist and a psychiatrist. I’ve been working in the area of sexual behavior since about 1972. The title of my presentation was Sexual and Psychosexual Development.

What are some of the key points of your presentation?
The focus of my presentation was on the difference between sex and gender, and how these two things interact, because they’re not always predictive of each other. Sex refers primarily to the external genitalia, and gender refers to what the person thinks they are, whether it be male or female. Now this particularly becomes relevant in the area of ambiguous genitalia, where the parents can’t tell what sex the child is, and so we do a number of medical studies to determine what the internal and external genitalia are like, and what caused the abnormality. Based on that information, we might then pick a gender to raise the child. What time has told us is that sometimes our choices are wrong – that if the gender is picked, let’s say a female, of a masculinized female infant, and we pick the gender of female, some of the females grow up to be males in gender identity. This even happens more when males have ambiguous genitalia, and although they’re XY, they make testosterone, they sometimes will grow up and not consider themselves as male. So it’s very important to keep these two concepts separate, and what this has led to is a big controversy as to what to do when a child with ambiguous genitalia is born, whether or not operations should be done in the first year of life to convert the genitalia to the chosen gender that the parents and the physicians choose for the child, or whether very little surgery should be done until the child gets old enough to choose their own gender. This is a raging debate in the United State and across the world, and I don’t think the final answer is in. Certainly what we do know is the majority of children who had their gender determined by their parents and their physician, those majority of children are happy with their gender. But there are certain vocal minority – significant minority, I don’t want to play them down at all – who are unhappy and then ask that their gender be reassigned when they become adults. The other thing that’s important is that gender and sex do not determine in any way sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is a totally different story – about which gender you like, when you grow up. So that’s separate from gender and sex, and can be all along the spectrum from a very masculine sexual orientation to a very feminine sexual one, and anything in-between, so-called bisexuals.

What have your studies revealed about sexual identity, gender identity, and sexual orientation?
Well there’s no question that most XY individuals are male in orientation, both in sexual development and in gender. And in sexual orientation, most males like females. Likewise, most females, who are XX, will grow up to be happy women in the female gender, with female external genitalia, and a preference for males. But it’s the exceptions that I think this area teaches us something about human beings, and teaches us that there are other determinants of gender in sexual development.

Closing Statements…
I think it’s very important for us to understand the difference between sex, gender, and sexual orientation. These get very confused by our legislators, and I think they need to keep these concepts separate, and not make a decision based on one or the other, but allow people the freedom of choosing their own gender and their own sexual orientation.