♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: tonight, we continue our exploration of the magnificent human brain with a look at gender identity and the biology of the brain. gender identity is a person's subjective experience of their own gender. it may or may not correspond with the sex assigned with them at birth. the term transgender describes somebody who feels his os hr her body and gender do not match. about 700,000 transgender people live in the united states. one of them joins me today to share his experience. ben barres is a professor at

stanford university. he lived and worked as barbara barres until he changed his sex to male in 1997. also here, a group of scientists -- norman spack of boston's children's hospital, catherine dulac of harvard university, melissa hines of the university of cambridge, and janet hyde of the university of wisconsin at madison. i'm pleased to have all of them here and to begin this conversation with my colleague eric kandel. what are we going to talk about? eric: we will talk about gender identity and the biology of the brain. this is a marvelous topic and i like it particularly because it shows how brain science can be a liberating influence in our life. as we understand the biology of our own gender identity better and become more comfortable with ourselves, we become more empathic to somebody else's gender identity. we can understand it at age 9 10, a person says i am in the wrong body.

we really can sympathize with them and understand what is going on. but, this is not only an interesting topic, it is an unbelievably timely topic. when you and i first began talking about this six months ago, it was not on the radar screen. we were ahead of our time. but now, you cannot pick up an issue of "the new york times" or "vanity fair" without having a discussion of gender identity. charlie: 17 million people watched the diane sawyer interview. eric: what we can bring to bear on this subject is not only a deep discussion of psychological issues, but what the biological underpinnings of that is. when we begin to talk about the biological underpinnings, we want to distinguish, as you already implied two different , kind of concepts. anatomical sex and gender identity. anatomical sex is the body parts associated with sexuality and reproduction.

gender identity is a more subtle, complex image where a sense of one's self is a male female or something else. anatomical sex is determined not surprisingly by our genes. genes are ancient chromosomes and we have 23 pairs of , chromosomes. we get half from our father and from our mother. 22 of these are called autosomes. the difference between the father;s's and mother's contributions are real but modest. but in the sex chromosomes, the difference is quite profound. women are xx and men are xy. the chromosomes are really quite different than the autosomes. they have a very important function in determining sex. let's begin with a y chromosome and see how that determines the sex of the male.

we are born with an undifferentiated gonad that could develop into testes or ovaries. if there is a y chromosome there, it has a region in it which is called the sex determining region of y. that contains the gene that activates the differentiation of the undifferentiated gonad into the testes. if that gene is not there, you have an xx, a female gonad develop. each of those have profound consequences. let's look at the male testes. the testes developed within the first seven weeks in utero. it it matures, the testes releases a massive amount of testosterone comparable to the level you have in puberty. that is responsible for giving you the male body form, the brain characteristics of male

function and also every aspect of your being. if the region of y is not there if you have xx, you have development of the ovaries. the ovary, in turn secretes estrogen and it gives you the female body form and gives you changes in the brain. clearly, these are extremely important changes. that's the easy part. this is the anatomical part. the more subtle, the more elaborate part is the gender identity. that is why we have brought together this spectacular group of people to talk about that. as you pointed out, we have ben with u s. ben is a long-term colleague. he is a major scientist in my field, in brain science. also in catherine's field. he's chairman at stanford. member of the national academy of science and a transgender person. he made a decision in his 40's

to undergo a bodily change. he can tell us what it was like before when he felt he was in the wrong body and how we feel about. people knew him as a scientist before he went under this change -- they can describe him interacting as a woman and now as a man. we have norman with us. norman is one of the pioneers in the united states of pediatric endocrinology. he can help people make a decision whether or not they should go one with their idea that they are in the wrong body. he has adopted a european strategy and applied it into the united states of postponing puberty subtest -- puberty so that they actually want to do and make the decisions in an intelligent fashion. the reason he wants to delete puberty -- delay puberty, is

because once puberty forms it is a more radical procedure than before. we have catherine with us, an old friend. she is interested in how sexes are presented in the brain and she found in mice, amazingly that in the male mouse there is a representation of the female. this is not a completely novel idea. freud suggested we are all bisexual and that is one aspect of the sexuality matures and the other one remains. you pointed this out -- there are men with female components and women with male components even in adult life. we have with us melissa, who is interested in how kids differ -- boys and girls -- in the games they play and interacting with each other. she is interested in how hormonal levels affect a child playing the games they get involved with.

we have janet hyde. she is interested in seeing what are the differences in cognitive capabilities between men and women in computer science, mathematics and engineering. her data suggests that there is very little difference between them. as i have gotten to know janet and little better, i think that is incorrect. the more i speak with her -- she majored in mathematics -- i have come to the conclusion that women are superior in mathematics, engineering and computer science. either way we have a fantastic , program. [laughter] charlie: let me begin with ben. tell us what led up to your decision, how you carried forward and the impact it has had on your life. ben: i think my experience is pretty typical for other transgender people.

i think i was only about five years old when i had strong feelings that i felt more like a boy and i was born as a girl -- barbara. i played with little boys, i preferred boys toys. i remember dreadfully wishing i could be in the cub scouts and boy scouts. every halloween, i would dress up as an army man for as a football player. i felt like a boy. as i got into middle school, i did start to feel more and more uncomfortable with it. i did not feel i should have breasts. i do not feel comfortable wearing dresses, makeup, jewelry. it became increasingly uncomfortable when i got into high school. i started to be teased more by kids. i just had a lot of confusion about my gender and i felt very ashamed. i never spoke with friends or family about it at all once. charlie: no one? ben: i felt very ashamed and confused.

it was the days before the internet so there was not a lot of information about this sort of thing. as i got into my 20's, i was doing well. i was doing well in my career. i was doing medical training and research training. but i was increasingly uncomfortable. like many trans people, i started to think about suicide. i never actually attempted it, but i thought about it a lot. i drew a picture of me back when i was barbara. i was 30 at that point and a bridesmaid at my little sister's wedding. i could still remember vividly just the agony that i felt, the discomfort putting on that dress, wearing jewelry and makeup. after 30 years i still remember , that. anyway, i did complete my training and begin my job at stanford. two years into that, i developed breast cancer.

i was very confused about my gender identity, but i knew i did not like to have breasts. when the doctor said he had to do a mastectomy, i said while he were there, please take off the other breast. he was quite horrified by this. perhaps it was the first one i shared with my feelings about gender identity. ultimately he did agree to remove the other breast. i cannot tell you how therapeutic that was. i felt so relieved to have those breast removed. a recognized it was a different response my mom had. when she had her mastectomy, she thought it was a huge blow to her femininity. after the surgery, the doctors talk to me about reconstructing my breasts. i was absolutely horrified. i said, there was no way you are putting those things back on me. it occurred to me that there was something different about my gender.

it was only about a year later i was reading the san francisco chronicle when i read this article about the life of james green, an openly female to male transgender person. i realized for the first time in my life that there were other people that had gender confusion. that there were other people like me. i went to see a sex change pioneer at stanford. he ran a gender clinic. after the evaluated me, they told me they thought i was transgender and offered me the possibility of changing my sex. which was immediately was irresistible to me. within weeks, i decided to change sex. i already had the upper surgery. i did not want lower surgery. i just needed testosterone. you can obviously see the effects it has had on me. it is powerful stuff. one of the interesting things

about the testosterone is it became harder for me to cry. male to females report it becomes easier for them to cry. that was perhaps a surprising experience. i think the main experience i had was i just felt after i changed sex -- it is hard to describe the intense relief i had. like this intense weight off my back. i have been so much happier. i have never had another suicidal thought. i have to say that at the time i had been a scientist at stanford for several years, i was very worried that changing sex could alter my career. this was 20 years ago. i have to say that everybody, all of my colleagues and friends and family were supportive and i have been fortunate to have my career continue and have lots of wonderful students and support. i guess the other thing i would like to say is i think the other surprise after changing my sex

is i found living as a man has dramatically changed how people react to me. i can tell you a story about an experience that happened to me shortly after i changed sex. i was invited to give a seminar about my research at m.i.t. and one of my friends told me after i gave the seminar that one of his colleagues was talking to him about the seminar. he said gee, that ben barres is somewhat better than his sister's barbara. [laughter] ben: i think that experience points out something that all of us trans people -- we have lived life as both genders. we all share and intense anger at the different ways society treats men and women simply based on their gender. i think in general i think we would all say that in society --

men are competent until proven otherwise and women are considered incompetent. this creates terribly unfair barriers for women in science. i'm am trying to promote some of my time to help women and their careers. charlie: let me turn to norman. listening to that story i assume , it may be typical in terms of somebody questioning to looking for solutions and the experience of the reaction after you have changed. what does this say about gender identity? norman: i wish we knew more, charlie. we certainly know it when we see it. i want to show you a very powerful example of two identical twins who, in this case, one of the male twins -- we have proven these twins are indeed absolutely identical and born male. but one of them at age three

started to say everything about being a girl. in fact, if there was any issue that came up, she turned it into an issue of gender. she did some of those things that we consider hallmarks like preferring to wear female underwear and pajamas, etc. and by the age of seven, the family decided, with the help of a counselor, to change her name to a female name and to have the child assume a female role. here is twin sister with twin brother at the age of just about 9-10 years ogf age. so, they are in fourth grade.

what i want to point out is if i switch all the attachments to them, the earrings, the clothing, the hairstyle, the shoes, you could basically switch one for the other. the fact of the matter is that kids with their clothes on are virtually interchangeable pre-puberty. their hormonal levels are virtually at that point interchangeable. everything happens, really at , puberty. here they are at age 14. now, because it is so difficult to live in a gender different from your biologic sex, when you have the toxic effects of your genetically hormone driven puberty, which would make twin sister looked exactly like twin brother.

you can see that she still looks like an 11 or 10 year old. and there is a good reason for it. she has had her puberty suppressed. the next slide shows the level of sex hormones across the human lifespan. look at the blue line which is the male level of testosterone the hormone that ben was receiving and some of us make. but, during fetal life especially in the mid trimester, the level of testosterone in a fetus rises to a level close to the full adult range. then it falls, and then there's another blip up after birth, a kind of second puberty. then things go completely dormant. if they did not go dormant, we would have a whole bunch of puberty looking fifth-graders running around because everything is suppressed.

eric: when we are thinking about possible causes for transgender, ben and i spoke about this before, wouldn't it be possible there is some kind of aberration in testosterone secretion during development or shortly thereafter? norman: it is certainly possible. it is a very dynamic stage. we still don't know what that second bump is after birth or what role it plays or whether boys are born without testes and show any differences because of that. the problem, eric, is that when you want to look at a hormone we want to measure it. you cannot get it out of the brain. the other problem is sometimes it is not the hormone level that is important but the affinity of the receptor for the hormone. and it is very difficult to measure such things. eric: it is a very fascinating

biological problem. to see what is the biological underpinning of transgender identity. it is so important because kids who were in the wrong sex, their incidence of suicide attempts is very serious. norman: it is one of the highest risks of any. eric: it is something we need to understand. norman: in the puberty process this system reawakens again. the system that has been awakened in utero comes back in which hormones hitting the pituitary causes the release of other hormones that strike the ovary or testes and cause the release of what we call the sex steroids, which are testosterone or estrogen mainly. those produced the differences between the body of the male and female which is associated with puberty.

so, we have been able to, since 1980, block the release of the hormone from the hypothalamus to the pituitary. once you do that so far upstream, everything downstream goes down to zero. we have a record of this medication being completely successful in shutting them down until the appropriate time and also the fact it is completely reversible. look how revealing this is because the twin sister affirms the female identity and the puberty blocks two years to get more time for counseling without the pressure of body change. that is very important because if we are going to give her estrogen, that will have permanent effects. take a look at what will happen to her if she was not given the blockade. she would look exactly like twin brother. he is in early puberty, but so would she have been because they are identical.

here are the twins at age 17. at age 14, just after that picture was taken, she began estrogen. at the same time having her male hormones blocked. with that, our patients do not need breast surgery when they feminize because it is so effective. she is now entering junior year high school, as is her brother. she is absolutely fabulous. this past october, the dutch , who taught us this reported , the first follow-up of the patients -- 55 whose puberty was blocked and sex steroids were switched. the dutch all caps surgery at 18 at which point they are gender dysphoria their total

, uncomfortableness with their gender disappears. the dutch found that the kids treated this way were psycho socially functioning as well or better than at the control group. the dutch gave me their protocol in 2006. we started using it in boston children's hospital at which , time we were the only major major medical center to do so. but we are not that many years since 2006 and over 40 programs now. so, it is now becoming the standard of care. ♪

charlie: let me turn to catherine and talk about whether this is wired. catherine: as we've just heard from ben and norman, humans have a strong sense of their gender identity, and this is a critical component to our individual identity as humans. in animals, as in humans, males and females display clear differences in behaviors. mostly but not exclusively related to sexual and social behaviors. for example, males and females have a very distinct sexual and aggressive displays and we see in the previous episode that

mothers of females are maternal and males are attacking the pups. how are these differences established and maintained? the basic mechanisms in which the brain controls the gender specific behavior cannot be studied experimentally in humans. instead, my laboratory is using the mouse as a model system. mice display clear gender specific behaviors. the mechanisms by which the brain controls gender specific behavior in the mouse can be studied using all the model tools of modern neuroscience. molecular neuroscience and genetics. scientifical behaviors, particular sexual, aggressive and parental behavior, are extremely maintained across different animal species. that suggests the brain control of those behaviors is also very maintained.

in contrast, the signals that trigger these behaviors are usually extremely specific of a given species. for example, in the species of birds called the american flicker, there is only one sign that matters to trigger gender specific behavior, and that is the black mustache on the face of the male. so, if you remove the black mustache from the face of the male, just masking it, then the other males will attempt to copulate with the male because they will assume it is a female. similarly if you paint a mustache on the face of a female, the other males will attack it because they will assume it is a male. so i have a mustache, i'm a , male. i don't, i'm a female.

mice, in contrast, use a very specific set of factors called pheromones. humans are particularly sensitive to visual and auditory cues. a fact that has been exploited very successfully by the pornography industry. once we know the signals that trigger gender specific behavior, we can look into the brain. how was the brain processing these signals and establishing these gender specific behaviors? as we have heard from norman, in young males, there is very important release of the steroid hormone testosterone and this release of testosterone , has been shown to be essential to masculinize the brain. in contrast females do not have this.

in males, testosterone is essential to establishing and maintaining the very specific set of certain underlying male specific behaviors. females organize their brand in a different way in order to control female specific behaviors. we have performed a number of genetic experiments that show that the situation is a little more complex. the experiment we did is actually very simple. we looked at thermo detection which is indicated by this little cross on the structure of the brain. so here is the femur mutant.

-- female mutant. black is male. the female is putting on a very male specific sexual display. this female is exhibiting a male typical behavior. -- contained in the presentation of male and female behavior. in females, the mail circuit is repressed by the ferret model system. -- pheromone old system.

the female circuit is normally request. in the mutant we observed, what is happening is that the repression of the opposite brain -- opposite sex does not exist therefore the female now is able to display both male specific behavior and female specific behavior. similarly, the mail is able to exhibit both female and male specific behavior. >> this is so beautiful because it really provides a way we can begin thinking and exploring a transgender identity, if in fact we have the circuits of both constant behaviors, you can see how this could contribute to wanting to be another junior -- gender. this is profound. >> i think as eric mentioned,

the brains of males and females are largely similar. specific hormonal and genetic regulation leads to the predominant but not exclusive display of the behavior of a given sex. this is extremely important, because animals occasionally need to display the behaviors of the opposite sex. we have seen that males are occasionally able to display parenting behavior in minimum million species, and similarly -- in many mammalian species. and similarly females displayed male behavior in a sign of dominance. the brain has been shown to be bisexual in fish reptiles, now in mice, and we think that this ability to have to go between the male and female brain could be relevant to gender identity.

charlie: i am going to turn to melissa to talk more about defining gender identity. melissa: i studied the role of testosterone and gender development. we studied to genetic conditions that cause people to have either higher or lower levels of testosterone during. in all development -- during prenatal development. evidence from those people suggest that testosterone in humans also influences gender development including gender identity. to start, it is useful to put this into context, to expand our understanding of the dimension of gender related behavior. we talked about anatomical sex and gender identity, which is our sense of self as mail and female -- male and female, but also people have sexual orientation. this refers to our erotic interests in males and females,

or for some people both or neither. finally there is a third class of behavior called gender role behavior. these are the other characteristics that differ on average for males and females. among these somewhere bigger than others. the biggest ones are seen in childhood toy and activity preferences. the second image shows the sex difference in height, and we are all familiar with this -- males tends to be taller than females, but there is some overlap. males are blue, females are orange. where they overlap is people who wouldn't know their gender -- where you wouldn't know their gender from their height. the next shows that gender differences in play are similar in size to the sex difference in height. finally, we see the gender

difference and identifying with the male gender. we can see that this difference is even bigger, and there is almost no overlap between males and females. but there are some people who are in the other distribution and these include the people who want to change their gender. how does this come to be? we have talked about the sex differences in testosterone some of which occur very early in life, and this corresponds with a. of very rapid brain development, and so it provides an opportunity for home loans -- hormones to program the brain in ways that might into her across the lifespan, including gender identification. the next image shows data about women who have high levels of testosterone -- had high levels of testosterone before birth and about 2% of women who have very high levels of testosterone before birth in adulthood decide to live as men. you might say that's not be

many, -- not very many, but that's hundreds of times more than those who might otherwise do so. this is increased many times over by being exposed to prenatal high testosterone. the next image shows men who are actually ex-wife females -- xy females. they have testes, but because theyir cells can't respond, they look like girls at birth and are raised as girls, and in adulthood almost 100% want to live as women. >> that's profound, because although we don't really know in the vast majority of the cases what causes the desire to change sex, here we find one create -- one concrete by logical explanation, -- biological explanation. this is clearly a biological

factor. probably with time, we will be able to identify several other ones. >> yes. also going back to the toys children like to play with, when i began the work people thought these different interests in girls and boys were completely socially determined, but it turns out these are all influenced by prenatal testosterone exposure. the next slide shows the toy choices between girls and boys in general versus those exposed to testosterone before birth, and boys spend most of their time playing toys like vehicles -- shown by the blue, and girls spend most of their time playing with toys like dolls -- shown by the orange. the girls exposed to prenatal testosterone are in between. they spent about half the time playing with boys toys and half of their time playing with the toys girls normally choose.

these are different dimensions of behavior, and the influence on gender identity is less powerful than the influence of testosterone on childhood play. that leaves a lot of, perhaps genetic or social, that contribute to gender identity outcomes. finally, this is not just testosterone acting on the brain before birth, but also children who had high levels of testosterone engage in different behaviors, and this has a feedback effect on their brain development, so this becomes an increasing mechanism where their behavior is increasingly masculinized. charlie: thank you. talk about cognitive performance and ability. >> in our culture, we have lots of stereotypes with gender and their abilities. people believe that boys are

better at math and girls are better at social skills and boys are better at spatial performance. those are the stereotypes. what does the real data show? what you see is that the most recent data shows that girls are tied with boys in mathematical performance. many find this surprising, but i have data from millions of people showing this. in regard to verbal performanc e, you can see there is a female advantage, but it's tiny. these are subtle, slight differences. for spatial performance, the difference is larger, favoring males. i am showing you one particular kind of spatial performance which involves the ability to rotate three-dimensional objects in your mind. other kinds of spatial performance don't show this

large of a gender difference. you need this kind of ability if you want to be an engineer, an architect, or if you want to use math to navigate new york city. it is important for some things, but not everything. but i have to say that we get this gender difference in the absence of a spatial curriculum in the schools. as we teach kids lots of verbal skills and mathematical skills we don't teach them spatial skills. these are completely trainable. some districts are now getting the message and try -- and are trying to institute these programs. if we want to do something to foster women getting into areas like engineering, where they are underrepresented, instituting a spatial curriculum might do a lot to help. i also want to emphasize the importance of cultural context in shaping these gender differences. this is the percentage of phd's

awarded to women in the u.s. by decade, beginning in the 1890's. it turns out -- i didn't know this -- it turns out that even in the 1890's, 11% of phd's and math were going to women. it eases up into the 1930's, and then the percentage plummets in the 1950's. only 5% of the phd's are going to women. then it has been inching up ever since, so that today 31% of the phd's in mathematics are going to women. why did it plummet in the 50's? those were the 1950's, right? men came home from the war, women were delighted, they moved to the suburbs and had babies. there is not a single force that causes women good enough -- to not be good enough to get a phd in math, it has more to do with cultural context.

this led me to propose what i call the principle of gender similarities, which is that males and females are actually similar on most psychological variables. you saw it for math and verbal performance, which are widely stereotypes gender differences. this graph shows essentially what the gender similarities hypothesis is. we have the overlapping distribution for males and females, and you can see there are huge overlapping areas where males and females are similar. let me turn now to looking at psychological disorders, because for some we get very lopsided gender. a show's, so on the left part of this graph you can see disorder

is where many more men than women are affected -- autism and alcoholism. that's not to say we don't have women now collects, or girls with autism, but it is a preponderance of males. if you look on the right, we can see depression and the eating disorder of anorexia -- here we have a preponderance of women shown in the orange bars. we do have these lopsided gender ratios, we wonder why those are. i am mostly familiar with the research done on gender difference in depression. we can see that this is not present in childhood, but it begins to emerge between 13 and 15 years of age. as you can see, the orange bar is going up there. it widens between 15 and 18. gender differences in depression emerge in adolescence. ♪

♪ charlie: let me go back to this idea of how society is responding because we know from the cover of vanity fair, the new york times, time magazine did a cover story, which i'm told was the biggest -- second-biggest selling time magazine that year, right behind

the pope. >> it's unfortunate that's exciting -- that society considers transsexuality to be a mental illness or in moral. -- or a moral choice. because of this, transgender people are often denied rights and subject to violence. in many states transgender people can still get fired for being transgender. as we have heard today, the brain has an eight circuits that determine our gender identity, so being transgender is not a choice that i made, but it's how i was born. i should mention something we haven't really brought out yet, that there is a broad spectrum of church -- of transgender people. some of them choose not to change sex or even identify as male or female, but for some of us there is cap -- there is a compelling need.

to deny that possibility. 40% of us commit suicide. that is why i suggest that for transgender teens to avoid this agony -- >> i think students -- what role do you play? what is it that you can provide? >> that's interesting, catherine. just in recent years i have been amazed by how many young lgbt students -- young scientists are reaching out to me. every time i visited the university to get a talk, i often get e-mails in advance from young kids very concerned about weather coming out will harm their careers area they often want to meet with me and talk about this. i always advise them not to be open -- to be open as they can.

they're always going to be a few people that are ignorant, but never let other people define who you are. charlie: what should parents do? >> i think the first thing parents ought to do is sit down and take a deep breath. [laughter] and realize that the prepubescent child is in a state of exploration. it is no accident that both boys and girls go to the boy toys and the girls toys in kindergarten. this is not gender identity expression, by and large. this is almost always a general -- gender role play, which is normal for children. of children who are fairly

persistent in their cross-gender play, but are prepubertal, only about 20% will go on to be transgender. 80% will not be. what i would say to parents is that if your child is getting close to puberty, or worse, is already in and is showing this kind of behavior, particularly underwear wearing binding breasts, etc., then you need to get help for that child fast. that may be calling your previous attrition -- pediatrician and asking for a gender specialist to meet with your child, because a child who holds on to the belief that they are in the wrong body at the onset of puberty feels like

pinocchio becoming a donkey. they may well take their life. these are the kids who are the real deal. charlie: over the series, eric you and i found a range of things that we traced to the brain and understood that some levels and cases -- what we understood about what was taking place within the brain was large , and in some cases small. where do you put this in terms of understanding what is going on here i go eric: we are at the early stages of understanding what is going on. this points out that number one there really is a biology. it is challenging and extremely fundamental. our understanding is very modest. we have talked about this. many have asked charlie and me how long it will take before we had a satisfactory understanding of the brain.

our perception has been a century area and we have been a lot of -- we have made a lot of progress, but we are a long way from really understanding the brain system. >> gender identity is so essential to who we are. i think we have a duty to be able to provide some type of explanation. there is something really important, too, which is to understand that it is not all black and white. >> i think it is important to remember that differences are not disorders. i am proud to be transgender. i think that different brains drive perspectives. the real question is why society thinks that male brains are better brains. >> i think one thing that would be interesting to see is, as you function in a way you are

comfortable with, it has freed you up. has it increased your creativity? >> it released a lot of mental energy that was devoted to confusion, and then feeling suicidal. i would say yes, i felt much at herein productive. charlie: what percent of people also undergo anatomical change? >> we are now in a state of flux about the operations that make us $25,000, which is a male to female gender plastique --gend erplasty. people are waking up to the idea that this is a medical condition. they are realizing that aspects of the care can be covered by

insurance, and it is going to change everything. up until now people had to save all that up to the surgery. it starts from the top down. first you have to not make it a mental illness, you have to define it as a physical problem, which it is, but hiding as being gay was prior to 1973, what freed up starting to people -- people starting to see gay people is not having a sidetrack it -- a psychiatric illness -- it was having it removed from the diagnosis of sidetrack of eric -- diagnosis of psychiatric and mental illness. charlie: thank each of you very much for coming. there is enormous interest as you can see, and the publications -- the publications

are devoting attention to it. also, the conversation that is taking place -- i remember when this subject was introduced someone came up to me and identified themselves as transgender. they said that to me, the fact that it is getting so much attention made all the difference in their life. they felt not so different. they felt like -- they had an appreciation of where they stood, and where their options were. what are we doing next time? >> we are going to continue to discuss childhood development. the consequences of growing up under difficult circumstances -- how does it affect the cognitive development of children, and is this task on from generation to generation? charlie: thank you think all of

you. we will see you next time. ♪

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