I recently met a pair of twin girls at a sports camp. They are eight and have lovely old-fashioned English-sounding girls names. For our purposes, we'll call them Isobel and Violet Worthington. They are both slender and fit. Isobel has medium-brown shoulder-length hair, and wears colorful T-shirts and shorter shorts and nice sneakers, like any American girl playing in the summer.

Until well into day two at the camp, Violet, however, was uniformly thought by just about all the adults present to be a boy. She has medium brown hair, just like her twin sister, but her hair is wavier and cut just below her chin and manages to make her look as male as her sister's longer hair sets off very similar features to look female. Violet wears hers parted in the middle in a loose casual style somewhat reminiscent of the father of Hallie Barry's daughter. She wears oversized T-shirts and bigger shorts, like the guys, finishing off the outfit with partially untied high tops, like a somewhat outdated male rap star. She sits at the guys' table, moves around a lot, checking out one thing and then quickly off to another, like the younger active boys do. And the boys seems to totally accept her as one of them. As I mentioned, we adults thought she was a boy.

We live in a time where the lines between female and male are increasingly blurred. Perhaps more than anything Violet just wants an identity different than her twin, and has chosen this ultra-Tom boy persona to announce her individuality. I certainly think her parents have the right idea, letting her dress and fashion her appearance in this manner. I'm happy to say, that while in another decade, this might have horrified a number of the adults she ran into, we all considered this discovery, that this young person was actually a girl, an interesting anomoly, and then moved on.

I know a trans-gender adult. This adult, formerly male, now female, believes that she was born a woman in a man's body, a birth defect, nothing more, or less, than that. Is this possible? Could such an emotional/mental birth defect exist? What if our society had never developed such strict ideas about female and male stereotypes, would there would be many transgender adults? Did we develop those stereotypes merely because we wanted predictability? To make more sense of a sometimes seemingly random world?  Does labeling and defining our world in the hopes of predicting certain actions and responses really make our life more manageable? In a totally open society, would a feminine male, say, feel completely comfortable acting however he wanted, styling his hair however he wanted, wearing whatever clothes he wanted, without having to take hormones that endanger his entire physical system to be able to start passing as a woman?

Basically, I wonder, is this "birth defect" that gives so many people such nearly unbearable emotional, mental, and physical pain actually a cultural creation?

Maybe time will tell.