Gender as a Playground for the Gifted Mind

If you’ve noticed that gender dysphoric people are often pretty bright, you’re not the only one. Though I’ve heard it loads now, the first person I heard expressing this was Lisa Marchiano, in her 2017 blog post at 4thwavenow, “Gender dysphoria and gifted children.” I found it in a search because I’d noticed it, too. Transgender identities were suddenly bubbling up in my circles, especially those with a certain intellectual and creative energy. That’s how I came to be interested in this question and why I explored it at Third Factor, a magazine and community I founded to help meet the needs of people who had that sort of energy.

To understand all the things that can make people reject their sexed bodies, we should look at this energy and the needs it creates.

So what am I talking about when I speak of this “energy?” At least in the United States, the most common term for such people is “gifted,” so I’ll use that label even though pretty much everyone hates it. Their defining quality is a high IQ; beyond that, however, is a basket of traits that many have observed in this population. Professor Francis Heylighen lists them in his article “Gifted People and Their Problems,” but some of the most common and relevant are original, unusual ideas; creativity; powerful reasoning abilities; high sensitivity; non-conformity; feeling different; and outrage at injustice.

Sound like anyone you know? Since you’re here at Genspect, the odds are good that it does. Maybe you can also see why some in gifted education circles say that these traits can feel more like a curse than a gift. There’s disagreement among gifted education specialists about whether the gifted are happier and more emotionally stable than average or not, two stances known as the harmony and disharmony hypotheses (see for instance Preckel et al 2015). There’s evidence in favor of both, as I’ve seen first-hand participating in and running communities that cater to the intellectually inclined. Not all gifted people suffer.

But when they do suffer, their intellectual gifts are relevant to why and how they suffer. This uncommon energy gives rise to uncommon needs.

The Needs of a Highly Active Intellect

The first problem is that the gifted child notices everything. She can also usually tell when you’re lying to her, though you might call it “avoiding things she’s not ready for.” Here’s a true story, about a girl I’ll call “Sophie.” When she was six, Sophie’s parents read her Love You Forever, the best-selling picture book about a mother’s enduring love for her child. Sophie’s response? “But you won’t. One day you’ll die.” Now they can’t read that book without facing weighty feelings about mortality.

Such children are not usually wrong about the unpleasant things they notice. It’s true that Sophie’s parents, and Sophie herself, will die someday. It’s also true that the world isn’t fair, and that it could, theoretically, be made fairer. Certainly most of us would, on balance, like to do so, if we could! It’s charming when (and here’s another true story about a different kid) a seven-year-old asks while you’re sitting with her in the car why all countries can’t be like Switzerland and just not fight wars. But what do you do with such a child? What are you going to do – explain Realpolitik to her and get in a debate about just wars at the next red light?

Here’s a big chunk of the problem: this sort of mind needs to run. There’s an essay that’s famous in gifted education circles called “Is It a Cheetah?” The gist is this: if you take a cheetah and box it into a pen at a zoo where it can’t run at its characteristic speed, is it still a cheetah? Well, of course it is. But it’s not going to be a very happy one.

The problem is that it’s not easy to meet a cheetah’s needs. If you think “giftedness” is only about doing well in school, you might think offering more challenging schoolwork would be enough; but what if the problem is more about the young person’s drive to process all that he’s taking in about the world? What about the struggle to find someone who wants to do so alongside him? But an intimidating cognitive capacity and drive can get in the way of social connection, even if a student understands social cues just fine. Research suggests that gifted girls who aren’t among intellectual peers “may be rejected despite good social skills,” with their vocabulary or general knowledge alienating to their age peers, while gifted boys may reject academic achievement to establish their masculinity and win the respect of their peer group.

Moreover, androgyny is a common trait among gifted and creative individuals. “When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers,” writes the eminent creativity research Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his popular book Creativity (p. 70-71).Unfortunately—and here I’m speaking from first- and second-hand experience—boys often struggle to find other sensitive boys who will not be put off by their soft sides, and girls often struggle to find other girls who want to discuss ideas and challenge each other intellectually.

This thing we call “giftedness” isn’t just about the intellect: it’s more holistic than that. Our intellects and our emotions are intertwined. This is why I talk about their energy. I don’t mean woo-woo energy; I’m talking about another common (if not universal) quality associated with giftedness: a nervous system that seems to respond more, not just to ideas, but to a whole range of stimuli, including emotions. The children who grapple with mortality too early and who set out in elementary school to solve the problem of war are not just intellectually but emotionally energetic. This is admittedly difficult to be around, for parents, for peers, and for the students themselves. It takes practice, and it takes the right people with whom to practice. The fact is that most people just aren’t going to want to expend the sort of energy that these cheetahs are driven to put out.

What the Internet Offers a Gifted Teen

Now, though, we have the Internet, and this changes everything.

On the Internet, these kids can find other cheetahs and take off running. After a life of feeling different, they can find others out there who feel the same. After being aware too soon of all those weighty world issues, they can unite with others struggling under that load. As for all those ideas they have about how to fix the world, well, now they’ve got kindred spirits to cheer them on, and even to unite as activists offline, if they possibly can get a critical mass together. And of course, the Internet gives them a fighting chance here, too. (Notably, the Internet doesn’t offer so much in the way of reality testing these ideas, but never mind that. It’s a relief just to find someone to run with!)

But there’s a catch. To find your tribe, you have to search for the right thing—the thing that others like you are coalescing around. It need not be a perfect fit; it just has to be something to search for, a hashtag to stick on your posts so people find you. This energy fuels many a subreddit or Discord, from men’s rights to spirituality to the mutually radicalizing subcultures of the teenage left and right.

If your intellect and emotions are activated by feeling like an outsider, though, it’s hard to compete with “gender identity.” Type in “am I trans” in Google and see what you get. If your results are anything like mine, you’ll see a lot of nebulous answers that will resonate with intellectually, creatively energetic kids who are trying to find an explanation for why they’re different that doesn’t involve the arrogance—or worse, privilege—of a label bestowed by teachers and defined by test scores or verbal abilities or (shudder) an expectation of high achievement.

At the same time, becoming a leader in this world allows the intellect that chance to run. Keeping up with the gender lingo makes good use of that high verbal IQ, as does mastering the nuance of genderflux vs. neutrois. But, crucially, this language does offer the young outlier a chance to vent those emotions and try to express something she hasn’t known how to express. Myers-Briggs, an old standby of digital identity exploration, hardly stands a chance. Witness young people declaring (so often that it’s a trope repeated by gender specialists) that “I just didn’t have the words before.” Suddenly, they’re handed an acceptable narrative to explain why they’re different.

Understanding and Guiding the Gift

The obvious question is this: Is this narrative going to point them in a constructive direction?

As the Genspect crowd knows, too often, it does not. I posit that for many, understanding the role of this intellectual energy—this giftedness—may hit closer to the mark, if only they knew that giftedness wasn’t just about needing harder school work. As Katherine Burnham, a detransitioner, wrote in Third Factor, “Rediscovering my giftedness (I don’t love the term, but what else is there?) was a paradigm shift; I was looking at myself in an entirely new light, reassessing everything I thought I knew about myself.”

But there’s a problem: by calling attempts to explore the reasons for gender dysphoria “conversion therapy,” we bar people from talking about the depths of an experience that I’ve only begun to prod in this short article. Given the over-representation of the gifted among the gender dysphoric, there’s a strong need for gender exploratory therapists who understand giftedness, its ensuing needs, and its impact on a young person’s sense of self and sense of belonging. To help these clients, those therapists must be free to explore the impact of this intellectual energy.

I’ve spoken to multiple experts on giftedness who share these concerns. All of them are reluctant to speak on the record for reasons I will not need to explain to you. To be sure, plenty in gifted education disagree with me. They’ll argue that gifted trans kids are doubly marginalized and that gifted kids might be more likely to recognize their uncommon gender identity precisely because of their gifts.

Suffice it to say I’m skeptical. It’s possible I could be wrong, of course. I’m all for having the conversation. The problem is that the conversation isn’t allowed.

I also recognize that any solution to gender dysphoria won’t be as simple as recognizing giftedness, even when it’s part of the answer. But it is relevant to the broader conversation. As many before me have noted, giving therapists this information—and then making sure they won’t lose their license if they explore it—is a sine qua non if we care about the well-being of gifted people.