However, when I read the article, I felt a bit disappointed. I was expecting the 469 children that are mentioned were new cases, I was expecting they would have made at least a survey in Western children with gender dysphoria and studied if this was somehow related to their past life memories. But in reality those 469 children came from the enormous database compiled by Dr. Ian Stevenson back in his days and the study is merely a statistical analysis of those data. I am not saying this is not important or has no value, but I do say it should be time to start doing things by ourselves instead of keep relying on the work of a person who died over a decade ago. As always, I feel we barely advance.
But let us focus on the article itself. If any reader wants to access the complete article for free and does not know how to do it, he can send me an email. I will tell them how. Another option is go to Foro Reencarnación and search for the thread where I spoke about this article for the first time. Luckily I have it in the public section so that everybody can have access to it.
An interesting piece of information the article shows is that gender nonconformity is nonpathological, and its prevalence estimates reach 3.2% in boys and 5.2% in girls. In regards to the causes behind it, it is known genetic and environmental factors play a preponderant role, but the precise nature of those factors remains to be elucidated. Among the environmental factors we can have social factors as parenting style or parent-child interactions, or biological factors, such as prenatal testosterone exposure.
Here is where children who remember past lives come into play. Many of these children remember lives of persons of a different sex, and a part of them show a behavior typical of gender nonconformity. In the article it is studied which is the association between the sex change and the apparition of gender nonconformity. Subsequently it is described in all detail how the statistical analysis was performed, something that is difficult to comprehend even for those of us with some knowledge about statistics, so we will go straight to the conclusions.
The association between type of past life memories and gender nonconformity was highly statistically significant. Eighty percent of subjects with sex-change memories exhibited gender nonconformity, compared to only 5.8% of subjects with same-sex memories.
In order to dismiss the possibility that parents themselves associated the presence of gender nonconformity in his child with a possible past life (for instance a relative of the opposite sex recently deceased, a relative who died from injuries that match birthmarks in the child, or cases where there have been previous announcement dreams), more studies were performed, and it was seen that gender nonconformity had no relation with birthmarks or announcement dreams. It was also seen there was not a statistically significant association between gender nonconformity and a positive attitude of the mother towards the fact this nonconformity could be originated in past life memories.
I literally reproduce the study’s conclusion:
My opinion.
For me the relation between gender dysphoria and recalling a past life of a different sex is clear. I have seen it myself in numerous cases of people I have met along the way, since I started to move around forums and research reincarnation seriously. I also have a certain degree of gender dysphoria, as I have always felt closer to certain attitudes we would consider “masculine”.
That said, I don’t know very well which are the causes that might give birth to gender dysphoria. In the article, which is already quite complex, only a past life is taken into consideration (possibly the most recent one, or the one the subject remembers with more detail). I remember many past lives and even so I consider I have gender dysphoria in a certain degree. The explanation we give to this in our circle has to do with the possibility that the gender we identify with would be no more than a preference, the same way you can feel more affinity with a nationality, or the same way you may like spicy food because you had a past life in India. What determines those likes or preferences? My theory is that certainly genetic and environmental factors (hormonal, but above all, neurochemical) have an influence. But, the question is: how are these factors originated? What operates in the formation of a new body so that certain likes or preferences are transmitted from a life to the next? There is only a possible answer: the soul. But, what is the soul? I would reply: it is the essence, the matrix, an energy framework, of subatomic particles ultimately, which somehow must bring the codified information that makes up our innermost self. There is where we keep our experiences, therefore we know how many times we were male and how many we were female, and we know what influence had each gender in our experiences, making them positive or negative. And that is what determines that in a future life we will prefer being a man or a woman, and we will feel comfortable or not with the sex that was assigned to us. Perhaps there is also a reason to choose that sex (if we indeed can choose), perhaps it is theoretically better to live the experiences we want to live, but even if this is the case, you can’t prevent your preference will still be the opposite.
Anyway, I think we always reach the same dead end: while science doesn’t determine what the soul is in reality, which is the real nature of our essence, we will keep stuck on a too materialistic vision of reality. In my social networks I often see people arguing about feminism and factors that make a woman to be a woman and a man to be a man. I think they are quite confused, as they don’t keep into account a fundamental part: our spiritual part, the one that can’t be measured by chemicals or hormones or environmental factors.