University students, masked to group
status, judged the physical attractiveness of girls with gender identity
disorder and clinical and normal control girls, whose photographs were taken
at the time of assessment (mean age, 6.6 years).
Each student made ratings for all girls for
five traits: attractive, beautiful, cute, pretty, and ugly. A multivariate
analysis of variance showed a significant group effect. Multiple comparisons
of the significant univariate effects showed that the girls with gender
identity disorder had significantly less attractive ratings than the normal
control girls for the traits attractive, beautiful, and pretty who, in turn,
had less attractive ratings than the clinical control girls.
Girls with gender identity disorder and the
normal controls also had less attractive ratings than the clinical controls
for the trait cute. Correlational analyses showed that age was substantially
negatively related to the attractiveness ratings in the group of girls with
gender identity disorder, but was considerably less so in the two control
groups. The extent to which the group differences in attractiveness were due
to objective, structural differences in facial attractiveness vs. socially
created, or subjective, processes is discussed.
Citation:
Arch Sex Behav 1996 Feb;25(1):17-31 an article
published on the Internet by PubMed <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/>
