Warren Beatty and Annette Bening's Daughter Wants Sex Change
Kathlyn Beatty, the teenage daughter of actors Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, has reportedly been living as a man for several years, and now wants to undergo gender reassignment surgery. According to The Daily Mail, Kathlyn's decision is causing friction between Bening, who is said to be accepting of Kathlyn's desire to change sex, and Beatty, who's still struggling to come to terms with it.
Kathlyn, 18, now calls herself Stephen Ira Beatty. She recently graduated from high school in Los Angeles, and when she walked onstage to collect her diploma, she was announced as Stephen rather than Kathlyn. Pictures of the event suggest her father was not at all comfortable with her masculine appearance and insistence upon a new name and gender - he's not smiling in any of the photos, while Bening is shown clapping and cheering.
Kathlyn - or Stephen - attended Buckley, a posh private school in Los Angeles, before transferring to Arete, a school for gifted and troubled children. He'd asked his Buckley schoolmates to refer to him as a boy, and was apparently very open about his desire to be seen as male. In a video on Arete's Web site, Stephen refers to Buckley as "very conservative," and says he loves attending Arete. He's headed to Sarah Lawrence College in the fall, to study Creative Arts.
Perhaps Warren Beatty, a legendary ladies' man who's said to have bedded 12,000 women before he settled down with Annette Bening, worries that Stephen's knowledge of his father's past has something to do with Stephen's decision to leave behind his female identity.
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and congrats to the recent graduate!
Families should be afforded privacy to deal with their own dramas. This should not be a public issue.
I know it was a joking remark... but there's no actual evidence that parental upbringing has anything to do with it.
From Sexual Hormones and the Brain: An Essential Alliance for Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation Garcia-Falgueras A, Swaab DF Endocr Dev. 2010;17:22-35
The fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb. However, since sexual differentiation of the genitals takes place in the first two months of pregnancy and sexual differentiation of the brain starts in the second half of pregnancy, these two processes can be influenced independently, which may result in extreme cases in trans-sexuality. This also means that in the event of ambiguous sex at birth, the degree of masculinization of the genitals may not reflect the degree of masculinization of the brain. There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation.