Portia Munson did this first.

We had company recently whose four year-old son first tried on my daughter’s knight’s armor and then wanted to wear her princess outfit. His mother was all right with it the little boy in the glittery dress, but his father was cringing underneath his feigned amusement. I swooped in to divert everyone’s attention with coffee. The boy shuffled upstairs again to play. I hope that he didn’t endure any admonishing comments from dad after their visit…

I guess I get to consider myself uncommonly lucky, though…my parents were very gender-blind when it came to my toys. I distinctly remember having my Barbies drive Tonka trucks in the sandbox.

And to what Luai_lashire mentions about cooking–I find it interesting that, in Japan at least, while housewives still do the majority of a household’s cooking, it’s almost taboo for a woman to cook in a restaurant or any such establishment. Usually the reason is quite feeble such as claiming that cosmetics and menstruation make women too dirty for the job. Huh…

*points up*

I saw that sort of thing a lot while I worked in toys. Girls wanting toy cars, boys wanting dress up clothes, all of that. When I was little I loved Ninja Turtles, but I wasn’t allowed to get the toys because I was a girl. I got Barbies and when I wanted to play with the Ninja Turtles I had to play with my brother’s.

Six06 — That story about your son is fantastic, good for him and good for you. I hope he continues to keep his mind open as he gets older.

he’d come home a bit down after his first day. i asked what was wrong.

“we all sat at a table and were told to color a bear. i was using a pink crayon to color in his ears. two of the boys at my table started to laugh at me and say that ‘Blue is for boys and pink is for girls’.”

“what did you tell them?”

“i said, ‘the rainbow is for everybody.’”

it broke my heart that some kids are conditioned with this sort of color-coding and notions about what gender means. at the same time, though, it made my heart swell to know my child stood up to this sort of mentality.

What really gets me is that people fail, time and time again, to recognize that gender and sex are not synonymous words. Sex is which body you are born with. Gender is a psychological identification. Just like many other psychological identifications, it may be partially something you are born with, but is always heavily influenced by society and your family.

Those who take David Reimer’s case as proof that gender is innate are being stupid, to be frank. Some kids are into cars and fighting and “boy things”, and some are into pink and princesses and “girl things”. The vast majority of us are into ALL of them. But we are taught to lose our interest in the “inappropriate” things, or at least hide them. This is a major factor in gender identification, but it is not the only thing.
David Reimer happened to be interested primarily in boy things. Did his parents discourage that? Did his friends, strangers, etc, discourage it? I don’t know, it doesn’t say anywhere in the article. Even if they did, it doesn’t mean he was “inherently a boy”, psychologically. He is one person. You don’t build a thesis for a phenomenon of human psychology on the basis of one person. My guess is that he was just a kid who wanted to play with cars and army men. That doesn’t have to do with sex.

Take, as an example, cooking. Cooking used to be a masculine thing. Only men were allowed in the cooking professions. Now cooking is considered feminine and “housewifely”, and it’s used as a mark of “girlyness” in men. This is pretty obviously a societal construction.

What really pains me is parents being unable to blur the lines. Why can’t they let their little boys play with pink frilly things and be princesses, while simultaneously teaching them to be proud and unashamed of who they are biologically? These boys (I suspect, and would love to do the research to be sure) are deciding they are girls because we tell them only girls are allowed to be interested in the things they are interested in. Only girls can like pink, only girls can be princesses, only girls can wear skirts and heels, only girls have long hair, only girls get to wear bras and have big chests, even, yes, only girls get to fall in love with boys. So kids decide, if they want these things, they must be girls.

When I was a little girl, I wore pink flowered skirts and grimy tee-shirts with dinosaurs on them, and I chased boys around the playground with worms, and I sang and climbed trees and wore sneakers and jeans and dresses and played with dolls and made up stories about wars and pretended I was a raptor and watched disney movies and the discovery channel and played with boys and girls alike. My parents told me it was good to be weird, and they told me I could do anything whether people told me only boys can or not. They encouraged and enabled me and gave me the support I needed to stand up to the world. They also made the excellent choice of putting me in an alternative school, where it was normal to be strange and I had no trouble making friends.

Until our society gets over gender, stops caring what people’s biological sex is, and lets people do what they want to do, we’re going to continue seeing people try to find ways to fit this phenomenon into a box that allows us to keep our societal structure of gender. And as long as we keep pretending these boxes exist, people who don’t fit our boxes are going to suffer psychologically and physically.

(for the record, I do support the decision many trans people make to get blockers and/or sex changes. I don’t regard this as being like “amputating a healthy limb” as the doctor in the article offensively said, but like getting breast enhancements or a nose job. I think in an ideal world, people wouldn’t be ashamed of their bodies to the point of wanting surgery; but we don’t live in such a world, and if they want it, it’s their choice to make, and we should all be supportive of that)