Gender stereotyping: Nature vs. Nurture

As my two little ones start developing their personalities, I find myself wondering how much of a person’s gender is innate, part of their chromosomal make up, and how much is how we, as parents, shape their personalities to reflect societies norms around gender.  Does having XX chromosome make you sugar and spice, does having XY chromosome make you want to play with toy cars and rough and tumble with your mates?

When my granola-eating sister had her first child, a boy, she was determined not to gender stereotype him.  He got both traditional ‘boy’ and traditional ‘girl’ toys.  If he wanted to play with dolls or a tea set he could.  The only things he was not allowed were toy weapons of any sort.  No toy guns, swords etc.

Well, despite her best efforts, he didn’t want any thing to do with the dolls and the tea set and instead fashioned all sorts of swords and guns out of sticks, branches etc.  He was forever shooting you, or wanting to play cops and robbers etc.  Pow pow!  He was a ‘typical boy’, in the way society defines a typical boy.

I don’t want to gender stereotype my children, I am very wary of giving them gender specific labels.  Yet, I find myself seeing characteristics of their personality and labeling them as a ‘typical boy’ and a ‘typical girl.  Adam is physically strong, he is loud, when he is angry he cries, he screams, shouts, kicks and pinches me, he is always hungry and doesn’t want to cuddle.  So much like his father actually, well besides the kicking thing..  Kate is soft, sweet and sensitive.  When Adam cries, it upsets her, her little lip quivers, she screws up her face and starts crying in sympathy.  When Kate cries, Adam couldn’t be bothered.  He is known to sleep through her wails.

As much as I hate to say this, Adam seems like a ‘typical boy’ and Kate seems like a ‘typical girl’, typical as in how society views a girl and a boy. 

Am I limiting my children by putting these labels on them already?  (Coincidentally, I don’t consider either gender as limited or limiting.  Women can and do achieve every thing men do, so being a girl doesn’t and shouldn’t limit you in any way.)  Am I fostering gender specific roles already by dressing them in pink and blue?  Why does it feel strange dressing Adam in pink?

Do we create / foster girl traits and boy traits in our children?  How much of this is just their personality?  How much of this is due to their sex?  How much is what we as parents socialize in our children? 

Is it nature or nurture that defines your gender? 

What happens in your family?

(Perhaps I should ask our resident anthropologist, Lioness, to give us her anthropological viewpoint on this)

Comments

[Beverly]

I've thought about this a lot. Years ago I would have said "nurture" all the way, but then I had a daughter and a few years later a son, and both of them fit gender stereotypes so well that it's hard to argue that there isn't a fair bit of "nature" going on there as well.

I think I started to notice it more with my son, who is very, very different from his big sister despite the fact that I've been pretty consistant with how I've approached parenting them. My daughter had toy cars when she was smaller, but she was never much interested in them except as transportation for her dolls or stuffed animals. My son, on the other hand, will make a vehicle or a weapon out of anything, and uses his dolls as wrestlers instead of babies.

I'm expecting #2 in the middle of the summer (northern hemisphere summer, that is!), and it will be very interesting to see how this plays out with the new little one.

[ankaisa]

You can decide not to give a boy toy guns, but he will make them from sticks or something anyway. So I've decided it is safer to give my DS toys that won't break if he trips while running and punch his eye. I've heard many moms first decide not to give their sons toy guns but have to give up eventually. So I'm guessing it is hard coded in the male DNA and there is little you can do about it.

My DS will play with girls, too, if no boys are available. He will play with boy dolls if girls play with girl dolls and actually has a doll house, but he really doesn't play much with it.

So my opinion is that you can try to give boy's toys to a girl and girl's toys to a boy but the child will decide whether he/she plays with it or not. And probably a boy will enjoy boy's toys best and vice versa. Some things can not be changed!

[juliejulie]

You know, when our little girl arrived, my friend bought her boys' toys and clothes. Although she loves to get dressed up in dresses, bows and shiny shoes, she is quite the tom boy and loves trucks and cars. When pretending, she'll turn everything into trucks.

[Sherry]

Don't feel odd about dressing Adam in pink. I know plenty of grown men who dress in pink themselves. At least if you do it, he can blame it on his mother later :)

I remember my uncle used to get very upset when his eldest son asked for pink (strawberry) milk as opposed to chocolate milk. My cousin wanted pink milk, and his father suggesting that the chocolate was better didn't change a thing!

[Pam]

I have a son who is just like his father. And I mean, exactly. The only thing he got from me is the wrinkle between his eyes when he's mad, and fair skin. He climbs on everything, loves toys that roll, and wants to wrestle all the time (hmm... just like my DH? Perhaps that's how Zach got here!)

I think it's more genetic than anything at this young an age (he just turned one), and it's not until children begin truly interacting socially with others that gender roles are defined.

[barren old crone]

Coincidentally I had a similar conversation with the man I babysit for...I asked him about the difference between raising a girl and a boy (he has a 5 yo boy and a 2 yo girl)...his answer was that it was PROFOUNDLY different.

He is friends with a couple who have two girls; and they were positively MILITANT about gender neutrality in raising the girls. They were offered toys from each 'gender', their clothing was non-gender specific...that is, until they could make their own choices. They INVARIABLY chose the dolls, the pink, pretty lacy clothes, ALL the girlie-girl stuff and totally eschewed any "boy" stuff. Oh how these parents wrung their hands, trying to figure out how they had failed.

My answer is very simple; they did not fail. In the overwhelming majority of cases, our gender is hard-wired in our brains. Easy as that! IMHO that is...

xoxo
vicki

[lynne]

I think a bit of both, nuture and nature but kids do sterotype themselves very early on. I remember at just four years old being told in the playground by a little boy, I couldn't play "areoplanes" with the other boys because I was a girl! As I was a feisty, well grown child I probably thumped him.

Also I used to love taking things apart to see how things worked and inevitably wasn't able to fit them back together again, my mother expressed fustration at this wanton destruction in a girl but approved when my nephews did it as they were "boys".

I'm so glad I didn't grow up smothered in pink though!

[Catharina]

I definitely think that nature and nurture both play their parts in the whole gender specific question. I have a 2yo cousin who I've spent a lot of time with since day one. She loves trucks, cars, soccer, dolls, her play kitchen, etc. Her parents never made a big deal about whether she gets 'girl' toys or 'boy' toys, and I was always very impressed that she was never forced into a specific role and just let free to do her own thing. But now they are expecting a little boy and I have heard several comments like "I can't wait to have someone to play soccer with." and I wonder why they couldnt have played socer with the little girl?
Also, when talking about nurture, it is important to remember that the parents aren't the only influence. Children learn by watching and immitating others and once they have friends in preschool or the neighborhood, chances are that they will want to play with the same things the other kids are playing with, and those things just might be the guns that the mom had never let into the house.
I am not sure where this is going, I guess I just meant to say that I believe it is a good thing to give children their space to play with what they choose and to be the way they are, and if in the end they are a 'typical boy' or 'typical girl', so be it.

[Lioness]

I kept wondering how on earth all these hits came from you bcs this post wasn't showing yet. Assholette. :DDDD I feel so... Goodallian now. [Or I wish.]

I think a lot ab this, especially bcs it's rather obvious most are very uncomfortable w the extent to which we are shaped by genes. Bcs we are you know, to a REALLY amazing degree. Nurture plays a very big role, and the environment can influence even the genes themselves. It's a positive feedback thing all round. But no matter what we do, no matter how we try, well, most boys will in fact be boys, and same goes for little girls. Anatomically-modern man is relatively recent, and we carry the marks of the novelty that we still are evolutionarily (evolution = adaptation BTW, not progress). Women still store fat in their buttocks and hips like there's no (food) tomorrow, men keep a diluted hunting mode that served them so well. Nevermind that it's no longer necessary for most, it's coded into us. I don't see why this should cause uneasiness. It's good that the sexes are so different. It's good that we adopt different social strategies (and inevitable to think that, if women ruled the world, there'd indeed be less violence bcs we're more socially refined, more observant of subtleties, less inclined to go for the literal weapon. We'd verbalise the hell out of our opponents rather than spread his brains all over the savannah.) Education can go a long way into shaping us, we are what is called an open-program species, but the truth is, we come heavily wired, we have different phisiologies, widely different brains, different genomic patrimony. Male doesn't immediately mean insensitive and callous, female doesn't immediately mean all-understanding and delicate. That's where education comes in, showing the male that sensitivity may be an asset and the girl that ass-kicking has its time too. If I ever have kids, and seeing as we come in two sexes, I should hope that the boy and the girl will behave like such, absolutely. Bcs in all likelihood they will be SUCH for the rest of their lives and there is a lot of heartbreak when genetically, to say the least, things aren't clear cut. We have become so PC that we often strive for the absolute amorphous blob - and genetics has shown us that health lies in diversity along defined lines. Besides, the kids will resist it, thereby surprising the hell out of the parents who certainly didn't expect this tiny thing to come so... organised and opinionated already. We all are prejudiced in many ways and we tend to view it as bad. But a bit of prejudice is useful, it's a social identitarian strategy, it helps define US vs THEM and keep the group cohesion. Men don't usually wear pink, women don't usually have moustaches. What, is that so bad? It really isn't.

Mind you, this is all v simplistically put but you know what I mean. I hope. Resident Anthropologist over and out, in the hopes of one day becoming the Resident Vet as well (Oh and I'll see to your yard menagerie for free dahling, of course).

[Lioness]

(Alright, MOST men, unless they're German, don't wear pink. That's more like it.)

[MJ]

I think a lot is in their genetic makeup. I get really annoyed when i hear the age old "men and women are the same and can do the same things" Well they may be able to havethe same opportunities jobs etc but gosh darn it, men and women are different!! And for good reason :)

[Slim]

Only have boys, so who knows? The older one never got interested in dolls, and it's too soon to say what will interest the younger one. Older one has never, to my knowledge, "created" a gun, but I should note that we live surrounded by fellow woolly liberal types, so his opportunities to imitate the behavior of playmates don't include many chances to see boys playing with guns. Similarly, my husband isn't a macho man (he is, of course, very very manly and studly and all, just in a desk-job-holding, doting-father, thinky-guy kind of way), so the guys' model for male behavior is someone who likes to read and who does his share of household tasks.
Cue Christine Lavin singing "Sensitive New Age Guys"...

[Lee]

Yeah, I thought it was all nurture, too. Then I had a kid.

[Jody]

Well, I have a very feminine little boy who loves to wear dresses, has yet to turn one of his toys into a gun, etc. So of course I get the whole "your gender-neutral environment has turned him into a weakling" vibe from grandparents. It alters my take on this whole question.

There have been pretty copious studies done on the entirely unconscious sex stereotyping that people do of babies. Some of it hurts little boys pretty badly. For example, child development researchers did a study where they showed folks a crying ninth-month old baby in a diaper. Some of the videos were of a girl, some of a boy, but the researchers told people a random sex. When people were told they were viewing a girl, they said her cries showed she was lonely and scared. When they were told they were viewing a boy, they said his cries were angry cries.

So given that, I don't agree with Lioness, who says that we come hard-wired for gender. It's simply not possible to be raised in a gender-neutral environment, and our parents send out subtle clues in their responses to us and assumptions about us right from the beginning.

And from an historical and cultural point of view, what is considered "gendered" (for example, a girlish love of pink and frills) is wildly cultural. Folks who adopted from Korea have told me stories about checking their babies on a panic, assuming their escorts brought the wrong baby, because girls were wearing blue and boys were wearing pink. (And in fact, in the USA, up until about the 1930s, girls wore blue and boys wore pink: check out Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Read the dress descriptions in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books.) Up until about 1800, wealthy men wore long flowing wigs and tons of frilly clothes.

I could say lots on this subject, but I don't want to hijack your comments. Maybe I'll add the subject to my to-write list over on my own blog.

[jenny]

Resident Developmental Psychologist speaking up: Yes, genes play a huge part. In blind videos studies of very young babies, where the babies are dressed in yellow so the raters can't tell the gender there are measurable differences in arousal (not sexual arousal you perverts) and activity and such that are statistically significant between female and male infants. However, in other studies it has been found that adults treat babies differently depending on what they think the baby's gender is, even nurses in the NICU. They are slighty rougher with boys and slightly gentler with girls. The adults are not even aware that they do this, the research is based on video analysis. So, although it appears that babies are born with innate differences that are related to chromosomal gender, the adults around them nurture those differences. Are the adults "hardwired" to treat babies differently?

Nuture? Nature? Context? Genes? Environment? As a psychologist I am a bit sick of this question, it is one of those questions we can't completely answer because we can't separate everything out. It is to complicated. It would be unethical to carry out the experiments that would give us clear answers.

The real point is that we want to give our kids every opportunity to play with different toys, have different experiences, and generally not limit themselves because of social or genetic inclinations. Individual differences always tend to be greater then group differences. Sort of like how men are generally taller then women, but that does not mean that there aren't very tall women and very short men.

For the sake of those individual girls and boys who do not conform to gender stereotypes, we try (at least I will) to allow them to be themselves, play how they play and explore their world however they please. As long as they are safe. Trying to force a little sissy boy to rough and tumble with his friends, to play with trucks, act macho, and such will only confuse and hurt him. It will only emphasize that he is in fact different. Usually, kids who are gender non-conformists grow out of it in adolescence. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are effete gay men in the making. Whatever! I say, let them be happy and love the richness and beauty in human variety.

Jenny

[Sarah]

You know what else must be a hard wired boy trait? The ability to make really neat noises - cars and trucks and such. My nephew figured out how to make the most realistic hellicopter noise before he was three years old. No one taught him. Girls seem to only be able to go "vroom vroom."
I don't know what evolutionary advantage this might be, though. Perhaps being able to mimick a mating mastadon was handy for the hunters.

[HelllonWheeels]

I think by giving a boy dolls to play with, and a girl trucks to play with, a parent has done the best they can as far as not stereotyping. You've given them the choice and opportunity, giving them the message that it's okay for boys to play with dolls, girls to play with trucks. After that, I think nature takes over.

[Jody]

Ack! Quick retraction: of course we ARE hard-wired for gender. What I meant was, I don't believe how we express our gender is hard-wired. Expressions of gender are cultural.

Bah. At the end of the day, you're going to end up with a complex interaction between nature and nurture. On the biological side of the argument, there's testosterone, sex-differentiated brain development, probably a bunch of other stuff.

But I know of no one who raises their child in splendid isolation, so the idea that any child lives in a truly gender-neutral environment strikes me as humbug. What I do know is that I'm one of the few parents in our circle now who hasn't started telling her little boy to stop that crying.

[Diana]

Eh, we have a dollhouse, ostensibly given to my daughter. My son plays with it more than she does. His collection of plastic soldiers routinely use it for commando maneuvers. He has toy guns but prefers the ones he makes from sticks. My daughter prefers the guns that are plastic and brightly colored. I was a science major in college, raised by a feminist math major of a mother. My husband was a psych major. I figure it is part nature, part nurture and the ratio in each person varies. Of course, I could be wrong.

[jenny]

I need to add an addendum to my post.

When I say "little sissy boys" and "effete gay men" I say it with much love in my heart and not a bit of uglyness.

I love my homosexuals (and non-conforming male children) and wouldn't want them any other way.

[sara]

I think that its both nature and nurture. I have one of each, and I can see there are differences...

But I think those who say "no, really, we're not encouraging one role over the other" are often unaware of just how deeply the "nurture" side goes.

Studies have shown that couples handed a baby and told it is a boy interpret "his" cries as *anger* almost always. WHen told the same baby is a girl, "her" cries become an expression of lonliness, missing mommy, upset tummy.... So it begins at the very beginning -- boys are "angry," agressive, boyish, while girls are seen as nervous, upset, etc.

This was one reason that I didn't want to know the gender beforehand either time. I'd seen people dealing with my pregnant friends, and it happens pre-birth. A baby known to be a boy is vigourous and kicks a lot -- "Oh, he's going to be a FOOTBALL PLAYER!" An active baby is a girl? "Oh, she's a little DANCER in there, isn't she?" Argh.

And I get an interesting perspective on this not only because I have one of each -- a little boy who loves trains and building blocks much more than he likes his doll or action figures, and a little girl who from the beginning has picked up the neglected people from her brother's train sets and played with them --- but because that little girl is bald as an egg and built like a linebacker.

I dress her in pink and flowers, and people see bald head and strapping shoulders and say "My, what a strong little boy!" People guage their reaction and how they play with my little girl on what they *think* she is, not what she actually likes.

Oh, and she can make just as many cool sounds for her brother's cars as he can... ;)

As for the pink and blue thing -- if one more person tells me little girls are hardwired to like pink I"m gonna scream -- because until the 30's, pink was considered a "boy" color (Pink was a shade of *red*, which was considered too "manly* to put on a little girl... I remember this from an exhibit of children's clothing through the ages at the American History Museum.). The only way that a little girl can decide that pink is a girl color is that she is *taught* that pink is a girl color. The social construct of pink is entirely SOCIAL, and thus it CANNOT be genetic to go for pink and lavender over other colors!

[Moxie]

Well, as usual I agree with what Jody says. Except thatI *have* told my son to stop that crying, and I'd do the same if I had a daughter because sometimes the 3-year-old crying because we can't have ice cream for dinner just gets on my last fucking nerve.:) But I digress.

I don't spend as much time thinking about where it comes from as I do how I want to act and react to gender roles and stereotyping in my environment. I think it's *extremely* important to provide a range of toys and experiences for my son, and I'd do the same for any daughter I had. So he had stuffed animals, a doll (OK, it's still on back-order because I wanted him to have an anatomically-correct one because how strange is a doll with no parts?), cars, trucks, and all the ball toys (which are totally gender-neutral IMO anyway). He had a pink doll stroller to push around on the playground, and he has a bad-ass tricycle. He has an apron for helping us cook, and a workbench his great-uncle sent him. He takes dance class and soccer class. We go to a church with plenty of happy, secure straight and gay men of all shapes and sizes and styles. I don't want him to think that sex and gender are strictly aligned. Everyone tells me he's "all boy," even when he's wearing Mardi Gras beads and an apron. I think they're reacting to the fact that he's quite active and races around all over the place nonstop.

But it perplexes me that some mothers of girls that I know have made comments to me like, "Oh, he's such a brute!" (excuse me, that was your "sweet little girl" who just scratched his face!) and "I could never have a boy; they're just so rough!" (because you never let your daughter climb on the monkey bars because she's wearing a dress to the playground every day. It makes me feel sad for these women that they've assigned such a strong gender role to their daughters that they can't see that maybe their daughters have angry, assertive sides or that they might like to run around and be hooligans.

A book I love is Playful Parenting by Lawrence Cohen. In it he says that the biggest challenge in parenting boys is giving them the opportunity to be sensitive and empathetic, because all the cultural messages they get override that. So at least at home they need to be able to be vulnerable. The biggest challenge in parenting girls is giving them the opportunity to feel angry and strong, since society sends them the message that those feelings aren't attractive.

So I don't think it's harmful to observe the differences in our kids, but I do think it's harmful if we start verbalizing those observations too much (because then the kids think that's who they are completely) or limiting our kids' interactions because of them. (I've also heard the perhaps aprocryphal story of the women who never let her son play with anything resembling a gun, and then one day he chewed his cookie into the shape of a gun.) As long as my son and Adam get recognized for being thoughtful and empathetic and Kate and our dauhgters are allowed to be angry and assertive, it doesn't really matter much who wears pink and who hogs the dump trucks.

[lynne]

I remember reading in Little Women when Meg's twins were born that Demi was clothed in Pink and Daisy in Blue aka Parisian style. I know those books were written around the 1860's and it did faze me as a kid, but I thought it was a typo. I wonder when it changed?

[mijk]

My girl is only 10 weeks so don't know about her but my boy is pretty much how you describe kate. ;-) He is a boy with feminine sides I think. He loves playing with his cars and watching formula 1 with his dad is a favourite thing but very often he puts his cars in bed and sing lullabies for them.He always takes care of the babies in daycare (and now his sister) and he cries when a friend is hurt. Oh I do love my son and am so curious how my little girl will turn out!

Mijk

[Egg Donor]

I don't have kids, but I see some of these things in my friend's children. I think there are elements of nature and nurture at play in differentiating boys and girls. The real problem I see is how those stereotypes creep in as they get older, and the messages they send. For example, I am a scientist. Some studies suggest women come in to elementary school with a disadvantage at science because they are encouraged to take care of things while boys are encouraged to explore things. Boys are encouraged to take things apart and put them back together, a tool that really helps create the scientific mind, while girls are encouraged to play with dolls and dress up (nothing sciency getting helped there).

Then, there are the stories. God how fairy tales piss me off. "Oh, Prince Asshat! Save me Save me!" Yeah. Way to teach your daughter to be smart and independent.

Last Xmas, I found this great (but unfortunately small) site that has a list of feminist-inspired kids books. I've already bought most of them (and read them before they were wrapped and sent off as gifts). They are good stories for boys AND girls (especially the Serpent Slayer, which I gave to my godson - he LOVES it), and I would love to see more parents buying these sorts of books.

http://www.danandjen.org/jen/feminism.shtml

Tertia - the fact that you're thinking about this is a great sign. I don't think the pink or blue matter, but encouraging your daughter to be adventurous and aggressive (in a good way), and encouraging your son to be creative and expressive, is the most important thing to make them end up happy and well-adjusted. You're a great mom, and I know you'll do great.

[Egg Donor]

God...I used the word "great" like 10 times in that post. So much for the quality of my vocabulary within 20 minutes of rolling out of bed :\

[j]

When I was in college (I'm old, so 1981-1985), we were taught that it was all "nurture," that even when we thought we were being gender-neutral, we were not, that there were subtle ways in which we treated boys and girls differently. The "proof" we were given that this was true was the case of the boy whose penis was accidentally cut off, I guess curing a circumcision?, I forget. Anyway, the doctors advised his parents to raise him as a girl, give him a girl's name, dress him as a girl, etc. He was never told that genetically, he was a boy. I suppose as he got older, he must have had surgeries and hormone treatments to make him more female. We were taught that he grew up happily as a girl, thus proving that it was all nurture. Well, years later, this "girl" (finally finding out that she was a "he") wrote a book about how tortured his life had been, how he never felt comfortable in his body, never felt like a girl, and finally found out the truth, and resumed living his life as a man. Debunking the whole theory. Can you imagine how awful his family felt, knowing that they had, on the advice of all these doctors, made their child so uhhappy.

I give my son lots of "girl" toys, much to my mother's chagrin, I think. He had a baby stroller that he used to push around constantly. But he never put a doll in it. He liked to push his Chicken Dance Elmo. I got him a play kitchen, etc. But I certainly dressed him like a boy, and got him some "boyish" toys, like trucks and balls. But I also tried to give him as much gender-neutral stuff as I could. Well, he is all boy. Sure he liked his doll carriage, when he was younger. And he played in his kitchen sometimes. But he also really likes trucks and motorcycles, he loves things that shoot and explode. Now that he has gotten older, he only plays with his kitchen when he is playing with girl friends. I still read him books that are "girly," like Madeline, and Olivia, etc. And he likes them. But he also really likes books about firemen, and astronauts, and things more traditionally masculine.

Now, I have my girls. They are definitely different than he was. But they are also bolder, and more physically brave than he was. They crawled faster, they like to climb, and are more fearless. I think maybe girls get shortchanged when it comes to physical prowess because people assume that they are more delicate, and don't play as rough with them as they do with boys, or are more cautious. I'm trying really hard not to do that. But they also already, at only 14 months, like dolls more than he ever did. They hug their little stuffed animals. He never did that. They are just more "girly." But because he has all the boys toys, they play with things I probably never would have bought them, like trucks and Rescue Heroes, etc. So, we will see. I'm very interested to see the influence of having an older brother on their likes and dislikes.

I think it is mostly nature, honestly, with a healthy dose of nurture mixed in. I try not to worry about it too much. I provide lots of different things for my kids to play with, and let them lead the way in terms of what they like and don't like.

[Christy]

I've got a 3 yr old boy and a 17 mo old girl. With clothes, we have always put the boy in boy clothes and the girl in girl clothes. I just can't dress a boy in pink. And I will dress a girl in blue, but I usually find some way to give it a feminine touch.

But as far as toys go, they are free to play with whatever they want. We've got everything from trucks and trains to dolls and dishes, except for weapons. It's nice to have a boy and a girl so they get to play with a variety of toys.

The boy is generally very rough and rowdy, but the girl also likes to climb and run around as much as she can. As she gets older, I don't know whether she'll get rougher like her brother or if she'll get more "girly" as she has girl friends.

[becky]

I'm an anthropologist, and I say nature for the most part. You look at human societies, and there are tasks that are more suited to men and tasks that are more suited to women. That's not to say women didn't hunt and men didn't gather, but for the MOST part, it's the other way around.

I think recent brain studies are showing us that there are REAL differences in how we opperate! I mean, what woman doesn't know that women are multi-taskers and men have to do one-thing-at-an-excruciatingly-slow-time. I think we can raise our boys to be *more* sensitive, and girls to be *more* aggressive, but honestly I don't know why we want to change the way we are entirely. I think it's beautiful how the two genders compliment one another. As much as I'd love for my husband to spend hours analyzing my feelings like a girlfriend, it's much more valuable to me that he has a different point of view. He keeps me from inspecting my navel too much. And I help him to develop closer relationships with those around him. It's a perfect fit!

Even though I say it's nature, I do believe that if your son wants a doll, give it to him! Your daughter a truck, that's fine! I just think it's an unusal child that bucks the system. They just come prewired for their preferences (for the most part).

[cathy b]

Haven't had time to read all the comments but:

A) What else can you dress them in anymore except pink and blue??? I have been shopping for gifts for my sister's babe, due in July--gender not known, gender they wish to be surprised by when they get introduced--and there are only VERY gender-specific baby clothes out there. Racks and racks of pink and lavender with bows, flowers or butterflies, OR blue and red with tools, sports equipment or airplanes. Then, as an afterthought, a very few sets of very bland-looking, yellow or green stuff that I call "bisexual" baby clothes.

(And pastels! What the hell is it with all the nauseating, ghastly pastels!? The store looks like Easter barfed! Whatever happened to primary colors for kids? I always liked for my kids to look like Legos.)

You know, I think children's wear has been ruined by prenatal testing. It used to be (back in my day...) that most of the 0-6 month clothes was NOT gender-specific.

B) i forgot what my "B" was gonna be.

Gonna go buy a rocking chair and sit on my porch and kvetch,

[Abby]

I have a 6 yo daughter. Until she went to kindergarten we couldn't get her out of dresses. Preferably frilly. And the pinker the better. She lover to play w/her dollhouse, tea set, etc. But...

We have ALWAYS been told (well, at least since preschool) that she was "bossy". She would tell the other kids what to do when they were doing an art project or a game. Heck, sometimes she tells ME what to do-I just happen to be bossier than she is! (where do we think that she gets this from????) We recently got an evaluation from her DANCE school (dance is supposed to be silent, right?) and this was alluded to.

A couple of other things (and then I'll get to my point, promise!). She's very verbal and is usually able to get her point across, even under stress, and still keep it together. She has never had separation anxiety. She has actually told us several times that we can leave, usually 2 minutes after she's entered a new situation. We've had a lot of comments on that. So she's ALWAYS been a very spirited, independant child. Fine by me! Despite the "bossiness" she is a very popular kid. OK, I know, I know, I'm not objective. This is actually what I've been told by her teachers, the parents of other kids in her class, camp councelors, etc. So it doesn't seem to be holding her back.

But (and this is my point) my best friend pointed out the other day that is Kate were a boy, we would probably not be being told that she's bossy. More likey that she is assertive, or a leader (both of which are true). But the older she's grown the more I've noticed people putting her assertivness in a negative light. We have talked to her about being bossy, and how it makes others feel. BUT, I have also said that she needs to remember that sometimes being bossy can be a good thing. I tell her that in my job I have to tell people what to do, and sometimes they don't like it, but it's got to be done. We've talked about women leaders, and how they got there. I don't want her to lose it. As long as it's not keeping her from making friends or anything, I hope she stays like this. It does make for battles, but that's OK w/us. I'm just worried though that, beyond dressing in "boy" or "girl" colors, or playing w/certain toys, how society is going to treat her as she gets older. (Disclaimer though, to say that I'm sure that she'll be fine. We live in NYC, the capital of pushy, which helps! I just think that it's a shame that certain traits that are seen as positive in one gender cen be viewed as negative in the other. And it does work both ways.)

[Lioness]

Jody, so far i don't see how we disagree Gender IS hard-wired, and true, we DO express it culturally and reinforce it in some way, even the most granola of us, every step of the way. Thinking we can escape it is a bit daft since nothing we do is neutral, ever. I'm cringeing for all the other little boys now, poor things.

My host family (I was an exchange student when I was 18) is the absolute Green type. My host brother was never allowed to play w guns or show any violence. Well he went on to join the army, causing a rampant family crisis, and is now a Kommissar and part of the team that deals w aeroplane highjacking and the likes. As radical a life as he could shape. In his case, nurture didn't do a thing, it's almost comical to see. I also know of hunters' children, brought up in the bullfight/violence culture still big in Portugal, who faint at the sight of blood and would rather die than kill anything. So of course they're sissies. Of course.

[cathy b]

Haven't had time to read all the comments but:

A) What else can you dress them in anymore except pink and blue??? I have been shopping for gifts for my sister's babe, due in July--gender not known, gender they wish to be surprised by when they get introduced--and there are only VERY gender-specific baby clothes out there. Racks and racks of pink and lavender with bows, flowers or butterflies, OR blue and red with tools, sports equipment or airplanes. Then, as an afterthought, a very few sets of very bland-looking, yellow or green stuff that I call "bisexual" baby clothes.

(And pastels! What the hell is it with all the nauseating, ghastly pastels!? The store looks like Easter barfed! Whatever happened to primary colors for kids? I always liked for my kids to look like Legos.)

You know, I think children's wear has been ruined by prenatal testing. It used to be (back in my day...) that most of the 0-6 month clothes was NOT gender-specific.

B) i forgot what my "B" was gonna be.

Gonna go buy a rocking chair and sit on my porch and kvetch,

[cori]

I try to give my 16-month-old daughter a range of toys. She wasn't intersted in dolls for a long time, but boy, put some big blocks down and she was all over them. She's gradually become more interested in dolls, but not as much as some of her other toys.

She's in daycare, so I suspect most of her gender-based socialization is coming from teachers more traditionally-minded than we are, but so long as they are not limiting her based on gender, I figure it's going to happen anyway.

We dress her pretty neutrally, mostly for convenience (she tripped on her dress hems a lot while learning to walk). I know that as soon as she's socialized by other kids she may demand pink exclusively but I'm just going to wait for her to ask for it.

[Alana]

At this age I wouldn't call it gender but personality traits. My first daughter was very strong and aggressive and loud when she was angry in infancy whereas my son was content and quiet and loved nothing more than to be cuddled. I called him my little lover boy.Now at age 10 he likes to sneak and play with my lipsticks. (I chalk that up to curiousity more than anything else) My littlest girl loves to wrestle and play rough and get dirty but she also loves her barbies and getting her nails painted.

[Lisa S (& Riley, Bella, & Adelyn)]

I just wanted to chime in as the mother of a boy and two girls. I was shocked to see what I perceived as innate differences between them even from birth.

My boy is my oldest, and I do let them each play as much as they want with each other's things. My son, who is 4, tries to point out that some things are for "girls" or for "boys", even if I try to dissuade him from being closed-minded about it. Even so, he's upstairs watching Dora with his sister right now, and I think he's more interested in traditionally "girlie" things because of the girls, and I'm glad.

I think Adam will be all the better off for having his sister there to show him the joys of girls, and Kate will enjoy the same benefit from Adam.

I'm thrilled that I have both sexes in my life and in my home. I used to worry that I had to try and break down the gender pigeon-holes, and would want to use gender-neutral toys, etc. Now I am interested in celebrating the differences instead of squashing them.

[Carol]

There was just a detailed article on this very subject in Time Magazine, as a result of the Larry Summers debacle. It seems pretty clear that there are innate gender differences. You're just not allowed to say that if you're the president of Harvard University.

My son is only 6 months old, but I notice that his crying is more intense than my daughter's was and he seems to get angry more often. Like if my milk doesn't let down right away when he's nursing, he yells and beats my chest with his little fists. But he's no less cuddly.

[GDawney]

When we first got married, 25 years ago, I had alot of atypical behavior patterns for females, and my husband had alot of atypical behavior patterns for males. We very often had complete role-reversal in our marriage. It was a running joke.

As we have gotten older and have gone through quite alot of healing processes (both of us were abused as children) we are becoming more and more typical of our respective genders. And we are both very comfortable with that. It appears to me that our atypical behaviors were defense mechinisms, and once the need for those defenses were no longer felt, they have quietly faded away.

I am in my mid-forties, my husband is 4 years older than me. I find myself more and more comfortable in the "typical" female role. I am becoming a much better mother to my children (something that I never really wanted to do when they were younger), my desire and ability to nurture is becoming more pronounced. I am more willing to allow myself to be protected, rather than being the protector.

I believe that reason that certain things become labled as "male" or "female" is because certain things are inherantly more comfortable for one gender or the other. I think we were made this way.

I vote for Nature

[cathy b]

Oh, my B) was about Nature vs Nurture:

I think language really muddies the waters in discussions of
N vs N as it relates to gender questions. As Abby wrote in her comment about her daughter's "bossiness," you can take just about any personal attribute and couch it in descriptions that will give it a masculine or feminine spin.

There are traits that each of my sons carry--personality quirks, habits, interests--that are very obvious inheritances from me. These traits, in a woman, can be described in female terms. In a man, they are described in male terms.

One thing I've always appreciated about having two sons (as opposed to "one of each") is that I was less tempted to define one way of behaving as "boy" and the other way as "girl" behavior. There were definitely two distinct patterns of behavior going on in my two kids, but each were related to that child's individuality, not their gender.

(Oh, sorry Tertia--make that behavioUr.)

[Laurie]

I have never posted before and am sure I never will again, but this is a subject I have had many discussions about with friends.
There are 5 of us, and we all had boys first and then girls. Boys and girls are just different. My little girl makes everything into purses. She would pick up my shoes and try to put them on her arms. Anything that will slip onto her wrist works. I just noticed her doing this one day. Trust me, it never occured to me to give a one year old a purse. She demands (and from our experiences girls tend to be bossier than boys-could it be just coincidence 5 times?) that she always has a bow in her hair. This started at about 16 months. I gave up trying to put one in her hair at 2 months because she always pulled them out. My son on the other hand is all energy. He and his preschool friends got heart rings at their valentines party. They all turned them into ray guns shooting from their fingers. He screams, he wrestles, he jumps from the back of the couch to the floor without thinking.
I think that nature is very strong. I mean there are huge differences between me and my husband. I also think that some people who think that there are no differences in boys and girls don't have both. My mother only had girls, and sometimes she thinks my son is from another planet. I keep hearing that boys are easier in the long run, but I keep saying they have to make it to then.
My experience is that kids are mostly who they are going to be. My son is more clingy in social situations, but crazy when he is comfortable. My daughter came home from the hospital independent. She has not interest in being babied. I wish she needed me more.

[Jo]

I vote half-and-half. Or sixty-forty. Or thirty-seventy. A blend.

Yes, there are differences between the sexes. Some are hardwired and obvious from birth -- um, penis? Some, however, *appear* to be hardwired, but are really the result of social conditioning. During the Lawrence Summers thing referenced above, studies about brain differences between men and women get trotted out to demonstrate that look, women do this better with their brains, and men do this other thing better.

However!

Brains change over time! Brain development and connections are influenced by experience! The fact that slight differences are evident between adult male and female brains doesn't prove that we are innately different, it only proves that we END UP different somehow -- and it doesn't tell us a damn thing about how we got that way. Correlation does not equal causation.

Since there is no truly neutral environment, it is impossible to tell what is nature and what is nurture. If I learned anything from anthropology, it's that our own unconscious biases affect our conclusions about other cultures and our own; tasks that seem ideally suited to one sex or another may seem that way because we believe, on a deep unconscious level, that those tasks are ideally suited to one sex or the other.

At the same time, though, I think there must be a component of hard-wiredness. How else do you explain intersex children operated on as infants, who are raised as one sex, who grow up knowing all along that something's not right?

Anyway. I grew up playing with dinosaurs and baby dolls, loved to play grocery shopping and built dams in the creek, caught crawdads and frogs, dissected insects and looked at them under my own toy microscope. With my boy and girl friends I baked cakes and played Arctic explorers. I think the division between trucks and Barbies is an artificial, culturally enforced one, and that a lot of kids, without a cultural push in either direction, will play across the spectrum, with preferences all over the place.

So yeah. Fifty-fiftyish. But it's almost impossible to prove scientifically in either direction.

[Tine]

What an interesting topic. I've only got one (a 2-yr-old boy), so can't really say how my parenting would affect another kiddo (boy or girl). I can say this, though: My son appears to be both "all boy" and "all girl". He's big, loud, rambunctious, and maybe even a bit of a bully. He loves trucks and machinery. But he's also very sensitive and affectionate. His favorite toys by far are his "friends" (a menagerie of dolls and stuffed animals whom he never tires of kissing and hugging and snuggling with). When allowed to choose a new pair of boots this year, he chose pink. And so on. So who knows? I think we all have femininity and masculinity within us. I think balance varies from person to person and can be affected by the opportunities and encouragement/discouragement we get along the way.

[bj]

Here's my assvice: (actually, no advice, so maybe it's just an assopinion? or are there no such things as assopinions, if they're not also assvice?).

I think that statistically there might be behavioral/cognitive differences between men & women (boys & girls). But, I think that there's no way that we can assess that on an individual basis (i.e with our n's of 2) in normal environments. Gender expectations so pervade our own world views & our houses & our friends and families, that it's impossible (unless you're a slightly weirdo scientist trying to do experiments on your kids) to have an environment that is gender neutral.

Therefore, I think it's impossible to tell whether Adam (or my son) are typical boys while Kate (or my daughter) are typical girls. [incidentally, my kids also follow the gender stereotypes].

There's a study out there (which I know only through repetition, and not reading the paper), that if you take two kids (toddlers/crawlers) put them in a room, and let people view the kids, that they will assign "boy" characteristics (like strength) to the child they're told is a boy, and "girl" characteristics (like prettiness) to the child they're told is a girl (regardless of the sex of the child). They'll even over-estimate the weights of the "boy" children to fit with their delusion.

bj

[Bella]

I am a developmental psychologist, and have read lots and taught much about gender stereotyping. The gender neutrality school is dropping out of favor as it doesn't really work. I grew up with all girls, and now I have a son and he is a true boy. He loves action figures, and acting heroic, and swashbuckling (at 2.5)! His first word, after "Ma" and "no", was "bus". He has a doll and stroller, which he plays with affectionately but infrequently, and he is also a sweet, loving, cuddle bug, whose first favorite color was pink (it is yellow now).

My professional advice, is that there is no harm in calling it like you see it and stereotyping, BUT, make sure your interactions with Adam include as much verbal communication as with Kate. A groundbreaking study was conducted with parents of 6-9 month olds. They were told to interact with a baby (not theirs) for five minutes while being observed. The baby used was the same for all parents, but they were told either that the baby was "Joey" or "Janey". Mothers playing with the "girl" baby held her more, talked to her more and had less physical play. Mothers with the "boy" baby talked to him much less, put him on the floor sooner and showed more physical play.

My long-winded point is that your son may be more boy-like naturally, but you want to continue to communicate to him (thereby teaching him how to communicate) as much as you do with Kate.

[bj]

Ooh, cool, I found an article on the web with cites to the toddler/gender stereotyping study.

www.vanguard.edu/uploadedfiles/ faculty/ddegelman/psychproposal.pdf

the article is a proposal to do a study, where pictures of 1 kid is shown, while telling the subject that the child is a girl/boy, and then asking the observer to rank the kid on different traits.

hey, you have the perfect venue to do this study. you can post picts (or little video clips) of adam or kate, and then ask whether we know which one it is, and whether they're acting like a "typical" boy or girl. Ok, might be a little bit too weirdo scientist (I'm trying to figure out how to do it myself with my 2). Of course, you're regular readers can tell the difference between Adam & Kate, so you'd have to start a new, but shortlived blog for us to send our friends to.

:-)

bj

[TexasMama]

I too, have tried very hard not to gender stereotype my son. But sometimes he is most definitely a boy. He loves trucks and construction equipment, and that love certainly seems to be just innate. From a few months old he was fascinated with tractors and later would point them out when I hadn't even noticed them. My sister's girls, on the other hand, never showed any interest in such things.

However, my son does love to play dress-up with his older cousins. They dress him in pink sequins and he delightedly proclaims he is a pretty princess. He loves the sparkly crown they left at out house. And despite my good intentions of not gender typing him, I find myself worrying about it in the back of my mind. I have to repeat to myself that it is normal for 21 month old boys to like pink and purple and enticing glittery objects. And that it is good for him to have this freedom of exploration.

So my point, I suppose, is that it is really impossible to know the nurture vs. nature question. I like to think I do not push him in a particular direction, bu given that I worry when he goes the other dirction, it stands to reason that I am subtly and unintentionally pushing him. Perhapse when he was very little I took more time to point out trucks to him than my sister did to her girls and he grew interested in them as a result. Or maybe I innitially project these interests on him until the become reality. But the fact is that now he loves trucks and he loves pink sparkles. Why and what it means, I have no idea.

[Leggy]

This is an interesting post and interesting comments. I will definitely check out the children's books recommended by Dan & Jen because I get so tired of the wussy females in movies/books.

I have a 4 year old boy how is a total alpha male. Even among his little friends, he is the most stereotypical boy I've ever seen. At six months old, I used to give him to choice between dolls and trucks and he always went for the trucks. Our house is mostly filled with boy-type toys because he doesn't like much of anything else- the few times I've tried to buy dolls for him he ends up offering them to me as presents.

That said he is very loving and affectionate. I try to encourage him to express his feelings, but recognize that his Y chromosome leads him to use his fists more than his words sometimes.

FYI, on the gun thing- I refuse to buy gun toys even though he turns everything into a gun anyway. I wrote about it a few weeks ago- Peacenik Mommies For us, the best strategy has been to explain that guns hurt people and I don't want those kinds of toys in the house. I still allow him to "express" his agressive side but I try to teach him that weapons have consequences.

The other day we played with his knight castle and after the soldiers were done fighting, he told me it was time for them to make up and be friends and that they should have a birthday party for one of the knights. So after all the knocking each other over, we arranged all the knights in a circle and sang happy birthday. It was pretty cute.

[Mollie]

I'm struggling with this very issue right now, since my lovely son, who just turned 4, is becoming more and more of a "boy" every day, and in ways I don't like.

I blame his daycare. When he started out in my care, he was neutral. Physically precocious and agile, but leaning toward the more aesthetic forms of sport. He loved his play kitchen. He loved his dolly stroller and dolls. He played with trucks and trains, too, but was not the least bit aggressive or violent.

At his first daycare, two days a week, he was the youngest and smallest, and the other kids there, about nine boys and girls, hugged and cuddled and babied him. He loved that, being the youngest. And his favourite playmates were the older girls. Even at less than two, he was all over the "playing house and dolls" thing. I was elated. I loved the idea of having a well-balanced male on my hands. My husband is very balanced in terms of gender, so it seemed like a good fit.

Then we moved, and Nico started a new daycare, one dominated by boys mostly his same age. They watch a lot of TV and have lots of crappy plastic boy toys at home, and bring that sensibility in to school with them, so it's all Powerrangers and Ninja Turtles and shit. Oh, how I hate that shit! Anyway, I noticed that his preferences and play changed dramatically after he started this daycare, which is full-time. He comes home super-charged with testosterone-type energy, and calls everyone a "buttcrack." He doesn't make everything into a gun, but likes sword play with sticks. He still isn't a violent kid, but I think his environment really changed him and brought out different aspects of his personality.

Happily, he recently befriended a girl at school who likes to do quieter things like drawing and pretending in a more real-world way. I've noticed that again, there has been a dramatic shift in his home behaviour now that he holds this girl friend in high esteem.

My baby girl is a lot like my son in some ways, but very different in others. At nine months, gender seems a non-issue, but I have to admit, because she is so big and bald, I keep catching myself thinking of her as male.

Oh, and once when he was about a year old, I put Nico in a little outfit I'd bought him in Vietnam, a blue outfit that I thought was a boy's outfit, which turned out to be a dress and panties. He looked beautiful in it, but he only wore it once, because I felt self-conscious putting my son in a dress.

And I'm really evolved! I swear!

[21stCenturyMom]

The public has spoken and you can see that your perception is accurate (I have my own story which I will write up and post - some day). By and large boys will be boys and girls will be girls. What is nice in today's culture is that if a girl wants to be strong, wants to be athletic, and/or wants to be a leader there are people who will actually not marginalize her and call her a tom-boy and decide she is destined to grow up to be a bitter old spinster because she says she wants to be fire fighter when she is 6. Female mathematicians are less likely to have somone look at them and say, "You don't look like a mathematician!" Similarly, if a boy likes kittens, gets attached to a stuffed animal and likes to cook he is not immediately written off as 'queer' and teased to death (at least not by everybody).

The good thing about modern times is that we recognize that there is more depth and variety in a person's innate interests and skills and we are a little less likely to pigeon-hole people based on gender. Not in all circles, mind you, but we certainly have more choices than we used to.

Oddly enough my daughter finds herself in college with people are are ardently arguing that it is all nurture and that boys are not inherently drawn to guns and things that explode. Most of them are, though and it ain't their Mama's fault.

[sandi]

I think that this becomes so much more apparent when you have twins. I have pondered this time and time again as my two are now 16 months old. I have given them cars, trucks, dolls, balls, all gender neutral items. I have g/g twins. Annie is just like Adam, she is rough and tumble, she loves to get into wrestling matches, and she just has a completely different demeanor. Her sister, Kimberly could not be more kind, gentle and nurturing.
I just thought I would share my experinces with twins.

[Pazel]

My 4 year old loves princess stuff. Anything pink and pretty is her favorite. She tells me that boys don't like it. Well, not all boys. Her best friend at school is Armand and he loves princess stuff. She smuggles him princess stickers to school because his parents won't allow him any princess things. She has promised he can come over and play dress-up and has asked me on his behalf if I will paint his fingernails like hers.

Does this mean he's gay? I don't think so. Actually, I'd say that the more the parents try to keep him away from princess things, the more he probably wants them. It's the forbidden that becomes so seductive.

I'm very interested to see what my son will be like. My daugher is very sunny, happy, pleasing, and at the same time very physical. Are there differences?

Part of me wants to say no because saying yes could allow some discrimination. And I hate stereotypes which can only limit a child. It's like the Harvard President who said that girls weren't biologically as good at math and science as boys. This is hogwash, but even IF it were true, putting it out there will mean encouraging boys more when by will and hardwork (nuture) we can overcome some differences in biology. There are women bodybuilders who can beat the crap out of a large population of men. So my tendency is to deny differences as a sort of protection to make sure that everyone gets equal treatment and opportunity.

[Nance]

I have one of each, although it's really too early to tell how much of a "typical male" the boy is going to be.

When my daughter was little, I dressed her in whatever I thought was cute - regardless of whether it came from the boy's section or the girl's section. She had blocks, and cars and trains, as well as stuffed animals and baby dolls. For her second birthday she got a trainset and a fire truck - she was in absolute heaven. Bob the Builder was her hero. And then she discovered Disney, and now she is THE girliest girl that ever was - if it's pink, resembles a princess or a horse in any way, or is covered in glitter/gems, she has radar to hunt it down.

The boy is 8 month old and now that he's showing sustained interest in toys, he goes straight for the trains and the cars. If it rolls, he's trying his best to get his hands and his mouth on it.

It's interesting to me to see the differences between them. Already my son is more physical than my daughter was at this age. His voice is lower, and his personality different. Is this because they're just different people, or different genders? Hard to say - but probably a little of each.

[Kel]

My son, being raised by two women, is such a boy. Trying to just observe him one morning while he was playing with his cars, about 5 minutes into vrooming them around, the cars began to crash violently into one another, sometimes dive bombing from the sky.

In my most even, non-judgemental, just asking way, I asked, "Are the cars mad at each other?" He turned his then 2-year old face in my direction and sighed, "No, they are just playing."

But then, and this is the best part, he does what we call The Unbearly Sweetness of Boys things:

I had to stay in bed after a CVS. And when he has a boo-boo, I've been known to rub my hands together and float them over his knee to "make it better" (when a kiss is rejected as it sometimes is). Without hesitation, he came over to me, rubbed his little hands together and waved them over my chest, saying, "Just relax, this will make it all better."

He loves to cook. Part of it is a general, please let me help thing he's going through, but part of it is that he loves to mix things together. But I know that he lives in an outside world that is very different. In conversations, he'll spout off, "No, boys don't cook..."

It funny that cooking is a feminine or masculine thing. It won't be for him, despite what he hears on the playground. When Nicholas does it, it will be masculine. That means cooking, laundry, typing, playing music, reading books, playing soccer, breathing...

Kel

[Rana]

You know, I don't know how much we can even discuss this without falling into gendered assumptions. Look at, for example, the descriptions of little children who like being loud and playing trucks as "all boy." Does this mean that a boy who likes playing with his stuffed animals is "less" of a boy? No. What it means is that some children like trucks, and some are loud, and some like stuffed animals, and some like all three. A boy who doesn't fit his gender stereotype is not "less" -- he's a different _kind_ of boy. He still has a penis and a Y chromosome, even if he's not as loud as other little people with the same kind of anatomy. Ditto girls. There are quiet nurturing girls and loud aggressive girls. Neither is "less" a girl for their behavior.

I do agree that kids are hardwired at birth in terms of loudness, strength, whinyness, cuddliness, etc. But those things can be shifted slightly if the parents reward and discourage behaviors they like or dislike; some kids grow up to be loud and argumentative because their families show love by arguing; others learn to hide their anger and seethe quietly, or to not show physical affection easily. A loud kid will be louder in the first family than in the second, but will also be louder than a quiet kid in either family.

And none of these things are _inherently_ male or female. If they were, we'd never be able to debate the question in the first place, because the idea of a "non-girly" girl would never occur to us, since such a person wouldn't ever exist.

I guess what I'm trying to say is three things:

a) People are born differently
b) How they act later in life depends not only on innate personality but on how they're taught to express that personality
c) What that difference means in terms of "boy" or "girl"-like is cultural, because if it weren't we couldn't have girly boys and boyish girls -- it would be a biological impossibility. And we probably wouldn't even be able to think of that possibility, except by observing other species.

[mopsy]

I have one girl and four boys.

From the time my daughter was a small toddler she has been entranced with anything pink, sparkly, dolls, babies, playing house, dress wearing, and jewelry. She was drawn to all things labeled as "girly" long before she knew consciously she is a girl.

My three oldest boys will build elaborate guns with their Legos, sword fight with sticks, and they are Thomas the Tank Engine freaks. They wrestle with each other, tackle, and invent physical games. My youngest is only 16 months and he is heading in the same direction as his brothers.

I don't have to jam the little car in his hand or give him something to bang---he just does it with no help from me. When my daughter attempts to play "baby" with him, he hates it and seeks out the boys.

I think parents can overanalyze this stuff...just let them play with the toys they are drawn to. And realize that even if you object to "violent" toys, boys will often find clever and creative ways around this. We wouldn't dream of owning a gun, yet we have a whole arsenal of Lego guns.

I read somewhere that boys who are allowed to explore their feelings of aggression learn to control that aggression in a healthy manner. Boys who aren't allowed to explore that side will someday explode...they don't know what to do with those feelings.

[Donna]

I read a book last year called 'As nature Made Him' by John Colapinto. It was a facinating yet disturbing true life story of identical twin boys born in Canada in the 60's. Both boys were circumcised, however one of the boys went horribly wrong and his penis was burnt off completely. The parents were convinced by an American doctor to bring this boy up as a girl, it was an experiment that had disastrous consequences for not only the child but the entire family. The baby boys name was changed from Brian to Brenda and was dressed in girls clothes and given girls toys to play with, however he never ever lost that instinct inside that told him he was a boy. No amount of reinforcement could convince him otherwise and as a result he grew up rebelious and the family went through a huge amount of heartache. The doctor was adamant that the experiment would work over time and tried to make 'Brenda' undergo surgery to give him female genitalia when he was a teenager. He fought against his parents and the doctor because he knew deep inside that he was in fact a boy. The story has a tragic outcome as 'Brenda' eventually comitted suicide as an adult and his twin brother followed a few years later.
If you have the chance to read this book it provides an informative insight into how children are born knowing what gender they are without any enviromental stimulation.

[Kathleen]

I think psychologists have proven pretty well that we do sterotype babies. When people are shown a baby in a diaper and told the gender, they make assumptions that match that gender, no matter what is actually in the diaper.

Further, my son spent most of his toddler years in a dress and his greatest reward was getting his toenails painted. He now studies ballet and is still a gentle, sensitive child.

It's still stunning to me how many so-called enlightened parents just assume my son is gay. These same parents think it's adorable when their daugthers like trucks and rough play. It doesn't occur to them to concur that their daughter is a lesbian.

We have "tomboys" and...what? Sissys? You can be a "Daddy's girl", which is sweet or a "Mommy's boy", which is a cut.

If my son is gay, that's fine by me. But it's interesting to see how uncomfortable he makes people. I have a lot of friends who loudly declare they wouldn't care if their son were gay, while in the same breath telling everyone in sight that inspite of offering dolls, their son chooses trucks everytime because he is "all boy." It's clearly very, very important to them.

[Mollie]

Kathleen,

My favourite nephew is a bit like the way you describe your son. At two and three, he wanted to dress in his sisters' clothes and play with Barbie. For Halloween, he always chose a character that wore tights, because he loved to wear them, and was not permitted to do so on any other day.

His parents somehow found a doctor (must have chiseled him out of a rock somewhere) who advised them to buy Charlie guns and trucks and forbade him to play with his sisters' toys. He became petulant, agitated, and destructive. It was all I could do not to just take him home with me and call child protective services. I felt that his soul was being decimated.

He loves music, and we've always had a bond there. We became very close, he and I. At one point, around age 10, he became fixated with the idea of having pretty rings to wear on his fingers. Needless to say, his parents were having none of it. I snuck him a Christmas present that year: a box of all my cast-off costume finger jewelry. He was thrilled.

My husband and I have watched this boy stuff himself further and further into the closet, and I do imagine that one day he will have to come out. It's been made so clear to him, though, by his nearest and dearest, that so much of him does not fit his sex, and he must conform to what society's idea of "male" is.

Needless to say, I am worried. He is 16, and I just hope he has the strength and grace to weather the storms ahead.

[Mollie]

Kathleen,

My favourite nephew is a bit like the way you describe your son. At two and three, he wanted to dress in his sisters' clothes and play with Barbie. For Halloween, he always chose a character that wore tights, because he loved to wear them, and was not permitted to do so on any other day.

His parents somehow found a doctor (must have chiseled him out of a rock somewhere) who advised them to buy Charlie guns and trucks and forbade him to play with his sisters' toys. He became petulant, agitated, and destructive. It was all I could do not to just take him home with me and call child protective services. I felt that his soul was being decimated.

He loves music, and we've always had a bond there. We became very close, he and I. At one point, around age 10, he became fixated with the idea of having pretty rings to wear on his fingers. Needless to say, his parents were having none of it. I snuck him a Christmas present that year: a box of all my cast-off costume finger jewelry. He was thrilled.

My husband and I have watched this boy stuff himself further and further into the closet, and I do imagine that one day he will have to come out. It's been made so clear to him, though, by his nearest and dearest, that so much of him does not fit his sex, and he must conform to what society's idea of "male" is.

Needless to say, I am worried. He is 16, and I just hope he has the strength and grace to weather the storms ahead.

[Angela]

Lioness put it very well. I only have one boy, so can't compare male/ female qualities in my home. I have, however, often caught myself saying that Oliver is "such a little boy". I definitely want him to feel comfortable with qualities which we perceive as feminine. From my experience with friends' boys and girls, I have always found the boy babies to be more affectionate and the girls to be more independent (I find the same with male and female cats).

[Carrie Jo]

Mollie, I think as long as your nephew has you in his life, he will be OK for the most part. Sure, he'll have "issues" but having a family member who understands can be a saving grace.

Anyway, I live in the Castro Neighborhood of San Francisco, otherwise known as the Gay Captial of the West Coast. Therefore, gender roles are very blurred around here. And I like it that way. My best guy friend is gay and he firmly believes it is more marure than nurture. He is hispanic, his parents are mexican. Their culture is very concerned with being "macho." He tried to be a normal boy and while he did enjoy stuff like skateboarding, he also enjoyed fashion and looking at the other boys while skateboarding. So, I've often felt that people are overly concerned with gender role out of fear of their child turning out to be homosexual. But ask any gay person and they will tell you that no matter how hard they tried to be straight, they couldn't. I personally believe in reincarnation and children will have an attraction to and an aversion to certain things based on what they did in a past life. I also believe that we are both male and female in past lives and that can have something to do with gender identity. But hell, I really don't know. I know that I was always middle of the road gender-wise. I loved playing with dolls and cars, "boy" toys and "girl" toys. I loved wearing dresses and looking like a pretty princess but I also loved my over-alls and blue jeans, and climbing trees and hunting coyote. As long as your children are able to choose for themselves, you are doing fine by them. Just promise that you will NEVER let any of the men in your life do the comb-over thing should they go bald. ;o)

[Croupier]

I have no idea how relevant any of the stuff I'm about to say is!! At all!! But here goes:

My bestest friend in the entire world is a transgendered man, and we talk about gender constantly. One idea he introduced me to that I truly love is the idea of gender not as a spectrum (with masculine and feminine at opposite ends), but as a sphere with an infinite number of points on its surface, where "male" and "female" are just two points on the sphere. That makes more sense to me than any other interpretation of gender, so it's easier for me to understand the world that way. For example, another pal o' mine has a five-year-old girl who ... well, wants to be Wolverine from X-Men (or, as she calls him, "Yogan!"). I cannot describe how masculine this child is. Is the kid a transgendered boy? Will the kid be content growing up a masculine girl? Eh, we don't know. But we're pretty sure she'll tell her mom what's going on whenever she figures it out.

[Meganann]

As a biological anthropologist I will give this a bit of a technical answer. As far as what is going on chemically and hormonally inside of the little buggers--they are about the same for now. Boys tend to track a little bit larger during infancy, but it is a really small difference. Then, in mid-childhood, they switch and girls are bigger for a little while, which remains that way until the boys catch up at adolescence and generally pass the girls in height and weight.

In terms of the sex hormones, right now they are experiencing about the same thing. Gonadatropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) is released from the hypothalamus and causes the release of lutinizing hormone (LH) and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) from the pituitary gland. LH and FSH in turn cause the gonadal hormones, estrogen and androgen, to be released and facilitate rapid growth of the infant. These hormones are chemically “switched-off” in late infancy and remain dormant within the body until just before puberty.

So, the rest will be social and cultural influence--and unless you keep them in a black box until they are 18, they will experience and internalize (to some degree) gender roles. Since the entire world reproduces gender roles, the kidlets will pick up on it and act in ways described in all those funny anecdotes above. So don't be surprised if they act in gendered ways regardless of maternal influence. The big job for you will be simply modeling a range of behaviours that both genders take part in.

At that point, it might be nice that they are twins, since twins behave more androgynously, in the sense that they are generally less prone to become extremely feminine or masculine. And people who behave more androgynously tend to do better socially than those who behave in extreme ways.

Sorry, my doctoral thesis is on child growth, so I really like to talk about it.

[andrea]

As a mother of a boy and girl I have to agree with you...my son does like wearing makeup and dressing up but generally he is a real boy.

[Kathleen]

Mollie, Your nephew is lucky to have you. I admit, that even a lifelong feminist, sometimes I have felt uncomfortable with my son's very public displays of "non-masculine" tendancies. It's really challenged me. I figured I'd give him his pick of toys (dolls, trucks, etc.) and he'd just naturally pick the so-called boys stuff. It did not happen that way.

Now my son is 12. I'm glad I was able to get out of his way and just let him grow into the super cool kid that he is.

[gkk]

Today I babysat my nephew (as I do twice a week) who is four months older than my daughter. Out in the backyard I watched as dd strapped dolly into the swing while dn took the tricycle "off-road" through the flowerbed. Later reading "Miss Polly had a Dolly" dd pointed at Polly and said "Polly said, dolly sick" while dn pointed at the toys at Polly's feet and sreamed "truck broom broom". My vote is for nature.

[Becki]

Eh. I never tried to do much of anything as far as giving my kids toys designed for boys or girls or both or neither. Not because I'm particularly enlightened, but because my family is so huge and generous that I rarely was the one choosing and buying toys.

My five year old son loves to throw on some Mardi Gras beads and my heels and teach school. My two year old daughter loves to play with his race cars and Power Ranger doll that he's never picked up. They're both funny as hell. I guess I'll just love them as hard as I can and hope they turn out happy and okay.

[Steph]

How can your boy/girl twins BOTH be my daughter?

DD is physically strong, she is loud, when she is angry he cries, she shouts, kicks and pinches me...

Yet she is sweet and sensitive. When I cry or hurt myself it upsets her, her little lip quivers, she screws up her face and starts crying in sympathy.

[wessel]

Tertia, a few years ago, there was a simply fascinating program on PBS about babies born with ambiguous sexual genitalia, and how doctors in the past treated them, vs. how present day doctors are treating them, and the controversies that exist over treatments. In the old days, the doctors would look at the genitalia, and make judgements based on what they could salvage. If the nubbin looked like it could make a decent penis, the child became a boy. If the nubbin looked to be beyond the tranformative powers of the surgeon, the child became a girl.

Now, 20, 30 and 40 years later, they are interviewing those adult children, and boy, are they learning a lot. These children say that they identified with their chromosomal makeup, and when their medically imposed gender conflicted with their chromosomal makeup, there was trouble.

A psychologist studied little boys and girls at play, and showed a videotape on this TV program. He pointed out the differences in male and female type play. Boys stacked blocks differently from girls, and they also enjoyed knocking them down more. He videotaped boys that had been made girls and girls that had been made boys--and guess how they played? THEY PLAYED ACCORDING TO THEIR CHROMOSOMES. An additional complication came into view when a child's chromosomal makeup is ambiguous, like XXY, or XYY, etc.

I, for one, am impatient and bored with the whole gender-neutral androgeny worship we have going on in our culture today. IT IS BORING. It is also stupid (just my always-so-humble opinion.) Men and women are different--let us celebrate the differences. It seems to me that the problem comes in when someone wants to make judgements about which gender is ultimately superior, or when someone wants to prevent a person from fulfilling their potential based upon their gender (men can be victims of this as well as women). We are equal in value, but we are not equivalent in essence.

[Sheena]

As you know, Tersh, it has been a long weekend here in SA (okay. maybe u didnt notice - what with being mother of two and all) so you will have to excuse me for the belated comment below:

BBBWWWWAAAAAHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! Being S. African is never more fun than when you look at yourself through foreigner's eyes!! Excellent pic both of you, thank you for making my day... I havent laughed like this in about two posts of yours...

Ps: I also noticed your new by-heading:- very true, and makes me wanna cry all over again!!!

[Lioness]

Meganann, this seems to be tied together: "These hormones are chemically “switched-off” in late infancy and remain dormant within the body until just before puberty. So, the rest will be social and cultural influence."

But you don't mean it the way it sounds right? (that during that time period it's social and cultural) I don't think we can ascribe differences solely to the world outside or parents. Being born w a genetic make-up, stands to reason it will be shown along the appropriate channels, even if the kid were brought up neutrally. In fact, I was going to post abt the very same babies/adults Wessel talks abt (tnx Wessel), and it seems a bit reductionist to not give genes their due credit. In a way this whole discussion is silly: environment influences genes, genes influence the environment, we are a product of a myriad of their interacting sub-factors, and amen for that.

[Graeme]

Based on my experience, it seems to be very much nature. My daughter absolutely loves her dolls and suchlike - she had a toy car, but loved it not because it was a car, but because it was pink.

Morgan (who is 2), on the other hand, is totally obsessed with cars, vehicles, planes, etc etc. He drives his cars around constantly, and likes taking things apart.

[Courtney]

I agree about the dreck that is out there for dressing kids these days. I refuse to stereotype my 15 month old son into wearing sports clothes, so I look for everything but sports clothes, and don't mind the occasional soccer item thrown in here and there. Don't want him becoming a total jock in rebellion!

But for the dress-up, he has most kids beat, hands down! We do medieval re-enactment, and he has been dressed up since he was 6 weeks old.

http://www.houghtonkeep.com/liam/images/Courtliam1.jpg

http://www.houghtonkeep.com/liam/images/mischief.jpg

http://www.houghtonkeep.com/liam/images/mischief.jpg

(Halloween was a hoot!) http://www.houghtonkeep.com/liam/images/engarde2.jpg

http://www.houghtonkeep.com/liam/images/dad_son.jpg

http://www.houghtonkeep.com/liam/images/hastings.jpg

So you can see, we have been dressing him in many different items, and colors, and styles, for so long, and plan to continue doing so for as long as he lets us. We make all of his outfits ourselves so that they match what we are wearing. I hope he will realize this and let us continue.

As for toys, he hugs his stuffed animals, and especially his talking Winnie the Pooh doll, but it especially fond of his big ball and his little hot pink soft hammer toy.

Frankly, nature or nurture, I can't tell. All I know is I want my son to grow up and be himself, what ever that self may turn out to be. And I want him to be happy as that person.

[Sara]

We had an experience with daycare that was almost the reverse of Mollie's, but still shows that outside influences can play a part as well.

My DS started off at a family daycare run by a wonderful woman. For some reason, her house was always a bit of a "boys club" - there was never more than one girl at a time there, and often none.

Under her guidance (and she's a naturalized citizen who came here from Pakistan about 20 years ago), the boys grew up playing with any and everything she had on hand. She didn't lead them to one toy or another, but without pressure from her to "play boy toys" and without girls around to contrast their play with, they loved playing cooking and meals, had "lunches" where they served squares of cake made from Duplos and invited the stuffed animals to play, and poured the sitter "special tea" and took it to her while she fed the baby his bottle. I was interested that despite the fact she comes from such a sex-segregated, male-dominated culture, she didn't push the boys to play only with boy toys -- her attitude seemed to be "of course they're boys, and they'll do boy things on their own - because whatever they do is what boys do."

Where do they learn guns and fighting? I don't know - but my son once took a toy gun (a big bright orange plastic super soaker tpye) and turned it into a boat. Yep, he took a gun and turned it into something else. Gun play is not somehow programmed into them at birth. Like any other behavior, they have to learn it. Its not like guns exist in some primordial brain place that only boys have access to.

Then he started preschool, and met a little boy (whose parents, ironically) are spokesmodels for the "toy guns are EVIL" crowd. And came home talking about shooting and exploding and shooting and exploding. And making guns out of his Duplos. But he still likes to have tea parties and play with toy kitchens and go on "camping adventures" with his stuffed animals... And that kind of play doesn't make him any less of a boy.

[Orange]

Just always offer both kids some typically girl toys, some typically boy toys, and some unisex toys. Encourage them to play with whatever strikes their fancy, and try not to let people tell them "No, that's for boys" (or vice versa).

Now, I do tell my son that some things are for girls. It's when we're clothes-shopping and he wants the sparkly girl clothes, and I haven't indulged that. However, when he plays dress-up at school, he has been known to wear skirts. And he carries a purse sometimes (very handy for toting toy cars around).

And I'm with Sara (just above)--not all boys are into gun play. My son (who's almost 5) does it minimally, and calls it "pashooing."

[falimako]

I have given my son both boys and girls toys. He seems to like both equally. But, he does run around and yell and play rough type "boy" games. On the other hand, he cries very easily, is very sensitive, and talks with a slight english accent because his great-grandparents are english, so he seems to have picked it up a bit. One of his favourite tv shows is "My Little Ponies". What upsets me is the fact that I have on more than one occasion had people tell me that my son is going to be gay when he grows up. Being a boy, and being sensitive makes you gay now?
I think gender is both nature and nurture. You can try all you like to bring your kids up gender nutural, but they are still going to see other boys acting tough and playing with cars, and girls playing with dolls and acting sweet.

[Judy Weldeens]

I would like to start to feminize my son also. I cannot have any more children and also I am a single mom. He has just turned 11 and I guess the best way to start him would be after school, on the weekends and holidays. Also I would love him to be in ballet like I was and see what it feels like to have his hair set and how pretty it looks after it is done. I was also raised at what would have been called a Southern Belle back then or gurly girl now. So pretty ruffles and lace would be so nice for him. My sister has saved most everything from her daughter who is now 13 years old.
Any advice anyone can offer would be most appreciated and any updates on their son as a girl I see these were posted awhile back. Thanks again Judy

[WTF]

Girls are girls and boys are boys, why the hell would some of you people give your son dolls to play with and your daughters trucks and toy weapons. Are you trying to add more people to the already growing homosexual poplulation of the world? If you are then you are sure as hell bad parents. You are just making life harder for your children and screwing up the balance of nature so STOP IT.

[Breeanna]

Just becuase you give a girl a truck to play with or a boy a baby doll does not mean that they are going to grow up homosexual. Studies have been proven that they are born that way. In no way is it messing up the balance of whatever you are thinking of. I can tell you are only one sided and instead of opening your mind to possiblities to things that maybe they do those things because society has set a certain role of us to play, that doesn't mean that we cant be the oppisite. that doesnt make someone gay or less of there gender. We only say it does because thats the way we've built our society.

[Mary Uselton]

i dont know if any of you have heard of John Money, but back around 1960ish (i think) this one woman had 2 perfectly normal twin boys. when they were infants they suffered from sever urinating problems, so doctors insisted circumcision by burning. well one of the boys had their genitals completly burnt off.
the mother chose to have him sugically transformed into a girl
in the early years, she was happy. playing with her dolls and any toys she could get her hands on, that was until she started school.
when she learned of her tru identity in jr.high she decided too live the reainer of her life as a man

eventually commiting suicide

the sociologist working on this particular case study realized the striking diffrence in the formation of a male and female brain,
many transgender children are so transformed because of the ammount of estrogen released durring pregnancy
most common in phaternail twins

nature always wins
period.

[Lori]

Here's what I think... I believe that a child's brain is hard wired from birth. If you encourage your child to behave the way the brain is wired then he or she will behave the way you raised them. If you try to taise them a certain way that goes against his or her hard wiring they will not turn out the way you raised them.

~Lori