Parents and children negotiating gender assumptions

[firecat]

This article was going around Facebook:

http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/babiespregnancy/babies/article/995112--parents-keep-child-s-gender-secret

This reminds me of the anecdote about psychologist Sandra Bem's son, as told in her book An Unconventional Family. One day her four-year-old son, Jeremy, decided to wear barrettes in his hair to school. She wrote:

Several times that day, another little boy had asserted that Jeremy must be a girl, not a boy, because "only girls wear barrettes." After repeatedly insisting that "Wearing barrettes doesn't matter; I have a penis and testicles," Jeremy finally pulled down his pants to make his point more convincingly. The other boy was not impressed. He simply said, "Everybody has a penis; only girls wear barrettes."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Bem

Comments

[gmdreia.livejournal.com]

I used to think that the difference was that boys had short hair and girls had long hair, and being rather secure in my gender identity, I was HORRIFIED that my mother wanted to cut my hair into a short page-boy instead of letting me grow it long.

Nice to finally meet you, by the way! I've run into you off and on over the years in various friends' LJ threads, and around the web.

[firecat]

That would have been scary!

Nice to meet you too. (*bows*) I can see there's lots of good stuff to read on your journal...

[gmdreia.livejournal.com]

Not much yet, as I've recently relocated from another journal, but hopefully there'll be more as time passes. :)