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| Thursday, 5-Jun-2008 00:00 |
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Understanding Gender-Bending Play
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When other girls her age are playing with dolls, Iman is comfortable playing with boys and cars and pretends that she's either 'Ultraman' or 'Superman'.
Am I worried that she'll become a tomboy?
Nope. I am not worried at all because at her age, I believe she couldn't make sense of the gender of boys and girls yet.At the moment, she tends to cross gender things her way and as long as she's happy and having fun with supposedly 'boys toys', I don't see the point of forcing her to play with 'dolls'.
However, Iman and I had come to an agreement that there will be two cakes for her birthday. An 'Ultraman' birthday cake to celebrate at her nursery and a 'Princess' cake to celebrate at home.
We're both happy bunnies, for now. 
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Girls with Footballs and Boys with Dolls: Understanding Gender-Bending Play
By Deborah Bohn
As soon as we learn the sex of our babies, the pink and blue clothes start arriving. Relatives buy tiny baseball mitts for boys and pastel-colored tea sets for girls. Most little ones enjoy their gender-specific toys, but when given the opportunity, little boys will dress up in princess gowns and girls will happily push fire engines across the floor.
If you worry such play will turn your daughter into a tomboy or your son into a sissy, you're not alone—many parents debate how best to understand and manage this type of play. Take a look at what professors and doctors have to say about this often controversial subject.
Is Gender-Bending Play Normal?
Cross-gendered play is normal behavior among small children. In fact, little kids have no clue that it's out of the ordinary until someone tells them. "Children up to the age of four don't have the cognitive power to really understand what it means to be one sex or another: their gender identification is rather superficial," explains Dr. Meredith F. Small, PhD, professor of anthropology at Cornell University and author of Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Children.
Little girls may want to shave like Daddy and boys might want to put on nail polish simply because mimicking adult behaviors is how they learn to become adults (and because putting shaving cream or makeup on your face is just plain fun). Dr. C.J. Pascoe, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley, says, "Girls don't know that their faces won't grow hair. They just know that shaving is something one of their parents does, so they want to do it, too. For us it seems like they're breaking gender rules, but they don't know those rules exist yet."
Even when children start to understand society's gender roles, they're still likely to be curious and attracted to what some may consider stereotypical behavior regarding clothing and activities. Boys want to know what it feels like to wear a skirt or walk in high heels, or even wear makeup. And little girls want to experience the powerful feeling of yielding a sword, or dressing up in a suit and tie like their fathers. Both boys and girls enjoy the experience of cooking and working in the kitchen and delight in the process of making something with paint and glitter. And what child (boy or girl) isn't curious about bugs and worms in the backyard?
Hormones might also account for some gender-bending play. According to a study of approximately 14,000 pregnancies and published in the December 2002 issue of Child Development magazine, the amount of testosterone a female fetus is exposed to in the womb can affect her preference for dinosaurs over dolls and sports over tea parties. (Testosterone is a hormone produced by the ovaries in varying amounts from person to person.)
While this study is fascinating, sociologist Dr. Pascoe cautions, "I'm not saying [gender-specific behavior] is all nurture or all nature. It's some sort of interaction between the two."
When Does It Stop?
Cross-gender experimentation is most common during the preschool years. Dr. Pascoe says, "It usually occurs before age six because kids aren't in school yet. Once they enter institutions, they enter a more gender-differentiated world."
Social Worker and Family Therapist, Arlene Istar Lev, LCSW, is author of the books Transgender Emergence and The Complete Lesbian and Gay Parenting Guide. She specializes in counseling people with sexual and gender identity issues, and she agrees, "Cross-gender play ends around five and six when they start kindergarten and the rules of gender are enforced. Depending on your school and church, how grown-ups reinforce that makes the biggest difference in the world." That doesn't mean that children's real play preferences change, it just means that they conform to the peer pressure and social norms they're now exposed to.
Oddly, many parents don't care if a young girl wants to play sports or even if she prefers pants to skirts. A girl who likes to play with the boys is generally viewed as assertive and strong—someone who can stand up for herself. Dr. Pascoe says that's because our society values masculinity. So we tolerate, even encourage, girls who can throw a ball; but we turn around and shame boys who play with Barbies.
Yet society's expectations eventually catch up to girls, usually in their early teens, when they are told to appear more ladylike. Dr. Pascoe says, "Teen girls talk about their tomboy pasts, but when they hit junior high a mom or brother or a coach says they can't do those things. They tell me this with sadness."
Does It Mean That Your Child Is Gay?
Gender roles—the fashions and behaviors a culture assigns to each gender—are distinct from sexual orientation. For instance, soccer, once considered a boys' game, is now a coed sport with millions of girls taking the field each weekend. Likewise, cooking was once viewed as woman's work, yet top celebrity chefs are predominantly male. And despite the shift in gender roles, most female soccer players and male chefs are heterosexual.
So why does a boy wearing a dress make adults uncomfortable?
One of the biggest reasons our culture frowns upon kids, especially boys, who play outside of their assigned gender roles is the fear that it's a sign of homosexuality. And that fear has some statistical support. Psychiatrist Dr. Richard Green, MD, spent 15 years studying two groups of boys. The first group of 66 boys preferred dolls, dress-up, and playing with girls. Seventy-five percent of them grew up to be gay men. The second group of 56 boys enjoyed rough play, boys' clothes, and sports. All but one of them turned out to be heterosexual. Dr. Green published his results in the 1987 book The Sissy Boy Syndrome.
In a 1973 landmark study on this topic, psychiatrists Dr. Marcel T. Saghir, MD, and Dr. Eli Robins, MD, interviewed groups of homosexuals about their childhoods and current lives. They reported that nearly 66 percent of gay men preferred feminine toys and games as children while 70 percent of homosexual women recalled being "boy-like" in childhood compared to 16 percent of heterosexual women.
Lev says that interviews with adults be misleading because a gay man who's asked to look back on his childhood will find significance in wearing Mom's high heels whereas a straight man wouldn't even mention playing patty cake with his sister or watching a Strawberry Shortcake movie because it wasn't relevant to his sense of self then and isn't now. A gay man sees his cross-gendered play as an expression of his sexuality, whereas a straight man sees his gender-bending play as childish goofing around.
The facts get even fuzzier for girls when you consider that in a 1998 research experiment of college students, their mothers and their grandmothers, 67 percent of all the women across three generations reported that they were tomboys as young girls. A similar questionnaire-based study back in 1977 had similar results. Yet according to a 1994 University of Chicago survey, only 1.4 percent of American women define themselves as gay.
While men and women's impressions of their childhoods vary greatly, it's clear that gender-atypical play does not cause or nurture homosexuality. It's merely a possible indication of a person's eventual sexual orientation in some cases.
How Should Parents Respond?
Alan Costa, father of three girls and a boy, remembers when his son asked for a baby doll. "Of course we gave him one," says Costa, who adds his goal was to raise well-rounded children with an educational mix of diverse experiences. Costa also didn't balk when his three older daughters put makeup on their baby brother. "He wanted to emulate his big sisters. That's totally natural. Kids want to emulate their family members and they want to try everything." His son, now 25, is a heterosexual law student.
Lev agrees that the appropriate response to the sight of your son in a princess dress is a cheery, "You look lovely, sweetie." And if your daughter chooses a plastic tool set over a tea set, be supportive and show her how to swing that hammer.
If gender-bending play makes you feel uncomfortable, be careful. It can be psychologically harmful to make your daughter wear dresses or tell your son, "only girls play with Polly Pockets."
"It's incredibly harmful," emphasizes Dr. Pascoe. Psychotherapist, social worker, and author Joe Kort, MA, MSW, ACSW, concurs, "It's traumatizing to the child and shaming that will likely manifest into low self-esteem."
Once children enter elementary school, though, it may be a kindness to help them understand that their cross-gender behavior might invite teasing and trouble. Dr. Pascoe suggests, "Let your son know it's OK to paint [his] nails, but we live in a world that hasn't caught up with that, so if [he] goes to school like this, [he] might be teased. Explain the reality and ask him if he wants to deal with it."
Kort suggests that allowing an older child to freely express himself or herself at home will make it easier to conform publicly and potentially avoid bullying. Just remind your football-loving daughter that it's not her problem, but the problem of other people; it is a sad but prevailing notion that having unique likes and dislikes is somehow wrong.
Give kids a heads-up that their decision could have negative consequences, but give them the power to make their own choices.
Let Them Learn
Lev reminds parents, "We can force children to dress a certain way and we can eliminate toys from their toy box, but can we change who they are? We really can't."
In a nutshell, letting a girl dress like Darth Vader for Halloween or giving a boy a baby doll does not confuse their young minds. Play is about fun. Allowing kids to decide what they think is fun will not create a sissy or a tomboy: It will create a happy, well-rounded child.
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