Another piece on the development of sex stereotypes

Why would they need to refine stereotypes if there were none?

Children and adults hold the same sets of stereotypes; they are harmful to adults. Unless you think they get rid of them and then pick them up again??

Stereotypes are just patterns that hold much of the time. They may be harmful in some cases, but plenty of them are not. Adults and children see similar patterns because they are observing the same society. Adults and children don't generally hold them in the same way though, as children tend to see them as concrete rules whereas adults generally understand they are patterns but they don't always hold.

But the point of the research on children is that it's developmental, not socially driven - they will develop stereotypical views so long as there are any patterns of difference they can discern between men and women. And they will overgeneralise them, and make them far too concrete.

This is how kids at that age learn about a lot of distinctions, you can see the same thing when they try and distinguish between different types of animals for example, or vehicles. Gross, clumsy generalisations, and that is the raw material that allows them to begin to see finer distinctions, how the rules are broken, which rules have more force. It's almost a kind of testing that goes on over years, sorting and refining the algorithm. But without the initial gross categorisation there is no starting place.

I don't think it would really be possible to have a society without cultural patterns around sex, but if it were, kids would still overgeneralise the sex characteristics they could see in people's bodies, and would need to refine their paradigms over time and as they became more able to see and understand nuances.

My kids are very used to their parents rolling their eyes and saying that we think the school ‘might be oversimplifying’ anything to do with science. Maybe that helps. But we can only counter misinformation if we know about it.

Just anecdotally, my five-month-old dd had a marked preference for boys and would be excited any time a boy was around. This was back in the nineteen eighties when most girls had short hair and wore trousers.

they had been told in school that people could 'take medication' to make them into a man or woman, plus they'd had biology lessons about gene therapy/CRISP-R/nanoscience... and had somehow assumed that science had advanced far enough to change the DNA of every cell.

I think this is extremely serious. Nice that some children still have well-informed parents at home, but too many people don't and we teach our children to pay attention in class and believe what teachers tell them, while now is almost illegal to say that tranwomen are men.

Yes, I think I'm following what you mean, Katie.

deliberate dissemination of lies in school - I don't think it's exactly that. It's more that the curriculum waves all these wonderful developments under kids' noses but without the full details (not surprisingly), and leaves a general impression that science can do almost anything.

But when schools can't robustly challenge wrong ideas of 'changing sex', that's a problem.

Quite small children can tell a boy dog from a girl dog and not just by which has the pink collar. Same with other kids.

Interesting article, thanks. ‘Gender identity‘ is just a fancy way of saying sex stereotypes, it bugs me that it’s treated like some kind of important discovery. As someone said on another mumsnet thread
You wouldn’t deal with racism by trying to change someone’s race.

(I haven't missed your point. Without obvious cues of different bodily appearance, small children do go on clothing cues. But larger children can be persuaded to ignore the obvious differences in the body even though they can quite certainly tell whether someone is male or female.)

Thanks! Not being very up in this area, I find 'phrases I'd never say in real life' put a certain distance into what I'm reading. (I have the same problem with reading the term 'oppression' rather than 'sexism and disadvantages to women'.)

Oh god no, no tiaras needed. Boys are girls the moment they say so, in Teen World.

Ooh this is really interesting Thankyou. I'm writing my dissertation on transwomen and gender stereotypes so this is a great resource to look at

they had been told in school that people could 'take medication' to make them into a man or woman, plus they'd had biology lessons about gene therapy/CRISP-R/nanoscience... and had somehow assumed that science had advanced far enough to change the DNA of every cell.

Terrifying. I feel for teachers, who risk losing their livelihoods if they dare speak out. But deliberate dissemination of lies in school, to support an ideology, is a new level of wrong.

Also, this:
'children who transition to present as the opposite sex and their siblings believe for longer that sex can change'

My own fairly bright teenager believed this. After all, they had been told in school that people could 'take medication' to make them into a man or woman, plus they'd had biology lessons about gene therapy/CRISP-R/nanoscience... and had somehow assumed that science had advanced far enough to change the DNA of every cell.

Can I ask a really dumb question, Katie?

I see the phrase 'their sexed bodies' quite a lot in this sort of discussion, but never outside it. Does it just mean 'their own bodies, with their sex characteristics', or is it talking about something more subtle such as others' perception of which sex they are?

Thanks!
[not a biologist or a gender theorist]

It’s been shared on Facebook by Let Clothes be Clothes and I see the usual comments from people who don’t seem to understand the purpose of the page

That is interesting.

I am interested in the idea though that we don't want to live in a world where kids see restrictions on the basis of gendered behaviours like playing with certain toys, or clothing, or hair.

If at the early concrete phase, children generally learn to categorise boys and girls based on these kinds of characteristics, if children had no visible cultural differences associated with sex, would they be unable to sort other children by sex? Would that tend to hold back their ability to begin to refine those stereotypes?

I think it's also reasonable to ask if kids having such stereotypes when young actually correlates at all to holding them later in life?

Works fine for me - excellent article.

Two of my kids went through a phase when they were adamant that only women/girls had eyelashes despite their brother’s exceedingly long eyelashes & all the other males around. Comic books!!!

Links in the first post work in the app but not the browser, Katie - I think it's an anti spamming thing.

fairplayforwomen.com/stereotypes/