AIBU to think we cannot possibly know natural gender differences.

[goodnessgracious]

Yesterday I overheard this;

A little boy who was approximately 2 years old was in a toy shop and was desperate for his parents to buy him a baby doll. Father responded to his pleas repeatedly with "they're for girls, put it back" He used a derogative tone each time he said the word "girls". He then said "what are you, gay?"

Co-incidentally the BBC news this morning had an article about how few girls go into science and those that do tend to go into to caring roles etc. The normal gender/work issues.

Taking aside the fact that the gay comment was totally appauling, AIBU to think that we cannot possible truly understand natural gender differences when parents raise children in this way.

No, I wondered about that too.

I think people often hear 'we can't ever prove there are innate differences because we're all socialized in a world that conditions differences' and think that means there are no innate differences. Personally, I doubt there are any significant differences, but the important point is that any attempt to find them (in our current world) will be heavily circumscribed. That doesn't mean it's invalid to try, just that we have to see the results in context.

I imagine the parent in question was just saying something to avoid buying another toy.

as we mature as society I think we need both gender equality, and an akowledgement that there are differences between men and women and that in fact a certain percentage of children might well follow these norms.

if we try and ignore gender issues and differemces we do so at our peril

I think that some girls like pink cack, some like bricks, some boys want to dress as a princess, some boys will turn everything into a gun and go "pow pow". all of this is fine- and natural

I'm totally in favour of gender neutral toys and was all set with dolls etc for DS. DH felt the same. Then seemingly out of nowhere comes all this wheel and vehicle obsession. Complete obsession. It's nuts. And has made me question whether some stuff is innate.

What everythingsrunningaway said

Where have you come across this "absolute refusal"?

I've never experienced it.

An absolute refusal to accept lazy, essentialist stereotyping doesn't imply that you are not open to the existence of physical differences between me and female bodies that go beyond genitals.

^^ this

Dogcalledrudis

I imagine the parent in question was just saying something to avoid buying another toy.

I am afraid not as he suggested he went to look at the bob the builder stuff.

Also, saying to a 2 year old "are you gay" is not anything is it? FFS!

Though, OTOH, I have two sons. One of them is obsessed with wheels and vehicles, one of them isn't - I wonder if the one that isn't was a girl, would I assume that the vehicle thing was an innate boy thing?

I also can't help remembering my own 70s childhood, where everything (toys, clothes, etc.) seemed far less explicitly gendered - I often wore hand-me-downs from my male cousin, which wasn't seen as odd in the slightest, pretty much all of us wore a lot of brown and orange and had The Default 70s Child Haircut and played with Lego and read Enid Blyton and William etc. I did have dolls as well, but they were only a small subset of my toys/games. I'm assuming we weren't actually less male and/or female at the time...

Also as someone said upthread, it's not that I'm sure there aren't innate differences, it's just they're very difficult, nay, impossible to untangle from the socially

Salted Caramel

Of course some stuff is innate. Just like the little boy in my OP wanting a doll.

GAH HIT POST TOO SOON

...socially imposed expectations.

Then seemingly out of nowhere comes all this wheel and vehicle obsession. Complete obsession. It's nuts. And has made me question whether some stuff is innate.

It's hardly "out of nowhere" for a small child to become obsessed with the things approved for his gender, is it?

In fact it's straight out of socially constructed gender stereotypes.

Well, that and the fact that wheeled toys are lots of fun and appeal to lots of the children who have access to them, regardless of sex.

How could this obsession possibly be "innate"?

Why (and how ffs) would an interest in wheel technology be something biologically programmed to be specific to male humans?

It's so men can drive fast after mammoths when hunting, EverythingsRunning. Obviously . While the women are at home in the cave wearing princess dresses .

Thecow

TheCow

It's entirely possible that there are male / female brain and psychological differences, which may or may not give rise to behaviour and preference differences.

There always has been, and still is, significant research around this, though I haven't read any for a couple of decades, so no idea where they are up to with it.

I took the OP's first post to be a genuine comment about how societal patterns and early pressures compromise such research, but I see that outofcontrol2014 is exactly right, OP was merely disguising the initiation of a contentious debate by presenting a thin veneer of concern about the validity and efficacy of any quantitative and qualitative analysis of the topic.

OP, you are very, very naughty.

There's so much stereotyping though, like boys are so messy. Yeah right because girls are just so tidy!

It's all ridiculous.

FWIW, brain, I went to a talk a couple of weeks ago by an academic psychologist, though admittedly she was dumbing her subject down so much I was amazed her brain didn't dribble out of her ears when she was talking.

Her argument was, charmingly, that boys and girls probably do have innate preferences, and after all, where's the harm if boys do naturally play with guns, because there are no significant differences between adults (yes, I asked her about the stats on gendered violence and whether they might have any relationship to boys playing with guns, and she had no answer).

However, she also cited the David Reimer case (a case of a child being several abused by a corrupt researcher) as if it were entirely unproblematic and uncontroversial, though it's been known about for years.

So, while I'm sure there is excellent work being done that's very cutting edge, depressingly, where they're up to with explaining it to us seems to be very, very, very simplistic and far behind.

JeanneDeMontbaston

That's a shame, sounds like a good opportunity missed. You get competent and incompetent people in every field. If she was competent, then it's a shame she failed to make it interesting and accessible for her audience.

brainfidget

You have lost me. No idea what I have done.

My take on it is that even if we could know, it wouldn't be useful.

Even if we could take socialisation out of the equation and say "these are the natural differences", it wouldn't tell us anything about any human being that should affect how we treat them or think about them.

Gender (and sex) is not perfectly binary
There are multiple features which do not reliably co-vary (someone can be "girly" in one aspect and "boyish" in another aspect)
There's a lot of overlap

Knowing whether someone is "a boy" or "a girl" is not going to tell you enough about where they lie on all the different spectra of personality traits for you to make any assumptions that you can act on.

brain - yeah, I was really disappointed. I'm sure it is very hard to explain things to non-specialists, though.

trills - I agree completely. It basically comes down to 'let's not be wassocks to each other'.