Swedish Parents raise 2 year old with no gender identity

[AndreaisSlowlyLosingIt]

www.thelocal.se/20232/20090623/

Had a discussion with the manshape about this who seems to belive the parents are insane. I however think its quite a good idea. The child is allowed to dress itself however it feels and its wadrobe includes both boys and girls clothes.

I'd love to know what the rest of you think.

I don't think social constructionism seeks to provide the whole story.

I think biology provides many answers to why people behave like they fo - but it's society that assigns certain behaviour/ personality traits to a particular.

In the end it isn't about nature vs nuture - the two are so intertwined you cannot seperate them out and say one is more influential than the other.

"Unfortunately though gender is not articially constructed though. Countless scientific studies demonstrate that a child's behavioural traits, instincts, preferences etc are genetically heritable to an extent. "

Countless scientific studies may well confirm that "a child's behavioural traits, instincts, preferences etc are genetically heritable to an extent", but what has that to do the assertion that gender is not artifically constructed?

This while thing foxes me anyway.

My a-levels are maths and sciences. My degree is science. I like thinking about how things work and understand the workings of the internal combustion engine. My favourite genre for escapism (book, film, whatever) is science fiction. As a young woman I enjoyed guilt-free casual sex with lots of men. I can read a map quite cheerfully and don't go around bursting into tears. When I do those tests they say I have a "male brain". I am baffled by lots of things that apparently "women like". I mow the lawn and take out the bins and like going to B&Q and looking at power tools.

So, am I am man? Well of course I'm bloody not. And there are loads of women like me around.

Ergo "men are like this and women are like that" is cobblers. On average there may be differences, but at an individual level, people are people, and we're all different.

Sorry 'particular gender'

There have been experiments like this and they have all shown the same thing - that certain "gender stereotypes" are innate rather than imposed social constructs.

Girls given only cars and trucks named them and out them to sleep in their beds, while boys given only dolls to play with were smashing them together, iirc.

ImSoNotTelling - I have a "male brain", too - low empathy, talent for understanding how systems work, math problems, sci-fi etc. That doesn't mean we have a Y-chromosome.

My (layman's) understanding is that male brain occurs with unusually high levels of testosterone during pregnancy. Autism seems to be related to "extreme male brain", incidentally. See here.

"The idea advanced by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who leads the Cambridge team, is that human brains are predominantly attuned either to empathising with others, or to understanding how systems work. Women are more likely to be in the first group and men in the second, while autistic people are extreme systemisers whose social problems emerge from a fundamental difficulty with empathy."

There are some issues with Baron-Cohen's research, though. Am not going to recommend Pink Brain, Blue Brain again, but there's a lot of discussion of his work (not in a bash-Baron-Cohen way, but looking at exactly what studies have been done, what they do show and what they don't) in there.

One fascinating look at the effects of prenatal testosterone was done by Brenda Henderson and Sheri Berenbaum -- they looked at sets of twins and compared girls who were part of a girl-boy twin pair (exposed to higher levels of testosterone than normal during pregnancy) with girls who were part of a girl-girl twin pair.

They found no significant difference at all between how much the girls in the two groups preferred or did not prefer trucks, cars and building blocks (in fact IIRC the girls with a girl twin, who had had lower prenatal testosterone exposure, showed a slightly higher rate of preferring "boys' toys", but the difference wasn't enough to be significant). There was a very slight statistically significant increase in the rate of sports participation by girls with a boy twin over girls with a girl twin, as reported by parents.

They also looked at the same measures for singleton girls (so exposed to normal levels of testosterone) who had an older brother. Here the difference was very marked -- girls with an older brother are far more likely than other girls to play with "boys' toys" and enjoy sports, and they are far less likely to play with "girls' toys".

So the "nature" element (how much testosterone were you exposed to in the womb) appears to be less important in this regard than the "nurture" element (whether you were raised alongside an older brother).

Testosterone (on its own or in combination with other hormones) does seem to play some part, though -- girls with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (who get a lot of exposure to prenatal androgens) do show greater interest in "male" pursuits throughout their lives, from trucks and blocks through to car maintenance and engineering careers. But it's not as simple as "testosterone makes you into a 'male' type person".

Oh, reference for that study...

Henderson, B.A., and S.A. Berenbaum. 1997. Sex-typed play in opposite-sex twins. Developmental Psychobiology, 31:115-23.

Fascinating stuff prof layton's loveslave.

"There have been experiments like this and they have all shown the same thing - that certain "gender stereotypes" are innate rather than imposed social constructs.

Girls given only cars and trucks named them and out them to sleep in their beds, while boys given only dolls to play with were smashing them together, iirc. "

But they don't, do they. Not every single girl will behave to type, and not every single boy.

I myself when given dolls would immediately vandalise them, and far preferred playing with my Tonka bin lorry in the mud.

I have been present when small boys have rushed up to their mothers cheerfully weilding pink sparlkly things.

How old are the children in these studies? DD1 is 2 and already knows which tihngs are "boys" and which things are "girls" and that she is a girl.

the socialisation starts very young indeed.

There may well be differences on average. But large numbers of individuals do not conform to type. And what concerns me is that the insistence that boys and girls are intrinsically different inevitably leads to them being constained, which is simply unfair for the ones for whom these theories do not fit.

There is a trhead at the moment about at examination board which is thinking of bringing out different exams for boys are girls (exams for the boys coursework for the girls) and a lot of this stuff is being discussed on there.

That is an interesting study ProfLayton. It would be more interesting imho if they looked into personality & interests at a later age rather than just a preference for toys.

ImSoNottelling - They do, actually. These are generalizations and just with any generalization, there will be people lying on the skirts of the curve. DD walked at 18 months, 13 month old DS shows no interest in walking and doesn't even crawl yet, but my two examples don't mean that there aren't fairly consistent milestones for the majority of children. Similarly, you, me, and some other kid being outside this "norm" does not mean there is no norm or that the norm is artificially created by social construct.

Possibly, but the study they did do was more relevant to your message of 11:28:50.

Another point is that the difference value for the vast majority of observable sex differences is extremely small, below 0.35.

Even where the difference value is greater than that, it's worth thinking about what that actually means. Identifying emotions on faces, for example, has a d value of 0.40. This means that a third of men will perform better at this task than the average woman. That's not just "lying on the skirts of the curve". And it's not enough, in my opinion, to justify saying "Women do X... men do Y", even as a generalization, when that's the measure of the difference that we're talking about (and bear in mind that most observable differences are far smaller than that for identifying emotion).

These behaviours aren't described as a "curve" though, they are being used as straight "boys are like this and girls are like that".

It is black and white "boys like trucks and girls like dolls", it is never tempered with "some/many of the children preferred "opposite gender" things, as it wasn't in your post.

When people cite these studies, or make statements like "the majority of boys do X", they never say what this majority is. Is it that 99% of boys conform to type/stereotype, or 51%? That is extremely important information, and is never given.

Plus, if we accept the idea that "boys are like this and girls are like that" then where does that lead us? What point are people who cite these studies trying to make with them?

"Similarly, you, me, and some other kid being outside this "norm" does not mean there is no norm or that the norm is artificially created by social construct. "

No, but it doesn't mean they are not a social construct, either.

Whether there is a "norm" or not (and if it is a very large minority who do not conform then the usage of "norm" is misleading), is a completely different question to whether these "norms" are socialised or inherent.

this is quite funny

Here is the original article from March 2009, so Pop will be 3 1/2 now. Wonder if Pop has said anything yet?

Pop doesn't go to nursery (or didn't when this was written) as both parents work part-time each and so share looking after Pop and earning money equally and Pop's mum says that Pop not going to nursery actually provokes more of a reaction than not telling people Pop's gender

That's a kind of strange idea, but I do like the fact that they're trying to avoid gender stereotypes.

I have ds (3) and dd (1), and neither of them confirm to stereotypes at all. Ds is very caring, loves babies, carries his toy rabbit everywhere and says he is it's mummy, and loves pretending to be Fifi, putting flowers in his hair, and wants to wear my make up. Dd drives cars around the floor constantly, throws dolls away without so much as a cursory glance, and climbs, bites and throws everything in sight.

I think that children's expression of gender is mainly influenced by nurture rather than nature. I make a conscious effort to treat both kids the same and give them the same opportunities, but you see so many small girls in dainty pink dresses which prevent them from being so active, and little boys who are told not to cry rather than being comforted. I would love society to stop labelling everything "boy" or "girl" and just treat children as little individuals who need to find their own interests rather than being shoehorned into a gender stereotype from birth.

Is this a true article - if so it's just not right to do that to a child imho

It doesn't matter how you treat a child; they'll construct gender for themselves.

I think it's admirable not to use gender stereotyping when raising your children.

Girls and boys know they're different, though, not matter what you do.

My DD(3) tells me at every mealtime that she eats lots of food so that her tummy can be huge like the (pregnant) lady we once saw waiting at a lift.
DS is 1, so I've yet to see whether he will try to copy and be like pregnant women.
Something tells me I doubt it, and no matter how I raise my children, they will notice that some people bear children and some people don't.

something tells me he won't