Another piece on the development of sex stereotypes

[KatieAlcock]

(By me)

fairplayforwomen.com/stereotypes/

It's for the Fawcett Society commission on Gender Stereotypes in Early Childhood but it's up on FPFW.

Click doesn't work

Brilliant clear, common sense article. Thank you Katie.

Oh it works for me?
Thanks @thingy

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/

They seem to work on a mobile browser too - I did preview, honest!

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!!!

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?

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??

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

I will check it out.
I have noticed LCBC Twitter feed coming out in favour of actual women recently too.

Interesting - the LCBC page admin says they were a former trans teen.

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]

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.

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.

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

@DodoPatrol I just mean, their own bodies, with sex characteristics.

I imagine your fairly bright teenager didn't believe, though, that a boy putting on a tiara makes them into a girl.

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.

(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.)

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.

‘Gender identity‘ is just a fancy way of saying sex stereotypes,

Actually, no, the research in young children is about how they come to understand that they are a girl or a boy so it's not a way of saying "sex stereotypes", it's more like understanding what a dog or a cat is.
Children would still understand that they are human, as opposed to feline, and that they are a boy, as opposed to a girl, if we had no sex stereotypes (at least, I think they would, but we'll likely never know!). They just wouldn't base it on what clothes they like and what toys they play with.

I know what you mean Dodo but that's rather different.
Your teen thinks that the reality has changed - in the same way that we could say that someone who has had a cochlear implant is no longer deaf. Your teen understands that changing appearance doesn't change reality. A younger child might think that e.g. taking a bandage or hearing aid off a child's ear would mean they are no longer deaf.

The younger children think that because something's appearance changes (boy puts on a tiara, deaf child takes off a hearing aid, cat puts on a dog mask) then the underlying reality has changed.

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.

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.

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.

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.