Kid Stuff I Am Learning

Learning About Gender

Books to read to understand gender exploration in young children are: The Gender Creative Child and Gender Born, Gender Made. by Dr Ehrensaft.

Our genders are as unique as we are. No one’s definition is the same, and compartmentalizing a person as either a boy or a girl based entirely on the appearance of genitalia at birth undercuts our complex life experiences. —Janet Mock, Redefining Realness

"The gender web proposes that gender is a three-dimensional construction and that all children weave their own gender web—based on three major threads: nature, nurture, and culture—to arrive at the gender that is “me.” Nature includes chromosomes, hormones, hormone receptors, gonads, primary sex characteristics, secondary sex characteristics, brain, and mind. Nurture includes socialization practices and intimate relationships, and is usually housed in the family, the school, peer relations, and religious and community institutions. Culture includes a particular society’s values, ethics, laws, theories, and practices. Like fingerprints, no two children’s gender webs will be alike." - The Gender Creative Child by Dr Ehrensaft.

Gender is not set in stone by age six, as I was taught in my training as a psychologist many decades ago, but can change over the course of a lifetime; so we all, you and I and everyone around us, will always be tweaking our gender webs until the day we die. That is where the fourth dimension of the gender web comes in—time. Gender is not static; it changes over time. - The Gender Creative Child by Dr Ehrensaft.

Who should be in control of the gender web? While we are little, to promote our individual gender health—defined as freedom to explore and live in the gender that feels most authentic to us— the only person who should be doing that tweaking is us. If our parents grab the thread of the web from us as we are spinning it, and tell us what our gender has to be, rather than listening to us as we spell out our gender, or rather than watching us do our own creative work, we are at risk of ending up with a tangled knot of threads, rather than a beautifully spun web that shimmers and glows. - The Gender Creative Child by Dr Ehrensaft.

India's Supreme Court has recognised transgender people as a third gender, in a landmark ruling.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-27031180

"We have the true gender self, the base of which is evident at birth, but which then goes in so many directions depending on how, in our infancy, we meet up with the social environment and how the social environment meets up with us. In the earliest months and years of life, that social environment will be the mommies, daddies, and primary caregivers of the child, with other family members in a close second place. Then we have the false gender self; that is the protective coating we wrap around our core gender as we meet up with the world and gauge how safe or unsafe it is for the true gender self to come out. Last, we have gender creativity, our endeavors to weave together and hold on to our very own unique and authentic gender self, based on core feelings of identity and chosen gender expressions." - The Gender Creative Child by Dr Ehrensaft.

A recent study of the effects of in utero virilization (exposure to high levels of androgens while in the womb) on girls diagnosed with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) found, remarkably, that female fetuses exposed to those high levels of androgens and diagnosed with CAH showed higher levels of both cross-gender identifications and cross-gender behaviors than a control group of girls not having had such exposure. page 30 - The Gender Creative Child by Dr Ehrensaft.

There are structural differences in the brains between men and women. For transgender people their brain resembles the gender they identify with rather than the gender they are assigned at birth. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/research-on-the-transgender-brain-what-you-should-know/

Transgender Children: Children who declare their gender as other than reflected by the sex marker on their birth certificate. This can include male to female, female to male, male to other, and female to other, and can show up at any age.

Gender Fluid Children: Children who flow between the female and male poles of gender, either at a point in time or over time.

Gender Hybrids: Children who combine or alternate between genders, often in a binary way. Among gender hybrids we have:

Gender Priuses—Half Girl/Half Boy: This gender label was taught to me by a school-age child who, from the front, looked like any third grade boy in basketball shorts, tank top, and basketball sneakers, and, from the back, had a long blond braid tied at the end with a bright pink bow. As this little person explained to me, “You see—I’m a Prius.” And then, in response to my puzzled look, “I’m a boy in the front, a girl in the back. A hybrid.”

Gender Minotaurs: Riffing on the notion of the Prius and the minotaur in Greek mythology—half-bull/half-man—I came up with my own label for all the children who were explaining to me that they were one gender on the top, one on the bottom, this usually to account for genitals that were at odds with the gender they knew themselves to be. Prior to puberty, everyone’s top is the same, so one can facilely claim their top as being either male or female. But bottoms are another story, particularly in a culture like ours where penis = boy (rather than a penis-bodied person) and vagina = girl (rather than a vagina-bodied person). So, these children live like minotaurs, but rather than bull on the bottom, human on the top, they are typically sex assigned at birth on the bottom and affirmed gender—the one that is “me”—on the top. Not surprisingly, these children, particularly the female-identified natal males, are enamored with the mermaids in my office, on the big screen, and in their toy boxes: a girl on the top, a fish on the bottom, who can morph into a whole girl under the right circumstances. Indeed, my Ariel (Little Mermaid) figures are the number one choice for many of the younger gender minotaurs who come for an office visit. Gender-by-Season Children: In spinning their gender webs, many children scout the territory around them, or their parents do it for them, and they assess that school, where they spend much of their time during the year, will not be a comfortable place to either explore or live in their authentic gender. They may also feel they have a history that follows them: Everyone at school has always known them as a boy or a girl, so they’ll just keep it that way and wait until the summer, when they’re off to a summer camp or to a different part of the country where they can shed their false gender self. A remove from the everyday setting allows their true gender to come out, at least to try it on for size, if not to declare it. So, we might have Sally during the academic year who enrolls in camp as Sam, or Joey at school who lives as Joelle in the summer when it’s time to be a helper at Mother’s family day care. Sometimes it’s the opposite—a youth whose true gender self is forbidden at home but who goes to a school that is gender inclusive and accepting, transforming school into a gender underground for the youth, a place where the school personnel try to make up for the lack of acceptance that the child is meeting up with at home. I learned the gender-by-season category from a nine-year-old who explained to me, “I would die if anyone at school knew, but I stay with my grandma and grandpa in New York in the summer and they say I can be any gender I want. So, I’m like Clark Kent/Superman—a plain old boy at school, but the most beautiful girl at my grandma’s. Better than having tights, a cape, and flying.” Gender-by-Location Children: A close cousin to gender by season, many boys come to my office explaining how they tear home to put on their favorite dress, and will even wear it to the park, but they leave it in the closet when they go to Aunt Susie’s, or to school, because it just doesn’t feel good to have to answer all the questions. Or because it wouldn’t even be allowed in their school. Or they go over to their friend Tommy’s and put on dresses there, because Tommy’s parents understand and let him wear dresses all the time, not like at home. Gender-Ambidextrous Children: This is a different category than gender hybrids because, like gender fluid children, who do not live as a gender hybrid, they are puzzled by all our efforts to pin them down as one thing. Here is the story of the child who brought this category to light: I was meeting with two moms to talk about their child, a natal male. It turns out that six-year-old Tony changes gender not only by setting but by relationship. What Tony never changes is what is worn every day—dresses over leggings. Tony is angry if Tony’s brother Marklin refers to Tony as a sister, but fine if Tony’s neighbor across the street thinks Tony is a girl. Tony is both a girl and a boy right now. In talking to the moms, who have been puzzling for years now, urgently wanting to pin down Tony’s gender, whatever it might be, I spontaneously came up with the term gender ambidextrous. Again, I was learning from the children who they knew themselves to be, simply finding my own words to describe what they were telling me—in Tony’s case, “I’m just me. Why does everyone keep asking?” As soon as I threw out the idea of gender ambidexterity, both moms completely relaxed and one of them said, “Yes, this makes so much sense. And this is what we can tell people—Tony is gender ambidextrous.” Finally they could pin something down, a way to place their child in the gender scroll of life. If children can use both their left and right hand on par with each other, so, too, can they use their female and their male part of self, not to mention all the parts in between and beyond those two genders; ergo, we have the gender-ambidextrous child. Gender Teslas: The gender Tesla is the state some children reach after a stint being a gender hybrid or gender ambidextrous. Some simply go from zero to sixty to get there, meaning from the sex assigned to them at birth to their affirmed cross-gender identity. Some go more slowly. Let me explain. One day I was meeting with a patient of mine at the gender clinic, a child I had been following for several years. Shannon was still exploring gender, not sure where it would land, but by all observations moving from girl (natal sex) to boy. Prior to this clinic visit, Dr. Rosenthal, our medical director, had been using a gender scale (1 = girl, 10 = boy for children assigned female at birth; 1 = boy, 10 = girl for children assigned male at birth) and asked all children who were gender exploring to give themselves a number along the scale, with an idea of measuring movement versus stability over time. At a clinic meeting we decided to dispense with the scale as being too binary and suggesting there were only two options—toward boy or toward girl. Some of us who were feminists also didn’t like the idea that girls got a 1 while boys got a 10 for the birth-assigned females (with the implication that 10 is a higher score than 1). However, Shannon had always counted on that scale and was looking forward to reporting some new ratings to us. So, when I walked in the room, Shannon said to me, with some innuendoes of accusation, “You know, Dr. Rosenthal forgot to give me the scale today.” Without telling him the news that we had discarded the scale, I simply asked, “What is it that you wanted to tell Dr. Rosenthal?” “Well, I’ve moved from a 4 to a 6.” I took this opportunity to share the idea of the gender Prius, a hybrid, half-electric/half-gas. Shannon loved this idea and mulled it over for a while, then looked up pensively and shared, “Well, then, I think I’m moving toward being a Tesla—all electric.” So now we have the gender Tesla, all boy or all girl, no half and half. We could say that any child in the transgender category would count as a Tesla, as would any cisgender child, but I like to preserve this term for children who are in motion toward an all-one-gender status. Gender Smoothies: Gender smoothies are just a variation on the theme of gender fluid, but the imagery is so vibrant that I like to keep it as a separate category. Again, I was taught this label by a patient of mine, a teenager who reveled in mixing the cultural idioms of male and female in both looks and dress so no one could possibly pin down a gender for this youth. Sitting at the edge of his seat (he was using male pronouns then), he explained

Genderqueer Youth: This is not only a category of gender, but also a social movement of young people who look at people like me and ask, “Why do you even bother? We are so beyond gender.” They are any and all, never either/or, and they challenge our thinking and carve a new path in which they invite us all to both imagine and embody a world where gender is no longer a defining category. Agender Youth: Agender youth are a close cousin if not the same as genderqueer youth. We can play with the word agender, seeing its double entendres—“I’m a gender, but not any particular gender,” or “I’m devoid of gender [as in asexual],” which is the more common referent to the meaning of agender. But I like to think of it both ways. These are youth who, like their genderqueer compatriots, are also pushing beyond the limits of constricting gender confines to say, “You can’t catch me” if it means pinning down a particular gender or any sense of gender at all as being relevant to living a life. Indeed, many youth who self-identify as agender also reference themselves as genderqueer. Protogay Children: These are the children who start out exploring and pushing the margins of gender on the way to discovering their sexual identity. They are typically exploring their gender expressions rather than gender identity, though not always. Although gender development and sexual identity formation are two different developmental tracks, they do sometimes cross, as they do for these children, and it should also be remembered that in early life gender is taking shape well before sexual identity appears on the developmental stage floor. Some of these children will maintain their gender fluidity/expansiveness throughout life; some will move toward more gender conformity; and regrettably, some, particularly if they are little boys, will end up entrapped early in life by unsympathetic parties who will attempt to make these children more gender conforming, often with the overt or implicit intent of warding off a “homosexual” outcome.

Recently I met with a mother whose six-year-old child, assigned male, wears dresses and has informed the family, “Just use my name, Justin, instead of pronouns, because I’m not a boy and I’m not a girl so he doesn’t work and she doesn’t, either.”

So, I pulled out my old developmental psych texts and brushed up on the childhood stages of cognitive-emotional development.23 By toddler age, babies are sorting out shapes into different boxes. Preschool is probably the freest of “in a box” stages, as children engage in magical thinking and fantastic fantasies, such as people turning into frogs, and beasts into elegant royalty. Yet they still like to categorize things to make sense of them, as when a little three-year-old informed her mother, who was just stepping out of the shower, “Mommies have breasts, and daddies read a lot of books” (this particular daddy was a college professor). School age is all about developing increasingly sophisticated skills in categorizing discrete items into larger entities, being able to discern what is the same and what is different and why certain things should go in one pile rather than another. Indeed, all intelligence tests for children involve investigating their ability for sorting and grouping under a common label. Then we get to adolescence, where, if Erik Erikson was on the mark, youth are dead set on forging their own identity, continuously applying labels to themselves to try them on for size. From toddlerhood to young adulthood, our children are in the market for boxes—both for themselves and for others.

Chores and Responsibility

Our kids are 7 and 8 years old. One of the things we're navigating is issues around chores, routines and responsibility including homework. I'm recording a snapshot of their current responsibilities, although I'm not sure there's any advice embedded here.

In the morning the kids get ready for school and I have this checklist printed and taped to the refrigerator where they mark off what they've done. When I see them losing their focus I ask them to check the list and tell me which item they're working on, rather than say "you should be getting your socks".

After homework the kids can play. Around 5:00 - 5:30 when we start to cook dinner, the kids clean up their toys. In the past clean up time was a heavy lift for adults. The kids were like Dali's melted clocks, just hanging on the sofa and whining that they didn't want to clean up. Adults were doing a lot of motivating with carrots ("We'll have movie time after cleanup!") and calm consequences ("If you really feel you can't clean up the trains I'll put them in the box and move the box to the basement"). One benefit of having a large basement is that the kids can have as many toys in the living room as they can be responsible for, and if there are too many toys to clean up, we can move some to the basement for a bit. Alex and I are really trying to hang back when the kids clean up their toys these days, and that's something I wish we had been doing from when they were five. The more they sense pressure from us the more likely they are to argue with each other as in "you're not helping!".

After cleaning up toys they can have screen time until dinner. This means an approved show or video game. Typically the screen time lasts 20-60 minutes. If dinner is slow I'll sometimes turn off the screens after an hour and ask them to just read or something until dinner.

The kids set the table for dinner. Right now that usually means I've placed a tablecloth, napkins, plates, glasses, water pitcher, salt, utensils, etc on the sideboard. Sometimes they get creative with candles and such. Right now it's not helpful to have the kids climbing up on the counter to get glasses while we're cooking on the stovetop.

After dinner the kids clear the table. This means taking all the dishes including the serving dishes to the kitchen counter. Currently they don't scrape their plates. At breakfast time on the weekend they fully clean up breakfast including scraping and rinsing dishes, and loading the dishes into the dishwasher. After the dinner table is cleared we all have dessert. Dessert is often small like a date or a square of dark chocolate.