Blog #17

I was absolutely blown away by "Becoming Members of Society: Learning the Social Meaning of Gender" by Aaron H. Devor.  I have never once thought about how we learn, as young children, to identify ourselves with a certain gender and how long it takes for us to understand what gender to associate ourselves with and how our culture defines gender behaviors.  It takes a long time for us to understand gender anatomically, because at a young age children recognize the genders of people around them on the basis of role information, like clothes or hairstyle instead of physical attributes such as genitalia.  A section of this article that I found particularly interesting was when the author described a study where young, school age children were given dolls and asked to identify their gender.  The majority of the children identified the dolls correctly but on the basis of their hair length or clothing style.  17% of the children identified the gender based based on their primary or secondary sex characteristics.  I think that is truly amazing.  It goes to show how much our culture affects us as young children before we can understand concepts from a more scientific standpoint.  This could also be why many people have trouble accepting that some individuals dress like the opposite gender, according to social norm.