Oh, gender identity

Over the past couple days in our discussions I relate a lot of what we're saying to my Human Sexuality class that I'm taking where we have discussed at length when children become cognitive of their gender identity and how they become cognizant of that. I think its fascinating how easily we place stereotypes and such on children and how these types of things affect children.

I'm thankful for the way my parents raised me because they never forced me to be someone I wasn't. They always let me and my siblings play any sport we wanted and avoided a lot of gender stereotypes. But what if they had? Would I have turned out drastically different and confused? Or what if they had gone a step forward and not taught me about gender differences, would I have been messed up for life if I hadn't worn dresses?

I saw this story on the Today Show this summer about a family that was not disclosing the gender of their child. This is the clip from The View, but it shows you the controversy. I think it will be interesting to see how and if the child is "hurt" by this. These women on The View seem very judgmental of the whole thing, and I am skeptical as well but our hormones help us build our identity. Science shows that boys' testosterone influence their aggressiveness, not just media and such and there's also studies that women truly have maternal instincts which begin at a young age.

In my class we also watched a story about a man who was raised a girl because his penis was burned off in a botched circumcision. The man was raised by wearing dresses and given dolls to play with and yet he said he always knew there was something different about him from other girls. So, is it all about the way we raise a child with these stereotypes, or could it be some of these thing that we talked about just be genetic? I think all of these questions are really interesting and unless people in science perform potentially harming tests on children we'll never know, so hopefully we'll just always wonder.