Kids, their bodies, and learning gender.

I’m a babysitter.  I watch a 1 year old and his 3 year old brother when he’s not at daycare.  I’m constantly watching their training in gender and sexuality.  Neither has yet noticed (or verbalized in the 3 year old’s case) much about race or class.  Luckily their parents are sociologists, so maybe they’re better off than other kids on the block.  But the 1 year old is always playing with his penis when his diaper’s off and the 3 year old is constantly in dialogue about who’s a girl and who’s a boy because the kids in his class are 4 and have already been taught that it matters.

About a month ago, he told me that his friend at school was a girl.  I asked him how he knew and all he could tell me that she was yellow and he was green on their name board at daycare, so that means she’s a girl and he’s a boy.

His little brother, age 1, has a playmate come over a few mornings a week.  i watch both of them, together.  When I change her diaper, he stares at her vulva.  He doesn’t ask questions in his language of sounds; he just stares as closely as she lets him, and silently.

The other day, the 3 year old told me that I am a girl while he was in the bathroom watching me sit on the toilet.  I asked him how he knew:  "Boys stand up and girls sit."  Me:  "To pee?"  Him: "Yep." 

I then asked him if people who sit down to pee have penises.  He said that boys have penises and girls don’t.  Then I asked him what girls have.  He didn’t have any words to respond.  It’s not that he didn’t know, it’s just that nobody had ever told him what the word was.  So, I said vulva (I wasn’t sure whether to say vulva or vagina, so I went for vulva).  He smiled and said, ohhhhhh.  I asked him to repeat it. He did.

And now as I’m writing this, I come to the conclusion again that the connections his classmates and his tv shows and his parents and grandparents are making between sex and gender create the complication for children.

Children learn at age one that they have a penis or vulva and like to play with it while they’re naked.  They learn with their eyes before language even comes to them; before they can ask questions about what they see.  Then at age 3, when their words have developed, they learn that girls are yellow and boys are green (or pink and blue) and that boys have penises and girls ‘don’t’ and that girls play with dolls and boy’s ‘don’t’, etc..  I am constantly seeing (with every single child I babysit) this disconnect. 

Already at age 3 this child is wrongly being taught to bridge the disconnect between the body and gender.  He know’s it doesn’t necessarily make sense.  But he’s listening very carefully to people around him to hear what’s right about the world.  As long as they tell him the that the body and gender are related,  I will always be the girl babysitter with no penis. 

And I’m tired of hearing the ‘kids-who-stand-up-to-pee’ on the block tell him that his Hello Kitty stuffed animal is for girls.