Strollerderby : gender

Best of FameCrawler - Week of May 29th

Whit Honea — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Mike Tyson's 4-Year-Old Daughter Dies

Madonna Dishes on A-Rod and Kate Hudson

Confirmed - Gisele is Pregnant With Tom Brady's Baby!

Nicole Richie, Dad Lionel & Daughter Harlow (PHOTOS)

Sneak Peek! Jon & Kate Plus 8 Season Premiere

Kelly Rutherford, Lies and Videotape

Amy Mickelson's Breast Cancer Battle

Michelle Williams and Daughter Matilda Support Their Local Coffee House

Angelina Jolie: Madonna Adopts For Fame

Jon & Kate - Who Are The Kids Happier With? (Photos)

Slumdog Kids Finally Get A Home!

Brian Grazer's Prenup Still Makes Wife Rich

How Much Would It Cost You to Take a Career Break?

Miriam Axel-Lute — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

The New York Times (h/t Creative Class blog) has an interesting report on the financial penalties sustained in different fields by people who take some time out of the workforce. Apparently, although medicine has the most grueling training, once you get there, it's a lot easier on work/life balance than, say, finance, business consulting, or law. Or even academia.

Of course by "people who take time off for family" we still mean mostly (but not entirely) women (it used to be called the Mommy track, remember?), and I'm surprised that the research didn't explore whether women and men experienced different financial penalties when they do take time. (And I'm surprised that the Creative Class blog post didn't even acknowledge that gender is still a huge factor in this.)

It's also, perhaps, a little hard for me to get too worked up about the relatively lower salaries of highly paid MBAs and PhDs who've taken a few years off when there are so many other people for whom work-life balance means being able to get paid time off or support their family without taking on a second job. Ok, so perhaps that's a little too harsh. Work-family balance is important for everyone, for the kids, and because people who've been forced to work 70-hour weeks when their kids are young often have a I-did-it-so-you-should-too attitude toward their own subordinates, not to mention about efforts to improve work-life balance for everyone.

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They Say: Having a Daughter Makes You a Liberal

JeanneSager — Fri, 22 May 2009 20:02:00 GMT

So blue might be the color most associated with boys. Turns out the blue states can thank their azure hues to the parents of little girls.

A conglomeration of studies about to be printed in a social science journal posit that parents' political leanings can be tied to the gender of their children. Notably, they say fathers of girls are more liberal.

Is that the same as saying they're more feminist?

Among the data social scientists looked at was the voting records of U.S. Congressmen. The first study (published in 2004) determined Congressman with daughters were more likely to vote liberally on reproductive rights issues. Four years later, the same researcher concluded the Congressmen with female offspring were voting liberally on a host of issues, including tax-free education and working families flexibility.

Integrating studies from Great Britain, the scientists have concluded parents with girls are more likely to sympathize with left wing ideals, while studies indicate that having a male child will lead to more right wing politics.

Interesting, because if you listened tp appeals to George W. Bush on particularly feminist issues, you'd often hear references to his daughters. As in "What kind of father would take his own daughter's rights away?" And I don't remember him coming out as a champion of Roe v. Wade, do you?

I'll allow that parents are more likely to weigh issues they wouldn't have otherwise focused on when faced with parenting a child of the opposite sex. A father with a daughter is more likely to have his daughter in mind when debating the rights of a woman over the rights of a fetus (although I'd wager there are a fair amount of dads who would still come down on the side of the fetus because they now equate their child with that fetus).

Even more interesting, the study suggests parents who lean to the left are more likely to stop having kids after the birth of a son - pointing to an added valuation of boys in the liberal community. Right wingers, they say, are more likely to stop making babies after a girl is born. Maybe it's all those liberal awakenings scaring them out of the bedroom?

Image: Flatrock

Via fivethirtyeight

Also on Babble:

Pick a Sex, Any Sex

Best of FameCrawler - Week of May 22nd

Whit Honea — Fri, 22 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Gosselins are Good for a Gander

Katie Holmes Sets a Bad Example For Suri

Mormon Marie Osmond Supports Her Gay Daughter!

Stars Come Out For American Idol Finale: Brad Garrett and Kids Max and Hope

Barbara Walters To Interview John Edwards' Mistress Rielle Hunter!?

Bristol Palin and Son Tripp Cover People

Angelina Catches Brad and Jen Aniston Together!

Kate Gosselin Blogs Her Troubles Away

Matt Damon: Bourne to Be a Dad

Pregnant Lauren London & Lil Wayne Will Raise Baby Together!!!

Kelly Clarkson Looks Like She's Pregnant!

Caption This, Julia Roberts (or Don't)

Toys R Us Can't Be Serious. But They Are.

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Does your daughter have a burning desire to play Ouija board? But clearly she can’t since the game is totally for boys? Well, for only $19.99, you can make your daughter’s dream come true, because Hasbro just came out with a new “just for girls” Ouija board!

What makes this edition different from the original Ouija board that can be handmade in minutes? I’ll give you one guess. You got it: It’s pink!

Not only that, but this new edition also comes with 72 question cards, since a big problem for young girls is that they always freeze up when it’s their turn to ask a ghost a personal question about their lives.

According to the product description, girls needn’t worry their pretty little heads any longer:

It has always been mysterious. It has always been mystifying. And now the OUIJA Board is just for you, girl. With 72 fun questions included, you'll never run out of things to ask. Who will call/text me next? Will I be a famous actor someday? Who wishes they could trade places with me?

Who would have guessed that a splash of pink is all it takes to get the catty, boy-crazy girl ghosts to spill the beans?

You might be interested to learn that the game is marketed for girls between the ages of eight and twelve. Now third graders don’t have to worry whether that “special someone” will send them a text. They can just ask a dead person! Progress never looked so good.

Image: AV Club

Transgender Girl Kicked Out of School

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:30:00 GMT

An eight-year-old who is biologically male but who has always identified as female has decided to begin living openly as a girl, even though this will mean leaving her beloved elementary school.

The second grader’s parents consulted with therapists and transgender specialists for many years before deciding to allow their son to live as a girl. It’s the same story shared by all parents of transgender children: from the time she could talk, the child (who will remain anonymous to protect her identity) told her parents that she was really a girl; she asked constantly to be able to wear dresses and drew pictures of herself in girl’s shoes and swimsuits.

“I know 8½ sounds pretty young, but when we’ve been dealing with it for six of those 8½ years, that’s a pretty long time,” the girl’s mother said. The Nebraska therapist whom the parents consulted warned them that attempting to deny transgender feelings can lead to drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and suicide.

Unfortunately, the child’s Catholic school does not see it that way. Although the eight-year-old wanted to continue third grade with her classmates, the church told her family that she would have to find a new school if she wanted to live as a girl.

So this fall, the eight-year-old will enter public school. Her parents say it’s a “delicate balance between helping people understand and protecting a child who’s different.” While they have chosen to speak to the media about the inborn nature of being transgendered, they do not necessarily want their daughter to be identified as transgender by her peers. They have enrolled her as a girl in her new school, and hope she will be unquestioningly accepted as such.

Photo: KETV

Best of FameCrawler - Week of May 15th

Whit Honea — Fri, 15 May 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Tom Cruise Pressuring Katie For Another Baby?

Dirk Nowitzki's Fiance Arrested?

Comedian Wanda Sykes & Wife Alex Welcome Twins!

Jada Pinkett Smith a Lesbian?

Julie Bowen Welcomes Twin Boys

Mary Stuart Masterson Has Reason to Smile!

Manny Ramirez Busted!

Chyler Leigh Welcomes Daughter Anniston

Sean Penn Still Dating Natalie Portman, Robin is Pissed!

Kate Gosselin's Heartbreak: Jon & I May Separate

Look, Look, It's Another Octomom Story

Jon Gosselin Shelled Out Big Bucks To Buy Mistress Presents

Don’t like Your Baby’s Gender? Sweden Rules 'Gender-Based' Abortion Legal

Cole Gamble — Thu, 14 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Now, according to a Swedish medical ruling, if a mother or couple discover the gender of their baby and decide “that’s not what we were hoping for” they can get an abortion on that basis.

Here’s how it broke down. A Swedish mother of two girls requested two abortions in a row after learning the gender of her fetus. It became apparent to doctors her decision to abort was based on the discovery of gender, which obviously was not the one she was aiming for. Doctors at Mälaren Hospital expressed concern and asked Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare to draw up guidelines on how to handle requests in the future in which they "feel pressured to examine the fetus’s gender" without having a medically compelling reason to do so.

The board found such requests cannot be refused, and neither can abortions, thus medical staff cannot refuse to perform an abortion based on gender.

Now the idea of isolating a “gay” gene in fetuses and therefore “eliminating” it has been bandied about by rather tacky political pundits. But before we get to that moral maelstrom, pick-and-choose baby gender is already here. Sure, the day when doctors can fudge your baby’s DNA to increase the probability of a boy or girl is possibly coming sooner than later, but for now, if you don’t like what you got, scrap it and start again.

Does this already happen discreetly in America? I can’t imagine anyone would ever openly admit to their doctor or otherwise that they want to abort the baby because “I really had my heart set on a girl” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Do you think this is more common that people are admitting?

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6 Reasons Why it Sucks to Be a Kid Today

Disturbing Baby-Swinging PSA

Dumb Kiddy Product Makeovers

Eating Your Baby's Placenta

10 Great Books For (Traumatizing) Children

Don't Ask If We're Trying to Have a Boy . . . or a Girl

JeanneSager — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:28:00 GMT

My friend cried hysterically when she found out her first baby was going to be a boy. Now, two boys later, she says she'd likely only get pregnant again if she could guarantee another boy.

So what's the most common question she's asked about the possibility of number three? "So, are you going to try for your girl?"

Writer Amy Wilson has written a compelling piece for Parenting Magazine about why that question comes so often for mothers of little boys . . . and why it's just so darn inappropriate.

"It bothers me that people assume I feel incomplete without a daughter, let alone that it's my motivation for being pregnant with a third child in the first place," she says.

I actually have a daughter, my one and only, and I get the opposite question: "when are you going to give her a little brother?" Or, maybe worse "when are you going to make your husband a little boy?"

Just as Wilson is disturbed by the notion that her life would be considered incomplete without a little girl, I wonder why a little boy is so necessary to round out a family. And why should I be putting the burden of being one or the other on this little fetus who really has no control.

Gender preferences are somewhat natural, don't get me wrong. There's the idea, as Wilson had, that you better understand the gender you have (with her, the boys) or the gender you are (why many women say they want a girl, many men say they're shooting for a boy). But those preferences will go away when a child comes along. They did for my friend. They did for Wilson, whose third baby, it turned out, was a little girl.

So why does the rest of the world seem to think we can't turn it off? Or assume it's there to begin with? I can honestly say I didn't know which (or I should say who) I wanted. I was equally excited and terrified by each gender. I'd changed boy diapers before, but never girls. But then again, I am a girl, I know how that works . . . and so forth. I worried about the still tenuous mother-daughter relationship I have with my mother. I worried about the father-son relationship my husband has with his dad. I thought about reading Anne of Green Gables with a little girl, about my friend's cuddly little ball of love of a boy.

And, in the end, I got a girl. A beautiful, sweet, sometimes drives me a little bonkers, girl. I wouldn't trade her in for a boy. I wouldn't replace her with a boy. And if I had it to do over, I might even find myself saying "yes, if we could guarantee another girl."

For those of us with one gender of children (be it one, two, three, etc.), it's really not the end of the world. Really. If anything, it's just the beginning.

Iowa Mulling Same Sex Birth Certificates?

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Controversial Sex-Ed Book's 15th Anniversary Edition Coming Up

Miriam Axel-Lute — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 22:30:00 GMT

This will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about me, but let me clarify that I describe Robie Harris's It's Perfectly Normal as "controversial" because, technically, it is true: It has caused a lot of controversy, frequently hitting the top ten list of most-challenged books, inspiring hysterical accusations of its being child porn, and generating publicity stunts like that of the woman in Lewiston, Maine, who checked it out and refused to return it because it was "amoral" (generating such attention that the library had to order several more copies. I love—kinda—book banners).

But I do not think that the content is (or at least ought to be) particularly controversial.

It is a comprehensive, well-researched, much-vetted book on puberty, sex, reproduction, and sexual/emotional health and safety. In short, exactly what far too many of our kids don't have access to. Which doesn't mean I don't see where the ideological buttons are getting pushed: It presents various sexual orientations as normal, discusses abortion without condemning it, and gives all the cautionary information necessary for sexual decisionmaking without preaching about timing per se. And yes, it contains tasteful, educational, yet light-hearted line drawings of naked kids and teens, and also of couples in bed (under covers!). It is, after all, a book about (1) how bodies change at puberty and (2) explaining the very basics of some of what people do in bed. Some of us don't learn so well by text alone.

Perhaps less on the usual radar about It's Perfectly Normal are two characters—a bird and a bee—who appear through out the book representing the voices of a curious teen who's eager to grow up and one for whom all this information is a bit much and feels a little uncomfortable. I found it all this joking a bit hokey on first read, but I'm not the target audience. And after a bit of relflection, I could see that the point of their banter was to subtly say to kids reading it, "It's OK if you're not ready to think about this much yet (and it's OK if you're really curious)." That's a level of nuanced thoughtfulness and consideration that the sexphobic abstinence people rarely muster.

Of course by the time some of our kids are old enough for It's Perfectly Normal, that bird and bee will be old friends from It's Not the Stork (ages 4 and up) and It's So Amazing (7 and up), which are quite similar, but with less detail and covering fewer topics in developmentally appropriate ways. I am particularly grateful for the pages devoting to debunking gender stereotypes at the beginning of It's Not the Stork, before the book dives into the anatomy lesson covering what the actual differences are.

I have critiques too (also no shocker to many of you, I'm sure). Particularly, I think that the gender stereotyping in the cartoon version of the sperm and egg meeting (in each book) are overdone, to the point of actually being somewhat untrue to the biology. I think the care to not offend anyone leaves kids with no explanation that breastfeeding is normal or why formula is sometimes used. Then again, they don't need to know very much about that. These are, in the end, small things.

I'm thrilled that these books continue to be updated (the 15th anniv. edition of It's Perfectly Normal is due out this fall), and I hope we're moving toward a time when they can gain the popularity they deserve.

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Don't Call Her a Tomboy

JeanneSager — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 18:36:00 GMT

Ask anyone of our generation what a tomboy is, and as forward-thinking as we might be, you'll get a gender-bending answer. Ask our kids, and you might just get a funny look.

It seems the word tomboy is disappearing, or at least the negative connotation that came with it when we were kids.

Years ago a girl who preferred her t-shirts to tutus and her knees skinned and dirty would bring out all the old biddies in the neighborhood to cluck and shake their fingers. The "l-word" was whispered by parents late at night, and I don't mean love.

It wasn't PC or, for that matter, very fair. Neither is the dictionary definition: "an energetic, sometimes boisterous girl whose behavior and pursuits, esp. in games and sports, are considered more typical of boys than of girls."

But according to an in-depth look at the tomboy label in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, girls who don't want to act all "girly," are getting a little more respect these days. Basically, girls are just that - girls. And if they're girls who like to skateboard, girls who climb trees (as long as their parents don't catch them) and girls who prefer getting muddy, it's OK - they don't need an extra title. They're still, well, girls.

Marketers might not have it figured out yet - I'm still waiting for mud and bugs Barbie - but the girls have. Maybe that's because so have we. I never would have thought to call my daughter a tomboy; even though I most definitely was (and I'm not ashamed of that). Part of it is because she loves her pink clothes, her tutus and her sparkle clippies, and nothing I've done has changed her tastes. Sigh. But when she tears across the backyard to tackle her friend Chase, I just see two kids playing. It took my godmother, who is in her late fifties, early sixties, to even alert me to the fact that my daughter isn't as "girly" as some. "She's a tomboy," she told me the other day, watching my daughter and Chase outside on the swingset. "She's unique."

The former didn't bother me, but the latter I appreciated more. Yes, that's right, she's unique. She's different. She doesn't have to do everything one way because she's a girl. She just does . . . whatever.

Explains Kristen Tillotson in the Star-Tribune:

The consensus: Girls feel more pressure to look good than boys -- but not necessarily all pink and lacy. They still have more responsibilities around the house, such as helping with cooking and cleaning, than their brothers do. They also have a lot of chutzpah and ambition.

I doubt the pressure to look good will ever go away. Whether you want to look good for a guy, a girl or even just to feel more comfortable in your own skin, a portion of that is intrinsic in feminity - in part because our bodies change so drastically during adolescence. The difference between responsibilities in the household between the genders is still up to parents; although I'd wager that even that is changing. But if it's the sister who prefers cutting the lawn to helping to cook dinner, at least she might never hear she's doing the man's job when there's woman's work to be done.

Image: SagerScenes

Sisters Better than Brothers? We Have Proof

JeanneSager — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:22:00 GMT

Finally, a study proves what sisters everywhere have always known - our brothers are so lucky to have us!

It turns out people who grew up with sisters are more likely to be happy and emotionally settled than anyone else. Those of us stuck with, er, who grew up with, brothers, received a "less positive affect."

Psychologists at the University of Ulster and De Monfort University studied five hundred seventy-one people, ages seventeen to twenty-five to develop their theory. The subjects included people who had only brothers or only sister, people who had both and only children.

The people who had a sister - whether it was just one or many, and regardless of whether they had brothers too - were happier and more ambitious than their counterparts. Overall, those who received the lowest scores on the British psychologists' tests were men who grew up with only brothers!

So why should parents of little girls be thanking their lucky stars?

Researcher Tony Cassidy, of the University of Ulster, told the Daily Mail, "Our explanation for it is that the presence of girls opens up channels of communication and it becomes a much more expressive situation and that's positive. Emotional expression is fundamental to good psychological health and having sisters promotes this in families."

As a big sister who always begged for a little sister, and ended up with a brother instead, I can tell you brothers aren't all that bad. But then again, I don't know what it's like to have a sister, and my daughter is a one and only - so I won't see it happening in my household.

But if you're planning on having more kids, maybe you should be shooting for a girl? Better yet - have two girls, so both get the benefits! And if you throw a boy in there, well, the more the merrier.

Via Jezebel

Image: Amazon

Save Your Baby Girl From Humiliating Baldness!

Kate Tuttle — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Do you have a bald baby girl? Do you cringe when anyone asks your baby's sex, or assumes she's a boy? No? Well, honestly, neither did I, when my daughter was small and (briefly) bald. But apparently some parents really worry about this stuff, or at least the makers of Baby Bangs! are hoping they do.

Baby Bangs! (the exclamation mark appears to be a necessary part of the name) are little wigs attached to stretchy headbands, so that parents of infant girls can pretend they have more hair than they do. According to the product's web site:

Our patent pending HAIR+band accessory combination allows baby girl's (with little or no hair at all) the opportunity to have a beautifully realistic HAIR style in a SNAP!! It's quick, easy and baby barely knows it's there. Each Baby Bangs! HAIR+band has been made using only the finest ribbons and fabrics, PLUS our Baby Bangs! come to you pre-customized & size appropriate, cut, styled and ready for immediate wear. The wispy hair strands have been arranged in the cutest most adorable elfish coiffure!

Created by a "hair replacement artist" and her daughter -- and using her infant granddaughter as guinea pi -- I mean, model -- Baby Bangs! are made of synthetic fibers attached to elastic headbands. Instructions on the site detail the procedure for properly pulling them onto your baby's head and arranging the little hairs for "the cutest most adorable elfish coiffure!" One hardly knows where to begin.

My kids had a hard time coping with being forced to wear hats -- you know, to protect them from the cold and the damaging UV rays, not to make them look more gender-stereotypical -- so it's hard for me to believe it would be all that easy to get your baby to go along with your need to control their hair quantity. Beyond that, is it really such a huge problem if someone mistakes your girl baby for a boy? Or is the real problem that our society is so strange about gender that anyone would think it's an insult? And who really thinks "long hair = girl, short hair = boy" anymore, anyway? That kind of thinking is not much in evidence where I live. It's hard to escape the feeling that Baby Bangs! come just at a time when their very raison d'etre is starting to feel a bit laughable. That said, as Saturday Night Live has shown, laughing at wacky baby products is always in style.

Photo courtesy of Baby Bangs (and yes, the little girl is adorable -- but she's even cuter without her wig!)

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Parenting in Gendered World

Miriam Axel-Lute — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

There's a great thread over at Womanist Musings about the ongoing challenge of teaching our kids to be openminded about gender, especially when they are in school and experiencing both a bombardment of "this is what girls do; this is what boys do" and also watching peers tease/label/ostracize non-gender-conforming kids.

It's all so familiar to me: the tiring repetition, the feeling that others think you are going too far, and the related backlash: It's going too far to tell my kids that a hurtful term is not acceptable?! Or to fight like hell to keep them from constraining their own options in order to gender conform? Argh.

We've started using the "[That adult] just made a mistake [in assuming all girls like princesses/that you were a boy because you weren't wearing any pink/etc.]" line in our household that several commenters talk about. And we're still in the primarily spoon-feeding perspectives stage, where one of us is on hand to provide nearly instant feedback on all questionable statements. So it doesn't get any easier from here, I assume.

I'm sure it's the same any time you're trying to teach your child values that are not commonly held by the culture at large, whether it's gender fluiditiy, religious tolerance, or non-violence. You don't want to let things you find patently offensive and dangerous go by without response, and yet you have to walk the line of not seeming so obsessive you spark a rebellion or even just shut down conversation. I really appreciated hearing from so many parents in that thread who spoke of not freaking out over their daughters' girly phases, merely sticking to the "there's no such thing as girl/boy toys" mantra, and reporting that it "worked" (as in the message stuck with respect to others, not any particular outcome for their kids' interests). There's hope yet . . .

Photo by llamafloor.

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They Say: Breastmilk Fights Respiratory Viruses Better in Girls

Miriam Axel-Lute — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:30:00 GMT

Science gets particularly exciting when it turns up things no one was expecting. Researcher Fernando Polack, working in Buenos Aires investigating how much protection breastmilk provides for very-low-birthweight babies against the wicked metapneumovirus (no vaccine yet developed), was surprised to find stark gender differences in his results:

Girls who were not breastfed had a much higher risk of rehospitalization for respiratory illness than boys, but breastfed girls were almost never rehospitalized. In boys, the difference between breastfed and not was insignificant. (The researchers hasten to point out that there are plenty of other benefits of breastfeeding that still hold true for boys.)

The fascinating part of this is that a gender difference may point to breastmilk's protective properties working differently than previously supposed. Maybe it's not just delivering mom's immunities until the kid gets its own—why would there be a gender difference in that? Could breastmilk prompt anti-viral protection in the absence of exposure to viruses somehow, interacting directly with the baby's developing immune system? (Of course, why would there be a gender difference in that either?) The report from Vanderbilt Medical Center speculates maybe, though they have no idea how.

Sounds to me for now like another thing to throw on the "we don't know what breastmilk is well enough to replicate it" evidence pile.

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What defines a girl or a boy?

Miriam Axel-Lute — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:30:00 GMT

Writing about transgendered kids is tough. If you believe sex is biologically set by chromosomes and organs, then even considering the whole notion is silly. If you believe that gender identity is entirely socially constructed, it's hard to understand why some kids raised in households without rigid gender roles—boys allowed to dress up and not like sports, etc.—still develop passionate, intense desires to be the other gender. (Me, I'm thinking hormones. Pesky things.)

The stories in the recent article on transgendered kids in the Minneapolis CityPages should certainly give pause to anyone who thinks these kids are having passing phases that their parents could easily deflect. And they also show the interesting challenge of coming out to potential romantic partners when you have transitioned early enough to pass completely. It's worth a read.

But as whenever we talk about what it means to "feel" like one gender or the other, the article ends up giving credence to conventional gender stereotypes and binaries along the way. It opens, for example, like this: "On her third birthday, Sarah Barnett tore open a package from her grandmother that would delight most girls her age. Gently folded on a pillow of tissue paper lay a frilly, ruffled dress." Sigh. Is it mixing my issues to wish that transgender awareness could manage not to rest on ideas like "girls inherently like frilly dresses?" Isn't the point that cross-dressing isn't enough?

The point of that anecdote, of course, is that her response was not (as my happy-to-be-a-woman childhood self's would have been) "Ew. I hate dresses," but "Why don't you tell Grandma I'm a boy?" Still, it points up how hard it is to talk about this issue without the crutch of "what most girls/boys" would like/prefer.

Photo by anyjazz65.

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Dinos and Dragons: On the Scientific Method for Kids

Miriam Axel-Lute — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:00:00 GMT

On my post about errors about the natural world in kids books, a few people piped up to say that the social biases in kids books bother them more—stupid fathers, prissy girls, everyone white, etc. I wish it were as easy to dispatch those with a simple top ten list, but they're far more insidious and numerous.

However, here's one tiny stab at the overlap: A bit of a commentary about the blinders that social biases put on scientists.

The book in question is called Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs. It was recommended to me by a commenter on my previous post, and billed as an introduction to the scientific method, a window into the process of making theories based on the evidence you have, testing them (when that’s possible), and changing them based on new evidence.

And, of course, it’s about dinosaurs, which hold a not entirely explicable fascination for a massive proportion of kids, mine included.

It is in fact, a pretty great book, full of neat stories such as people mistaking Iguanodons’ massive conical thumb bones for horns until they found a complete skeleton, or how some bone cross-sections look more like those of warm-blooded animals than of cold-blooded ones—which is part of what spurred the whole movement toward dinosaurs-as-bird-ancestors and away from dinosaurs-as-big-lizards.

But the book also is a better example of how science works than it really set out to be: It contains two glaring examples of how, for all the real power of the scientific method and (most) scientists’ genuine commitment to objectivity and open-mindedness, science is carried out (and interpreted and written about) by people who are subject, to a greater or lesser extent, to all the biases and assumptions of their day. Those blinders creep into their conclusions far more than they would like to admit.

For example, one of the points that the book makes is that we used to think of dinosaurs as having reptile-like parenting skills—i.e., none; they lay eggs and leave. But then paleontologists found evidence (such as nests with older hatchlings in them) that dinosaurs may have been more active parents.

Except the book doesn’t say parents.

It says mothers. Over and over.

I have no need to project egalitarian parenting onto other species, where it often doesn’t exist. But since it does exist among birds quite often, I would have been pretty slow to make such a massive assumption and present it as a “discovery.”

And in fact, last December a flurry of articles about active dinosaur dads came out—some researchers think in some cases they were the primary parent.

Boy, was the book wrong—not in a scientific way though, in a lazy way.

This kind of assumption can actively bog science down. In the 1990s, cultural anthropologist Emily Martin described how researchers working on new forms of contraception were incredibly slow to recognize key information about how human fertilization works because they were so wedded (unconsciously) to their culturally influenced assumptions of mighty aggressive sperm and passive eggs. (Turns out sperm are weak uncoordinated swimmers and have to be entrapped and engulfed by the egg while they try to get away.)

The other bias in Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs strikes even closer to the heart of scientists and their self image. It starts off with a description of how the ancient Chinese found dinosaur bones and, in trying to figure out what they came from, came up with the creature we now know as the Chinese dragon. It shows a picture, says that they figured they must have been magic to have been so big, and thought they might be still around. “Boy, were they wrong!” Then it says, “Now we think many of our own past guesses about dinosaurs were just as wrong as those of ancient China.”

Toward the end of the book we come back to this theme, but less diplomatically: “Perhaps today’s ideas about dinosaurs will someday seem just as silly as the magic dragons of long-ago China.”

Interestingly, instead of “Boy, were they wrong,” everyone else, starting with European scientists from hundreds of years ago gets “Boy, were we wrong!” (emphasis mine). The message is clear: real scientific inquiry began after those initial discoveries, with the “we” of the rest of the book (all white by the illustrations).

Let’s pause and consider for a second. What did the ancient Chinese think those bones belonged to? A large, long, scaly reptilian creature. What did the first Europeans to try to make a theory about the same sorts of bones—a long time later and with far more technology—come up with? A large, long, scaly reptilian creature. They gave it a different name. They came up with different wrong embellishments. They placed it into a different cosmology. But the ancient Chinese were basically doing the same thing, with fewer tools, and had remarkably similar results. They weren't right, but they were hardly silly.

I understand and support what the book’s authors were trying to do: show how early scientific hypotheses can turn out to be as off-base as something that even a child can recognize as untrue. Only in the process of doing so, they revealed their own ethnocentric biases: They feel that dragons were an obviously silly, superstitious theory, while gray, reptilian brontosauruses dragging their tails through the mud were an educated hypothesis that happened to turn out to be inaccurate.

Boy, were they wrong. But at least they gave the parents reading it a ready phrase to critique their own book with.

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Girls' School, Boys' School: Does Single-Sex Education Work?

Kate Tuttle — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:32:00 GMT

In this case, it's girls' classroom, boys' classroom -- a public elementary school in the St. Louis area has been experimenting with single-sex education and so far both parents and pupils seem pleased. At the Carman Trails School boys and girls are offered the option of single-sex classrooms starting in the first grade -- the program, now two years old, extends to the third grade but it seems likely it will expand upward.

According to an article about the school, the girls' classroom is filled with the sound of singing, while the boys' room features lots of shouting, standing up, and running around. Parents of boys say they are glad their sons are no longer described as being unable to concentrate, now that they aren't bound to what some feel are unrealistic behavioral expectations. It's not mentioned whether parents of girls feel there's any advantage to how their daughters are being taught, but the usual point raised by advocates of single-sex education is that girls feel freer to express themselves in a classroom cleared of competitive male energy.

As the mother of a boy and a girl, I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I gew up with two brothers and never felt that I was any less competitive or rambunctious than they were. On the other hand, I can see that at times each of my children might have benefited from at least some time spent in a single-sex environment. Certainly my daughter's summer camp, all girls, has been a perfect setting in which to learn leadership skills; my son is too young yet to know, but in a preschool classroom dominated by girls he is sometimes quickly blamed for any rough behavior, even if his female classmates are just as rough. As a feminist, I reject the essentialist point of view that says boys and girls are just born different, with distinct interests, temperaments, and physical and emotional needs. But I do see that girls and boys are socialized so differently, and have to each learn to exist in a world that expects different things from them, that this kind of classroom experience might make sense.

Single-sex education has long been a staple of Catholic and other private schools. These days it's reported that around 500 public schools are trying it out. What do you think? Would your son or daughter do better, learn more, reach his or her potential more easily, in a classroom filled with others of the same sex? Or does this kind of gender segregation harm kids, at the very least by reinforcing sexual stereotypes?

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They Say: Girls Made of Sugar and Grit

JeanneSager — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 20:34:00 GMT

In case you needed another bit of ammunition to send the "girls are more delicate than boys" notion blasting into outer space, I'm happy to oblige.

It turns out girls are significantly more resilient then their male counterparts when growing up in a troubled family.

The small study (just one hundred twenty-five kids) published in this month's Journal of Adolescent Health acknowledges the odds are stacked against kids who grow up in dysfunctional homes. The girls, however, seem to have slightly better odds of triumphing - about four times that of the boys.

The conclusion of the study is one of those "duh" findings that come from a lot of social studies: "early intervention with families with opiate-dependent parents to prevent and reduce internalizing and externalizing problems in their children holds the most promise of supporting resilient adaptation in early adulthood."

In other words, help the kids when they're younger, and you'll make more of a difference. Obvious, I'd say, but then a lot of these social studies seem to be geared toward convincing those of us with a lack of common sense of the right path.

I was disappointed not to find more information that would explain why the girls fared better. As a woman, and the mother of a girl, I'd love to say that is a "no duh," conclusion too - but I'm not writing off the boys out there! So I can only posit a few conclusions from my own experience:

1. Sisters are often called on to be the "responsible" sibling in a family. Not every sister, of course, and there are often brothers who end up shouldering a much heftier burden. But in almost every case I know of adult siblings splitting familial responsibilities, the brunt of the work falls to the sister. Sisters are often expected to take up the bulk of caregiving for older parents, even if that means moving across the country while a brother lives in the same town as the parents. Perhaps this relates to the traditional role of mother (female) as caregiver?

2. Sisters tend to "mother" their brothers. Again this isn't true for every family, but in an overwhelming number of families when the going gets rough, the females tend to turn outward rather than inward. That focus on the well-being of the other family members can be a huge source of stress, and not particularly healthy for her emotionally. But it's a form of strength that powers them through - and isn't that just another way of saying they're resilient?

Of course, none of this means boys aren't "as good" or "as responsible." But then again, they're not necessarily all that strong!

Via: Los Angeles Times

Image:NC Medical Insurance

Smackdown: I Don’t Care If My Daughter Has Sex as a Teen

Miriam Axel-Lute — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:01:00 GMT

Progressive, feminist, supposedly sex-positive parents are, of course, pretty well united against the absurd excesses of abstinence-only education and the religious no-sex-until-marriage frenzy.

What continues to amaze me though, is how little the positions they do take really vary from the underlying values of the abstinence worshippers.

As a parent, I keep running into a nudge, nudge, wink, wink understanding that even though we know it’s not good to base policy on it, of course really we all want to put off our daughters’ sexual awakenings as long as possible (or at least until they’re out of the house). There are jokes about chastity belts and not letting boyfriends come over until age 30. Every once and a while I feel the urge to get out a calendar and check the year.

I confess that I don’t get it. Not a smidgen. (And neither, for the record, does her father.) I don’t think this is just a matter of my having a defective freak-out gene. I really think that this attitude is not in our daughters’ best interests.

Concerned and thoughtful parents like my colleague Shannon, argue that it’s not really about the squick factor. They think it’s important for their daughters to put off the confusion and emotional drama of sexual relationships in order to get solid in forming their own identities, to make sure that they don’t get distracted by serving other’s needs first.

It sounds good at first, but I have to disagree. It’s not sex that hampers girls’ development, sense of self, or progress toward a career. It’s negative, hysterical, sexist attitudes about sex. (And the unintended pregnancies, abusive relationships, etc. that follow.)

The self-esteem argument is really the religious right’s argument minus the God and marriage specifics. It says this: “Sex is such a god-awful big deal that it will necessarily consume you when it happens and so you must wait for some future time at which you will miraculously be able to handle it.”

I don’t buy it. Sex is a powerful force, sure, but we have a fair amount of control over how much power we really give it. Making it something dangerous to your very identity gives it just as much power as making it central to your very identity.

I think this attitude is partly to blame for teens continuing to mistake sex for love. It also still places far too much emphasis on the importance of the “first time,” leaving girls (and women) feeling attached to first lovers who don’t deserve a third glance (or feeling like failures for choosing a less-than-perfect first lover).

In its usual gender-specific form, this attitude also perpetuates the idea that girls can’t really want sex for their own reasons, that they must be succumbing to the media hype and trying to please someone else and they will automatically lose their sense of self in a sexual relationship.

(Yes, clearly, far too many girls are getting pushed into sex they don’t want. But telling them they should never say yes does not help teach them when/how to say no.)

Of course I also have to wonder why, if people think sex is such an overwhelming cognitive thing to get started at, the conclusion they draw from that is that it’s a good idea to put it off until kids leave the nest and are distanced from familial support systems and previous friends, have easier access to alcohol, are first learning to live on their own, and are facing academic and/or job pressure. Or, for that matter, until they are 30, feeling their biological clocks and suffering pressure (internal and external) to find “the one” and settle down.

Obviously I wouldn’t argue that everyone ought to start having sex in high school. “Ready” is a super complex and individual cocktail (and takes two). Not everyone over 18 or 20 is ready. Not everyone younger isn’t. But high-school does have some potential advantages: financial security, parental backup if needed, and some extra time to be processing, daydreaming (or angstfully writing in a journal). That could all actually form a safer place to experiment than newly adrift in the “real world.”

Of course we all use our own experience as a touchstone. I starting “fooling around” at 15 and having sex at 17 with someone trustworthy I’d been dating for many months and who served, as good friends and partners do, to help me learn more about myself as well as how to have a relationship. I made out with a jerk or two in there first and lived to tell the tale with my self-esteem intact. In fact, those early experiences gave me a very clear and relatively safe tutorial in the difference between attraction and love, flirtation and friendship, passion and trust that has served me well.

If my daughter has the chance to do the same—armed with the facts to protect herself and the solid knowledge that her worth doesn’t depend on her choosing one way or the other—it won’t bother me in the slightest.

Photo by Made Underground, via Flickr.

The Other Side:

Smackdown: Sex Before Twenty? Hopefully Not My Kids

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They Say: Turns Out Eating Cereal Does Not Affect Your Child's Gender

Jen Chaney — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:02:00 GMT

It sounds like an old wives' tale: If you eat breakfast cereal while trying to get pregnant, you'll have a boy. And yet, that's exactly what a study published last year by British researchers said. Now, a group of Americans has published a new study that says that first study is a load of Crispix.

After re-examining the data, the U.S. group -- based in North Carolina -- contends there is no cause and effect relationship between what a woman eats and what gender her baby is. The British study had found that 59 percent of pregnant women who ate breakfast cereal daily delivered boys, while only 43 percent (still a substantial percentage) of those who rarely ate cereal had boys. It also suggested that moms-to-be who consumed more calories were more likely to have boys, too. Both reports were published in a journal called the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, which sounds like it should be the name of the latest thriller from "Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown.

To me, all of this should be filed under "duh." The idea that eating cereal is all it takes to determine whether we have sons or daughters sounds ridiculous on its face. And the statistics weren't definitive enough, as the American researchers suggested, to prove anything. I chalk this up to human nature. Naturally, we all want to think we can control that whole boy/girl thing. Any scientist who finally stumbled on the key to that mystery would understandably be excited. Perhaps so excited that they would published a pretty thinly supported study.

Image: Inmagine.com

For the record, the Brits still stand by their results, particularly the more general causal relationship between maternal diet and infant gender. Of course, we all know how important it is to eat well when you're expecting. Whether you want to take that a step further and start chowing down on Special K so you can finally name a child Aidan? Well, that's up to you.

The Pink and Blue Project

SunnyChanel — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 06:36:00 GMT

Pink and blue. Now those are some loaded colors. Put a baby in a blue or pink onesie and their sex is more than specified, it is considered an honest hued fact. The gender affiliation of these two shades has become a seemingly universal trend, with color conditioning occurring immediately out of the womb. It ain’t no wonder that many a young girl and/or boy affiliate with one of these clichéd colors as a major part of their emerging identity.

One woman was curious about this and also happened to have a camera and one hell on an eye. The New York photographer JeonMee Yoon’s daughter became fascinated by the color pink and at the age of five only wanted to dress and play with pink clothing and objects. This inspired The Pink and Blue Project by Yoon, a series of portraits of boys and girls with their own cherished collections of pink and blue objects. The portraits, in her own words, “also raises other issues, such as the relationship between gender and consumerism, urbanization, the globalization of consumerism and the new capitalism.”

It’s interesting to note that according to color historians, the affiliation of the colors was once reversed. Pink was for boys, being a variance of the “stronger” shade of red. And as the 1918 Ladies Home Journal stated “blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl." The color conventions we now know only came into being in the 1950s.

Were you a "pink" girl or a "blue" boy or perhaps a "blue" girl or a "pink" boy?

Check out more photos from Yoon's series here.

Adolph Hitler and Your Little Pink Princess

Mike Adamick (Cry It Out!) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:45:00 GMT

The BBC has an interesting story on the impact the color pink can have on a girl, but what I found truly amazing in the story was the role reversal colors have undergone in the previous 100 years.

According to the story, in the early 1900s, pink was the preferred color for boys while girls were adorned with blue, which was considered the paler, more delicate shade on the color spectrum. Go shopping for kids clothes today, as you probably well know, and you'll hit rack after rack of princessy pink crap for the girls and rack after rack of cool grays and blues for the boys.

But I digress.

Hitler. I was just getting there. So where does he come in?

Apparently he's to blame for the role reversal of colors and gender. According to the story, when he shipped gays and lesbians off to concentration camps, he ordered the ones who could be "cured" to have a pink triangle attached to them. And soon the color became one and the same with femininity.

And Barbie.

But what damage has this caused? Well, one expert said it's severely damaging to little girls, thwarting their independence by forcing them to conform to the girl-centric notion that pink is the only cool. Another expert basically shrugged his shoulders and said, "eh, whatever."

I'm in the latter camp. Pink as a color rocks. I think it goes exceptionally well with brown. Am I going to fill my daughter's closet with it? Of course not. Am I going to be peeved when she tries to do that herself one day? As long as she dresses herself, I could care less.

[Thanks to DaddyTypes for the story.]

Et Tu, Scholastic?

editors — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:11:00 GMT

These two books came into the office the other day:The Girls’ Book of Glamour: A Guide to Being a Goddess and The Boys’ Book of Survival: How to Survive Anything, Anywhere. Ha-ha, we thought, how retro and ironic and . . . OMG, THEY ARE TOTALLY SERIOUS.

The jacket flap copy on the girls’ book: “Be confidant. Be glamorous. Be gorgeous . . . Be the goddess you were born to be!” On the boys’ book: “Be brave. Be prepared . . . Be a hero!”

Now, our son loves trucks, planes and dinosaurs. Our goddaughter loves tutus. BUT. STILL. Our son has been known to dance around in a skirt, and our goddaughter has been known to play with dinosaurs. The truck books do not say, “TRUCKS FOR BOYS.” They say, “TRUCKS TRUCKS TRUCKS. TRUCKS.”

We read both of these books to make sure they are as bad and reactionary as their covers suggested. In fact, they are worse.

Girls are instructed to “accessorize fabulously.” Boys are taught to “survive an avalanche.” Girls are told how to “give yourself a mini-facial.” Boys are given instructions for making a dugout canoe.

The major theme in the boy book: Be ready for anything! You’re a leader! (“How to Be a Good Leader,” p. 12) The girls’ theme: Be pretty! Also, friendly! (“How to Have the Best Manners,” p.81) And “jazz up” that “boring ponytail.”

For realz? This is the publishing house that gave us Hermione Granger? For shame. — Ada Calhoun

Parents Upset: Transgender Kids Use Different School Bathrooms

JeanneSager — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:33:00 GMT

Uncomfortable kids in a bathroom or locker room? Who knew? That's the reason two California parents think their junior high should ban transgendered kids from using the facilities of the gender with which they associate. . . . because their own kids might feel "uncomfortable."

The district is fighting back (phewwww) because they say discomfort on the behalf of one individual does not qualify as a reason to deny another his or her constitutional rights not to be discriminated against. Score one for San Rafael school administrators.

The policy allows kids who have made the permanent switch to another gender (not necessarily sexual reassignment surgery, but presenting oneself as that particular gender) to use the girls bathroom if the identify themselves as girls or to change clothes in a boys locker room if they identify themselves as boys. In the case of changing clothes, they can choose to do so behind a curtain for additional privacy. State law protects gender and sexual identity, and the district isn't the first in California to allow for transgendered students to make choose their own facilities. Three other districts - including San Francisco - have adopted similar rules.

So what's the big deal? These parents say to expect boys to change with a young woman present - albeit behind a curtain - is imposing on their "modesty and dignity." In a very small way, I can see that. Kids in middle school are going through an incredibly tough time - they're touchy about EVERYTHING.

But transgendered kids are kids too. Once they begin telling the world they are of a certain gender, those that have made the switch entirely (the kids who the policy is built around) are making an attempt to live in one gender. If the other kids watch a "girl" named Jane walk into the boys bathroom, all her hard work to live comfortably in her own skin will come undone. "She" will be uncomfortable; what's more, she will have her rights to be protected from discrimination violated.

I'm also hard-pressed to see how it's any more uncomfortable to change in front of someone who is walking around acting like they're the same sex as you than it is to change in front of someone who has the same parts "down there" as you do. Kids in middle school, for the most part, still change very quickly in the locker room with their eyes downward (at least they did in my school). Are we going to start separating out the gay kids next because homophobic kids are "uncomfortable" imaging they're being looked at?

What these parents need to do is educate their kids on what transgender means, specifically the fact that these kids are not just cross dressing. They are specifically living their lives in another gender, the same gender as the kids sharing their bathrooms and locker rooms. Or maybe these parents are the ones who need an education?

Image: Amazon

Source: Mercury News