Confounding parents' efforts to deal with all this are myriad social pressures: what the other kids, parents, and strangers may think, say, or do. Most of these revolve around the way masculinity and femininity are defined in such marked opposition to each other, but find their strength in the privileging of traditionally male traits in both genders. If a young girl prefers softball to softboiling, or expresses her hope to become an airline mechanic, parents usually just deem her driven and ambitious. But if a boy chooses the purple Teletubby over the blue one, or favors baking to breaking, moms and (especially) dads almost immediately become concerned that he's going to turn out funny: less than manly. In fact, recent studies have shown that parents of boys — but not girls — regularly mention their anxiety about their son turning out gay unprompted when talking about kids and gender roles . Giving them cause to "worry" is a landmark analysis of forty-one separate studies that demonstrates a strong correlation between gender-variant childhood behavior in boys and homosexuality. The link doesn't seem to be as strong for girls, who are — unsurprisingly, to those of us who witnessed the Sapphic hothouse of a college campus — much more fluid in this realm.

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Placing the pink and blue icing on this towering cake are parents' muddled notions about where gendered behavior comes from, and their own roles in their child's developing sense of masculinity or femininity. The kinds of scientific explanations I subscribe to (e.g. the kind that aren't derived from the Bible) generally concur that gender is the product of some bewitching stew of the innate (what you're born with), the nurtured (what your world teaches you), and the adaptive (how you respond to the other two). Now, we all know that once a stew has been boiling for a while, it becomes difficult to figure out where the potato ends and the broth begins. But when one talks to parents about kids and gender — and I do all the time in my work helping companies to develop children's media, toys, and consumer products — they seem to have a remarkable way of separating out the ingredients. When their kid's behavior is gender typical — a boy who likes to play with vehicles — they throw up their hands and see gender as fixed and innate: Boys just like cars. But when this behavior is variant — a boy who likes to sew — they see it as socially influenced, and mutable: He gets that from spending too much time with his sisters; we're going to enroll him in T-ball.

Recent research bears out the existence of exactly this duality. So it's no wonder parents are so muddled on the subject of gender, and do such a good job of mixing up their kids. When a child conforms to gender stereotypes — ones the grown-ups are usually pretty active in creating and steering them into — parents act like the kid is simply following their biological destiny. But when a child behaves in ways that challenge these norms — abiding their interests or their innate sense of self — moms and dads often treat them as if they're doing something "wrong" and try to adjust their course.

The end up of all of this pressure, categorization, and mixed messaging is, as you'd expect, a wide-ranging mess. We've created bunches of crazy rules to define what's appropriately male or female. Instead of dealing head-on with the fact that the biggest difference between men and women is in our reproductive biology, we've created bunches of crazy rules to define what's appropriately MALE or FEMALE, and these loopy strictures rope in jumbles of unwarranted outcomes. Kids are taught to apply gender rules to animals (dull and docile sheep vs. crafty and aggressive sharks), mythological characters (omnipresent but benevolent God vs. volatile and vindictive Mother Nature), and shapes (quick: which is more male, a heart or a square?). But it is our gendering of colors that perhaps best exposes the arbitrary nature of these divisions. Most people don't know this, but prior to WWII, the order was actually reversed, with pink thought to be a more male color (a babified version of manly and powerful red), and blue thought to be more girly (watery, dainty and associated with the Virgin Mary).