The Sex and Gender Issue

Babble Editors

The trucks surprised me. When my son turned one, suddenly he became obsessed with anything that had wheels. We'd never told him about trucks. He'd never seen TV shows about them. He just, somehow, knew. And so it went with many of the boys on the playground: all of a sudden, they all had mini-excavators clutched in their hands and wanted nothing more than to roll a little dump truck back and forth in the dirt. Their parents all stood around comparing notes on Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go and the optimal times to drop by our friendly local firehouse for a chance to sit in the truck and try on a fire helmet. Meanwhile, my goddaughter developed a deep love of the color pink and skirts that twirled.

Clearly, gender isn't just a social construct formed by sexist daytime TV commercials, as some of us were raised to believe in the '70s and '80s. Back then, many well-meaning Boomers withheld Barbies from girls and encouraged boys to play with toy kitchens. In this era of the pregnant man, we're a lot more easy-going about how our kids express themselves. But what we think of as "boy" or "girl" behavior is still pretty narrow. Brett Berk convincingly argues in his groundbreaking article "The Gender Spectrum" that gender exists on a pretty broad continuum, and that most of our kids fall somewhere in between the extremes.

Of course, that doesn't stop us from having hang-ups about our kids' sex, or from having our gender expectations confounded, as we see in Ondine Galsworth in "The Little Man" (about a manly boy), Lisa Carver in "Natural Born Cheerleader" (about a girl who loves cheerleading) and Keri Fisher in "Little Boy Pink" (about a boy who loves princesses). Our progressiveness also doesn't stop some of us from longing for a boy or a girl, and going to great lengths to guarantee a baby's sex, as Jeanne Sager describes in her dispatch on the brave new world of sex-selection.

It's fascinating stuff, how our kids' sex determines (or doesn't determine) their behavior. While he still loves cement mixers, my son also loves to tenderly carry around a baby doll. And that's my goddaughter in the photo illustrating the illuminating gender quiz, dressed in pink, wielding a toy chainsaw. As we hope this Special Issue (which will run August 4-15) will demonstrate, they're still the perfect expressions of boy- and girldom. — Ada Calhoun

TABLE OF CONTENTS The Gender Spectrum

By Brett Berk

Social pressure to act girly or macho is stronger than you'd think.

The Gender Spectrum Quiz

By Brett Berk

Find out where your child fits.

Babble List: The 15 Most Sexist Daytime TV Commercials

By Cole Gamble

Fifty years of Stepford moms and dumb dads.

Bad Parent: A Private Matter

By Jeanne Sager

Sorry, sexperts. At my house it's called a "cha-cha."