Week 4

Gender and Family Life

Sex is biological. Gender is social.

Boys and girls are different. Sometimes it's okay to treat them differently. In fact, all children are treated differently because none of us are the same. I have 4 younger siblings, and being the oldest, I've often felt like the guinea pig, or trial and error child. I've talked to my parents about this and they always assure me that each of us is so different that they have to do different things for each of us. All of my siblings are guinea pigs in different ways. No two children are the same.

When I was about 4 years old, my little sister (age 2) and I had a bunch of friends, girls and boys. One particular family had a girl who was my age and a boy who was her age. We would play together all the time. One of our favorite games was dress up! Her friend would play with us as well, even though he was a boy. His favorite dress up was the Minnie Mouse dress. This definitely didn't make him a female though! Just because young boys do girly things doesn't mean they're feminine and should be transgender. If his parents had switched his gender, I can't even imagine what his life would be like! Boys are definitely boys, even if they do girly things sometimes.

Male and female brains are very different. The actual tissue inside the brains is different. Women can think about so many different things at once while men generally only have one thing on their mind at any given moment. If you have a few minutes, watch this video, A Tale of Two Brains! It's hilarious, and you can find it at this address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XjUFYxSxDk.