Why Is It Important to Talk About Gender and Gender Diversity in Early Childhood?

Question

Answer

As we're thinking about this, we also want to ask, "Why is it important to start talking about gender and gender diversity in early childhood?" People often ask, "When is too soon?" People are worried that things will get too big and too intense too quickly. I think sometimes they're also worried about not knowing what to say. The reality is we're always talking with children about gender, whether that's what color your room is going to be and what clothes you're allowed to wear. Think about how much our choices can impact children's mobility and access, from a baby in a dress who can't crawl without falling on their face because the skirt gets caught under their knees to whether or not they're encouraged to go play in the mud, with the trucks, with the balls, or with the dolls. All of these experiences offer us help in understanding ourselves. This isn't an idea of making children into something. This is an idea of being thoughtful about who the child is, what they can access, and what choices we're making in terms of how we present and share the worlds that they live in. One of the things we do see is in research, which can be limited based on what we can see from children. It's often limited to expression so things get benchmarked a little later to when children can talk about things, particularly in those early years when they've got five or six words to begin with, which can be so hard to know. Figure 4 shows some of these milestones related to gender and gender identity.

Figure 1. Milestones regarding gender expansiveness in very young children.

We do see evidence by a year that children are categorizing individuals by gender, looking at what we call secondary sex characteristics. This is because most of the time they're interacting with people with clothes on, so the attribution is different than when you're born, such as voice, facial hair or no facial hair, haircuts, and clothing style. Kids are taking this in and making ideas. They're already doing gender attribution.

By 18 months, we can see kids showing awareness of their gender identity. Many children at a very young age love dresses and love expressing themselves in what we as a culture call feminine ways or really love expressing themselves in masculine ways. I think we trust that so easily when it lines up with our expectations. I've seen people be so charmed by a little girl who was just learning to walk and wants to twirl and twirl and twirl, but not as charmed necessarily by a boy who wants to do the same activity.

By two years of age, they're communicating awareness about their own gender. For some kids that can line up with their legal gender designation at birth, the identity we've assumed they are based on that moment, even from an ultrasound. For others, even as young as two years, they can be expressing either a gender-expansive identity, which means a sense of gender that isn't within that binary, or transgender identity. We also see them recognizing gender stereotypes at two years. We see them already holding those stereotypes, and in those early years, we can often see those stereotypes fit the culture and the biases they're experiencing in the world. Sometimes that will lead to them telling others who they can and can't be, and will also lead to them telling themselves who they can and can't be in order to line up with the world that's been presented to them.

This Ask the Expert is an edited excerpt from the course, Supporting Gender Diversity in Early Childhood, presented by Flynn, N. and Nicholson, J.