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Comment by t-writescode | Hacker News Reader

I have not raised children; but very young children can tell gender apart from other kids ("Cooties, eeewww"), and they may be wanting to emulate the person of the same gender as them doing things like play with guns as sticks, etc.

The conclusion made: that one gender likes to play with guns, the other likes to be nurturing, aren't necessarily binding, is why I brought up external factors.

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It is really tough to draw conclusions until you have spent every moment of your life with a very young child. Initial interests/behaviors and the intensity of those interests/behaviors are most often gender centered. I am talking 10mo+.

At this age they have had very little social interaction/pressure and begin to behave in very gender specific ways. To ignore biology in this case seems short sighted especially in the context of evolution and every other mammalian species on the face of the earth. I can point out the boys and girls in a litter of puppies at 4 weeks. They just behave differently.

( Again, so I don't get flamed, this is not a 100% statement because biology is distinctly individual but the tendency significantly overwhelming ).

This makes some sense, but your analysis assumes that observed parental gender roles aren’t responsible for the patterning you describe before 1yr. I’d be more convinced of an analysis of child rearing in a “gender neutral environment” created by those who do not have the gender they were assigned at birth. Do these patterns still occur? I’d be more inclined to buy a biological explanation then, but without that, all you’re telling me is that a 10mo baby is extremely adept at absorbing patterns from their parents.

This would assume that the father for instance is crashing cars into each other, wrestling his friends, shooting at the neighbors, jumping off the back of the couch, tearing heads off of dolls, etc.

Most of the behaviors I am discussing are not patterned by a parent in anyway.

Aggression can absolutely be patterned by parents.

Sure it can but it isn't in most households. Certainly not mine therefore these behaviors were not influenced.

> I’d be more convinced of an analysis of child rearing in a “gender neutral environment” created by those who do not have the gender they were assigned at birth

I agree with you about some stuff, but you're wrong about this. Transgender people aren't magically free of gendered societal influences. Some are shitty sexists who prefer strict gender roles. Speaking as a transgender person.

This is very fair, and I could have phrased with more nuance. Upon reflection I'm actually not sure how I could be convinced that you'd raised a child without gender influence.

What's the process of evaluating whether a kid's gender matches their sex. You can easily check their sexual organs and/or measure their hormonal levels (if they differ at all at that age) at least.

Other than the physiology are you going to ask a kid "hey, do you feel like a boy or a girl?" Because it isn't clear to me what that question means exactly and whether a kid can answer that.

To state the obvious, no one knows what it is like to be someone else. We can compare what interests us, motivates us etc and say "I am more like that person than this other person". So I suppose the question might be framed in that way?

> observed parental gender roles aren’t responsible for the patterning you describe before 1yr

How does a baby of less than 12 months recognise its own gender in either of the parents?

Parents recognize their own gender/sex in the baby, and babies can easily pattern off of differing levels of attention or different kinds of moment-to-moment emotional feedback.

When my kids were very young (3 years?), they had a hard time telling gender apart, including their own. It may seem absurd to an adult, but from a toddler's point of view, grouping granny/mom/sister as one and grandpa/dad/brother in another is simply not very useful. They have to individually memorize "Yes, mom is a woman, and dad is a man" before they finally understand the concept.

So I don't think social pressure affects choices of play - a toddler will happily play with cars or dolls while they don't even know they're boys/girls.