Kids and gender
By Michael Tan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 21:14:00 03/08/2011
http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20110308-324243/Kids-and-genderSOME TIME last month I was in the car with my 5-year-old son, with his Tito Mark (a friend, not a relative) at the wheel. Suddenly out of the blue, my son proclaimed in a tone of papal infallibility: "Tito Mark is bading." (For now, I'm going to translate "bading" as gay but the term is much more complicated than that.)
[...]
This kind of pre-operational thinking extends into gender. Little boys will protest if you ask them to wear a dress because they are convinced that will make them girls. My son had zeroed in on earrings as a "woman thing" but, curiously, had also figured that if a man uses a woman thing that makes him bading. I knew he wasn't being anti-gay in the way he used the term. For him, bading was a hybrid male/female gender category.
