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-gender

SOME 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.

its amazing how early you get those kind of things programmed into your head, the thoughts that because of your birth you can and cant do something. its so weird isnt it.