Parents' fears of gender nonconformity in their children are powerful. Many studies have shown that even parents who do not subscribe to strict roles or attributes often engage in subconscious gender training. In one experiment, two female and two male sixmonth-old babies appeared in both sex?appropriate and cross-sex clothing, and they were given gender-appropriate names for their apparent sex. Women, who were themselves mothers, then interacted with the babies, whom they had never before seen. The sex they perceived the baby to be changed their behavior toward it. When they perceived that they were playing with a boy, even if they were not, they verbally encouraged the baby in its gross motor activities, responding significantly more often to the "boy" baby's movements. The researchers concluded that it would be no surprise that boys tend toward higher rates of activity and physical prowess, not because of a natural tendency toward it, but because of stimulation during infancy.

Another study identified an infant as "Adam," and dressed "him" in blue overalls. The same infant was later identified as "Beth," and dressed in a pink dress. Three toys were made available for the adults to give the baby: a duck, a doll and a train. The adults were parents who had both girls and boys of their own. The mothers gave the doll significantly more often to the baby when identified as "Beth," yet espoused the view that boys and girls should not be trained in sex?stereotypic roles. Most fathers reported themselves aware of playing more physical games with their sons, but the mothers showed no awareness of their differential treatment of "Adam" and "Beth."

In 1980, there was a study entitled "Baby X Revisited." The infants used in the study were from three months to eleven months old, and they were dressed in gender nonspecific clothing of T?shirts and diapers. The same baby was introduced at different times as male, female, or with no gender information. Sixty undergraduate subjects at Hunter College were told that they were in a study concerning "young infants' responses to strangers." The subjects ranged in age from seventeen to forty?five years, and the racial composition was White, Black, Hispanic and Asian. Three toys were made available for the subjects to present to the babies: a small rubber football, a Raggedy Ann doll and a teething ring. None of the men presented a "girl" baby with the football, and 89 percent of them presented "her" with the doll. Eighty percent of the women presented a "boy" baby with the football, and 73 percent of them presented a "girl" with the doll. Besides the obvious gender stereotyping in terms of toys with children who are presumed to prefer them because of their "apparent" sex, I think the study reveals something very important that the researchers were not necessarily measuring.

The men presented the baby "boy" with the football only 50 percent of the time. They gave the "boy" the doll 20 percent of the time, and the teething ring 30 percent of the time. The women presented the baby "girl" with the football 28 percent of the time, but never presented "boys" or "girls" with the teething ring. When the women were not told what sex the baby was, they then presented the baby with the teething ring 43 percent of the time. In this study, men did not stereotype boys as strongly as women did, while women did not stereotype girls as strongly as men did. This suggests that men and women seem to believe in the stereotyped preferences of the opposite sex, but when it comes to their own sex, they seem aware of flexibility. A man knows that he can be nurturing, although society has forced him to hide that part of himself. A woman knows that she can be competitive and athletic, but she has to mask that part of herself as much as possible. However, when a man looks across the great sex divide at his daughter, or a mother at her son, there is an "otherness" about the baby, a question, a concern by parents that simply by virtue ofn being male or female, they cannot know something intrinsic about their own child, and so they rely on stereotypes as a guide.

This study also reflects that women may be even more involved in stereotyping children than men, since they never presented the teething ring, which was the "neutral" toy, to a baby unless they were given no information as to its gender. While women bear the brunt of discrimination based upon sex, they seem to be as actively engaged as men, and sometimes more rigid, in the gender training of their children. This might be because women are held more responsible for this training, and they want the children to be appealing to their fathers. Yet what happens if the parents do not bow to these norms? If their child's behavior is not gender conforming, and is more than simply gender independent, showing a marked "cross-gender" tendency, that child is at risk for being labeled deviant and disordered. His or her future adult sexuality is called into question. Sometimes the child's body itself is called into question, as if deviant doll or truck play lurked in the chromosomes. The parents, however, are often blamed for not training their child in a more rigid fashion. Traditional gender training hangs like the Sword of Damocles over the heads of well?meaning, loving parents, who feel they must teach their boys and girls gender appropriate roles in order to protect them, even if they sense that gender independence, whatever it may bring, would be a healthier, truer route.

What then of the children who, for whatever reason, slip through the cracks in gender training? In 1995, Dr. Green quipped, "Barbies at five. Sleeps with men at twenty?five." Is that really true, or did Dr. Green and his cohorts simply reinforce for these boys the popular notion that, because they liked "feminine" roles and activities, and disliked "masculine" roles and activities, they were, or would become, homosexual? This is an extraordinary, absurd leap to take with a young child's growing identity. In effect, they trained these boys to believe that they were gay, and psychologically crucified their parents as being responsible for their child's deviance. The parents were accused of being lenient, phallic, distant, too masculine, too feminine, negligent, competitive, empty. They were portrayed as suffering from bad marriages, penis envy, rage, jealousy and impotence. The bottom line was, they had sons who, at their most flamboyant and for a wide variety of reasons, mirrored back to the world a vividly accurate cartoon of socially constructed gender roles. The artificiality of these roles is terrifying for the adult to witness, because we are taught that these roles are biologically natural and linked to sexuality. Our personal identity is threatened when we realize that what we took as a given, because of our sex, was really a choice, a choice we forgot we made, a choice that might have been made for us.

More Gender Shock...(on to page 2)