Raising Gender 

“Mom, when is the good fairy going to come and change my peepee?” asked two-year-old Jazz.

Jazz was born male—with XY sex chromosomes and a penis—but as a toddler he already felt certain that he was really a she. By age five his parents allowed him to present himself to the world as a girl. Jazz thus became the youngest documented case of a transgender child to openly transition from male to female.

Children such as Jazz have recently captured the public’s attention. Barbara Walters interviewed Jazz and her family on an episode of 20/20, “My Secret Self: A Story of Transgender Children.” Transgender children have also recently appeared on Oprah and on the cover of Newsweek. Thanks, in part, to this media coverage the distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity is dawning on public consciousness. What still needs to be better understood, though, is that there is variation in gender identity beyond the strict binary of male or female. Not surprisingly, “variation” remains a contested term because many people view transgenderism as a genetic mistake—that something went “wrong”, that male and female are the only correct genders.

At the infant development lab at Brown University, we take the perspective that the behaviors and roles typically associated with gender in early childhood emerge from subtle events starting at or even before birth. Although we do not study gender identity or sexual orientation, we suspect that the techniques and approaches we are using will ultimately provide insights into these phenomena. We see the infant’s developing skills, capacities, and understandings of “self” and “other” as a series of events in which the social and biological intermingle. For example, a preterm infant is at a higher risk for learning disabilities later in life but not if he or she grows up in an attentive, responsive home environment. That is early damage thought of as biological can be healed by events we think of as social.

In our lab we focus microscopically on the behaviors of first born infants and their mothers. We observe five minute clips of the infant and mother in each of the following scenarios: playing alone, playing together, and care taking (feeding, diapering, etc.) during the first three to fifteen months of the infant’s life. We analyze behaviors for both the infant and mother on a second-by-second basis. The infant behaviors examined include gross motor movements, fine motor movements, vocalization, and play with specific types of toys. In mothers we look at stimulation (of infant), play (with infant), and vocalization. We are interested in the mother-infant pair because we believe that too often developmentalists (both biologists and psychologists) focus on the infant as if it were an autonomous unit. By analyzing the behaviors of both the mother and the infant, we hope to see not only how a parent can influence a child’s behavior, but also how a child can shape a parent’s behavior. No infant develops alone. No infant learns to talk unless immersed in a surrounding sea of language. No infant thrives without physical touch and affection. We believe that gender itself emerges from the intimate daily dance of infant and social milieu.

We analyze our data, behavior recorded on a second-by-second basis, using dynamic systems theory. The late Esther Thelen, who revolutionized developmental psychology, emphasizes three critical principles—complexity, continuity in time, and dynamic stability.

First, gendered behavior is complex. A girl may wear dresses but also play with trucks. Or, she and a little boy while playing together at home may happily invent a fantasy game involving cooking. But in the school yard these two best friends may avoid each others’ company and go to the boys’ or the girls’ side of the playground. Context is crucial to understanding the complexity of sex-related behaviors.

Second, a child’s behavior, as Thelen writes, “depends on its previous states and is the starting point for future states.” If a child plays with only girls on the playground for nine straight days, chances are likely that she will do the same on day ten. However, the old pattern can—and sometimes does—become unstable (say around puberty!) and that period of instability may predict a behavior pattern that becomes her new dynamically stable state.

Lastly, “dynamic” refers to the fact that behaviors are usually not fixed. Highly stable behaviors appear to be fixed because the underlying dynamics that sustain them strongly reinforce one another. But even stable behaviors change when the systems contributing to them become unsteady. For example, the transition from crawling to walking is one from a highly stable behavior to one that is at first unsteady. (Picture those early, wobbly, fall-down steps of the almost-toddler).

What motivates such transitions? Traditionally, child development research has ignored the intricacies of such sudden changes and focused on the starting and ending states. By contrast, dynamic systems theory demands attention to smaller time scales, time scales “on the order of milliseconds,” as Thelen writes.

What is it about gender in the under-three age set that we think needs explaining? Our research group scoured the literature to find consistently demonstrated differences between boys and girls aged three and under. Surprisingly, given the constant hype in the news media, we didn’t uncover much. The most consistent finding is that by age three boys and girls have different play patterns and toy preferences. They also have different patterns of physical activity at certain ages but not others. For example, young boys typically participate in more competitive, rough-house play, and girls in more cooperative play. Weaker evidence suggests that girls may learn to speak earlier and with greater proficiency than boys, although these findings are less clearly supported than those for toy preference. There are many other single findings of sex differences before aged three, but most have not been repeated in the scientific literature and thus remain “interesting but unproven.”

The other strong finding in the literature is that from day one parents start with a set of expectations and stereotypes. Their interactions with their children are saturated with a culture of maleness and femaleness. One only has to turn on the television to see commercials of young girls playing with pastel colored houses and fake make-up, or boys playing with brightly colored trucks. Or to look at the dominance of pink and other “girly” pastels in the gifts at a baby shower where the participants already know Mom is expecting a girl. We also know that mothers talk more to their daughters as compared to their sons. Such differences may result from the influences of both the parent and child. Since girls talk at a younger age than boys, their parents may talk to them more frequently. Or, since parents talk to girls more often, they may talk at a younger age.

The differences noted in the literature by age three are not present in children at three months. We hope to see differences emerge between the boys and the girls, or the ways in which mothers interact with boys versus girls, when they are between three to fifteen months. It may be that our results are indirectly related to gender. For example, infants may display different patterns of behavior when playing alone versus playing with their mothers. If it turns out that in the home mothers play more with girl babies, for example, girls’ emerging differences might be a secondary result of different mother infant play patterns.

A study conducted in Italy by Manuela Lavelli and Alan Fogel showed that after the first month of life, infants sustain face-to-face communication with their mothers significantly longer when they are propped up on the couch as opposed to in their mother’s arms. Moreover, girls could sustain longer periods of face-to-face communication when held as compared to boys. What if a mother has a child that is more attentive while sitting on the couch, yet she continues to engage in face-to-face communication with the child in her arms? Such small differences, differences on the order of seconds to minutes, compile over time and may contribute to childhood behavior patterns.

Take Jazz for example. If her parents had insisted that she live as a boy, it would have been a “constant battle” as they put it. Merely choosing an outfit before school each day would have been a source of tension—Jazz wanting to wear a dress, and her parents insisting on pants. At some point, Jazz’s parents realized that their biological boy truly wished to live as a girl. Through a focus on individual variability and a more nuanced investigation of gender, we hope that someday Jazz can be viewed on a spectrum of gender variation, rather than a deviation from the norm. And we hope that our studies will provide a blueprint for studying the origins of gender variability in a way that truly acknowledges the indivisibility of nature and nurture.

Natalie Nokoff is a second year medical student at Brown Medical School. She received her BA in Gender Studies from Brown University in 2006. She is currently working in Anne Fausto-Sterling's infant development lab as a part of her scholarly concentration in medical humanities. She is co-leader of the student chapter of Physicians for Human Rights at Brown. She hopes to incorporate her work in gender studies into her future career as a physician.

Anne Fausto-Sterling is Professor of Biology and Gender Studies in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown University. She is the author of Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (Basic Books: 2000).

Ms. Nokoff and Dr. Fausto-Sterling would like to acknowledge the collaboration of undergraduate students at Brown University as well as their faculty colleagues Professor Cynthia Garcia Coll and Ronald Seifer, and the work of Professor Deborah Schooler, now at University of the Pacific.