Good Answer

Scene: Nat is sitting on Mama Shannon's lap discussing various people we know and she refers to babysitter, J, as "she" in one of her common pronoun gender slips.

Mama Shannon: Is J a boy or a girl?

Nat: a boy!

Mama Shannon: What do we say for boys?

Nat: "he"

Mama Shannon: so we say "he" for J.

Nat: no, he's a girl.

Mama Shannon:  J's a girl?

Nat: well, maybe she's a boy.  She's a boy and a girl.

Mind you, J is a fairly conventionally male person, if sensitive and quite likely "in touch with his feminine side."

Mama Shannon:  Well, everybody is kind of a girl and kind of a boy, but most people choose one or the other.  What about you?  Do you want to be a girl or a boy?

Nat: Well... I want to be Nat!

I congratulated her heartily on her choice and told it was a good one and she can certainly always be Nat.

Comments

[kate]

Hmm, this is interesting to me because my kids make that gender pronoun mistake all the time. They are 6 and 4, but they are bilingual (we live in Spain) so I figured it was just confusion from Spanish, where the subject can be included in the verb so you don't have to continually specify gender. But maybe it is a common stage in language development, even for monolingual kids.

I realize that this misses your point entirely, but I'm in a commenting mood, so thought I'd mention it anyway!

[cherylc]

That's awesome. My daughter is 7 and a half, and she still refers to butch women we know as "he" sometimes. We'll say, "You know "name" is a girl, right?" and she knows, but it's confusing. She started this at the age of two, when she called one of her caregivers "Mama" and one "Dada" and she got the genders correct. It's fascinating. I think it's confusing anyway, and especially if you know people who don't follow all of the gender "rules."

[Dani]

We had an unspoken policy of never correcting these mistakes when ours were little, on the grounds that it really doesn't matter what gender someone is. I think this was an instinctive reaction to the sudden onslaught of 'gendering' both of us felt hit us as soon as we started socialising with other new parents. We weren't explicitly correcting any other little mis-speakings (mans, goed, etc), so it would have seemed quite out of step to pick up on this one in particular. Of course, all these things do get ironed out very quickly, with or without explicit correction.

I like Nat's answer! I wonder what was behind her explanation that J was "a boy and a girl".

[Nancy]

Shannon has heard this before but for the amusement of her readers...

My niece (4.5) was a "flower girl" when I married my butch partner. A few days later this conversation took place at a mall when she, my SIL and I were shopping for some new clothes for my brother:

Niece: Is L a husband or a wife?

Me: (pausing, thinking fast about this, decide more questions are best way to go) Well, is L a boy or a girl?

Niece: A girl.

Me: Are girls husbands or wives? (I later wished I hadn't presented this as a either/or)

Niece: Wives

Me: Then L is a wife.

Niece: No. She's a husband.

Me: Oh.

Pause as we meander the store.

Niece: Does L wear boy clothes or girl clothes?

Me: Mostly boy clothes.

Niece: Why?

Me: She likes them.

Niece: Do you wear girl clothes or boy clothes?

Me: Mostly girl clothes.

Niece: Why?

Me: Because I like girl clothes.

Another long pause.

Niece: Is L kind-of a boy and kind-of a girl?

Me: YES!! She's kind-of a boy and kind-of a girl.

What I think was happening (aside from her brilliant understanding of the nuances of gender) is that she knew two women could get married because she'd just seen it happen. But she didn't have any reference point for there being two wives or two husbands. Since there can only be one wife and one husband, I must be the wife since I am more like what she thinks of as a girl. That leaves husband for L.

I didn't think she was ready for the "L is neither a husband nor a wife" conversation.

[Tracy]

Totally unrelated to this post, but I would love to know how you interpret it: what are your feelings about people who are getting all excited over whether or not Barack Obama can call himself "black"? I don't understand why it's an issue?

[caro]

I like your explanation to her ... saying what "most people" do (choose one or the other) without negating her sense that we're all a little bit of each. I've been noticing Ingrid's ideas about gender recently -- she told me she thinks Iris (little sister) is "a little bit boy" because her hair is short. Pretty cool that they are working it out in such a complex way at this age, and not really buying the binary system even though they hear it all the time in our language.