What we know about gender and what we don't

It is list making time. I am trying to update my sense of where gender science is these days. Let me know if I have missed anything.

It would be a mistake to think that we have arrived at a perfect understanding of the relationship between nature and nurture, much less the mechanisms by which we acquire our identities. There are people who still believe that boys become homosexuals because they have a weak or absent father and a dominant mother. There are people who believe that trans women choose their identities because they want to infiltrate and excel in women’s sports or invade girls’ bathrooms. The fact is that the scientific understanding of human sexual identity and behavior is far from complete, and the popular understanding lags behind the science even more.

What gender scholars know with reasonable certainty: 

• What we call “sex” is not completely biological. Even the way we label a person “male” or “female” is connected to cultural definitions of what determines sex. The queasiness and avoidance around intersex variations is powerful evidence of this cultural inclination.
• Gender is not completely social or cultural; neuroscientists are pretty convinced that early childhood learning about gender patterns and expectations impacts brain development and cognition.
• Neither sex nor gender is binary, but a continuum of characteristics and behaviors
• Children learn the prevailing rules of gender before their first birthday, as they acquire language (Mama, Dada, she and he) and learn gendered patterns of color and decoration from their surroundings.
• Gender identity is fairly stable in most children by the age of four. They know how they feel inside and how to label and express it. Even more significant, they know their gender is important.
• Even when they have acquired this knowledge, it takes a few more years before a child fully internalizes their sense of self as a “boy” or “girl”. This is because they rarely believe that their sex (biologically speaking) is permanent until they are six or seven years old. This explains why a little girl may insist on only wearing dresses. She fears that wearing pants will make her a boy.
• Shifts in how we talk about and express gender make it harder for everyone to learn the “rules''. Adults frequently complain about having to adjust to new standards; children just learning how their culture works might also find it hard to figure out changing patterns.

What gender scholars still don’t know:

• How much of the variations in gender expression that we see in children are linked to biology (i.e., hormones, genetics).
• How biological factors interact with social and cultural factors, especially in infancy and early childhood. 

We will never know the answers to these questions, because we can’t do controlled experiments on children. Gender studies can never prove causation, only correlation. And while the academics are pondering and positing, parents are conducting small-scale, uncontrolled experiments on their own children all the time. Their conclusions about “how gender works” then become part of the cultural mix. For this reason, as gender science has been evolving, there have been continuous changes in the way we raise our children, including how we dress them. Welcome to the gender fun house!