I was reading a paper on how children develop gender identity (“I dont want to play with dolls; I like trucks”). A certain line caught my attention. It seems, that a very young child (1-2 yo) may not have any gender identity, but by 3, it begins to identify itself as a “boy” or a “girl”. This idea gets stabilised by age 5. By age 7, it achieves “gender constancy”- meaning that it begins to understand that its gender (- and other people’s gender) will not change under different circumstances: A boy will understand at 7 that by putting on princess pink dress in a game, his gender is not going to change.
In a nutshell: a baby’s pure and minimalistic sense of “Self” is captured by firm ideas of gender identity by 7! What a miracle!
Does something like this happen to a pws at this age? Anyway, here is the passage, I was referring to:
“..Gender schema theory proposes that gender stereotyping results from the fact that the self-concept itself is assimilated into the gender schema, such that those individuals who adhere to more gender stereotypes (e.g., girls do not play with trucks) have a greater readiness to process information about themselves (e.g., I am a girl, so I cannot play with a truck) (e.g., (Bem, 1981)..”
If this is the case: a pws between 5-10 yo begins to identify oneself as a “stammerer” and is convinced that s/he will have to battle with it for the rest of its life– then, really this is a big CHANGE for that child. It will take quite sometime to extricate her/his “Self” from that overlay, that mess. In my case it took many decades. But good news is: I did find my “Self”- and that is what ultimately matters, maybe.
We can learn a lot from LGBTQ commuinity: troubled people have gone beyond “gender” (= stammering) in search of their “true” identity. James Baldwin was openly gay, but refused to be boxed into identity politics; he saw identity as socially constructed, and emphasized human essence beyond labels. He will be remembered for his role in US civil rights movement. Virginia Wolf is another big name. She deeply explored fluid gender identity, through his characters and pointed toward a mind beyond fixed gender.
So, the idea is: people have turned their gender “difficulties” into creative pursuits, works of art, edifices of public good! What are we doing with our speech “difficulties”?
If all this makes no sense, do drop in our next “Who Am I?” workshop! 😍😂
