Gender

In everyday life, gender is taken for granted. Most of the time, we recognise the people we meet as boys or girls, men or women. This is such a common experience that people can be embarrassed or even angered by a social encounter that is ambiguous and leaves the 'gender question' unresolved. For many people, meeting an effeminate man or a burly lesbian can violate their deeply held belief that humans ought to be dichotomous-instantly recognisable as male or female. The belief that humans are naturally dichotomous comes from two sources. The first is an oversimplified view of genetic programming. The idea here is that gender is a natural consequence of sexual differences that are biologically determined. On average, the argument goes, women are weaker than men. They can have babies and suckle their young, so 'real women' should be happy staying home and mothering children. Men are stronger and have testosterone, so they are thought to be better equipped to manage the outside world and earn a living for the family. As we shall see later in this chapter, the biological dichotomy sketched here is greatly exaggerated. The second source of commonly held views about the gender dichotomy is also simplistic. It has its origins in theories about socialisation where it is argued that if children are reared in the right way, they will develop correctly differentiated understandings of their unique sex roles. This chapter reviews a range of evidence around the idea of the gender divide, exposing flaws in these ideas and arguments. As we shall see, neither the biological determinism view nor the sex-role socialisation view adequately accounts for the ways young people in our society go about constructing their gender identities. Children are not passively socialised into sex roles; on the contrary, they exercise considerable agency as they experiment with alternative forms of gendered behaviour (Davies, 1989; Thorne, 1993; MacNaughton, 2000). As Connell puts it, they 'do this actively, and on their own terms [and] ... even play with and against the gender dichotomy itself' (2009, p. 16).