GENDER DIFFERENTIATION AND SEX REHEARSALS
It is a social and cultural imperative to assign an infant as male or female, in accord with external genital status. The regularity with which infants are assigned as male or female masks the social importance of that event for the child, the parents, and the family. Only when an infant is born with a defect of the sex organs and sex of assignment must be delayed, or sex must be reannounced, are the social consequences easily observed. Uncertainty of gender status characteristically produces distress and anxiety in medical caretakers as well as in family members, who may presuppose that sexual development and sexual functioning stems from chromosomal, hormonal, or gonadal status, rather than from the program of upbringing. Without parent counseling, a child may then grow up sensing ambiguity about the self, feeling freakish or queer, neither male nor female, reflecting parental attitudes, anxieties, and misconceptions. Sex reannouncements are successful only when the parents are able to rear the child convincingly in the reassigned gender; parents cannot ordinarily bring up a child as a girl, if they continue to believe the child to be a boy, genitalia notwithstanding.
The genitalia of the newborn act as a releasing stimulus that initiates the program of rearing considered culturally, socially, and personally appropriate to a male or female child. Once set into motion, the program of rearing tends to be fixed and resistant to change. The gender status of the baby may be imprinted on the family in the critical period at childbirth, just as gender identity is imprinted on the child in the following eighteen to twenty-four months.
Different expectations and responses toward girl and boy infants and children often are so automatic as to go unnoticed by the parents as well as by others. In rare instances of sex-reannouncement, the dimorphism of rearing practices employed with the same child, living first as a boy, then as a girl, is strikingly illustrated. Money and Ehrhardt report the comments of several articulate parents. The observant mother of a child who was sex-reassigned from male to female at age eleven months, after ablation of the penis, reported:
“I started dressing her not in dresses but, you know, in little pink slacks and frilly blouses . . . and letting her hair grow.” A year and six months later, the mother wrote that she had made a special effort at keeping her girl in dresses almost exclusively, changing any item of clothes into something that was clearly feminine. “I even made all her nightwear into granny gowns and she wears bracelets and hair ribbons.” The effects of emphasizing feminine clothing became clearly noticeable in the girl’s attitude towards clothes and hairdo another year later, when she was observed to have a clear preference for dresses over slacks and to take pride in her long hair.
Related to being dressed nicely is the sense of neatness. The mother stated that her daughter by four and a half years of age was much neater than her brother, and in contrast with him, disliked to be dirty: “She likes for me to wipe her face. She doesn’t like to be dirty, and yet my son is quite different. I can’t wash his face for anything. . . . She seems to be daintier. Maybe it’s because I encourage it”.
In addition to differential parental expectations and responses for girl versus boy infants, parents provide models for identification and complementation. Identification with or copying the parent of the same sex, and complementation or reciprocation to the parent of the opposite sex are dual processes essential to the establishment of gender identity and gender role. Developmentally, the emergence of gender identity/role parallels the emergence of language at eighteen months to two years. The gender designations of language, the gender dimorphism of upbringing, and the body image jointly contribute to the imprinting of core gender identity, much as native language itself is imprinted. Once established, core gender identity is resistive to change and likely to be associated with psychopathology (Hampson). In the ensuing years of childhood, gender identity/role is elaborated and consolidated as the child interacts with adult models for identification and complementation, and rehearses both sex-coded roles and sex roles in play and in fantasy.
*14/187/5*
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