Critiquing Gender Constancy as Practice and as Model :: Gender Sex Research Essays Papers

Critiquing Gender Constancy as Practice and as Model "What is REAL?" asked the rabbit one day..."It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." A current debate in Developmental Psychology centers around when gender labeling, identity, and stereotyping first occur in children, and how the timing of these events correlates with a moment in every child's life where they reach what is called "gender constancy." Gender constancy, briefly, is the knowledge that the mechanical sex one has been assigned will always be his or her sex, but also the knowledge that he or she will always be a girl or boy, and the characteristics that go along with that gender are a part of his or her permanent future identity. Before the age of around three or four, children state that they believe that they can grow up to be a different gender than they are now, and they can change genders based on how they dress or cut their hair. I guess fortunately slower than many children, I struggled with this concept of gender constancy long after mastering that rabbit-hat illusion, and it never really caused me a great deal of pain or confusion until the end of high school. The fact that I never really liked girls, but that I was a girl never really occurred to me as a problem. Looking back now, I was such a contradiction because I did so many "girl" things, but I didn't think I respected "girl" things. I could easily observe and then decide not wear make up or high heels and my protests of "girl" were obvious, but I was quiet and polite in my way of acting and speaking I didn't have gender constancy when I was 3 or 4; I was 18 when I finally realized, "I'm a girl", and despite my respect for "boy" things, I was never going to be a boy, and although I could do as many "boy" things as I wanted, society would always treat me differently.