A couple of years ago, I met up with an old friend and her just 3 year old twins. They were both in dresses, and my friend was in a dress too - very unlike her! She was raised in bell-bottoms and no TV in the wilds of Vermont (like me, only more so), and had never been much for dresses. I commented on the dresses and Cat said, "Oh, the girls insist I wear a dress, because boys wear pants and girls wear dresses." I went, WTF?, since clearly Cat was not raising her daughters in a strongly gender-biased way.
Now that Casper is turned 3, I get it. I think (based on no actual training in child development, so this is just me observing), that 3 is the age where children wake up, look around, and start to interact with their peers and be influenced by them. They start to understand the rules and patterns of the world, and how they work, and want to fit the things they know into the rules.
With gender, it seems to be all of a sudden Casper knows there is "girl" and "boy" stuff, and that she is supposed to want the girl stuff. Examples:
-Toy Lightning McQueen (male red sports car protagonist of the film Cars): painted pink with tempera paint.
-At Sears, heads stright for the Disney Princess sneakers with lights. When I suggest the Spiderman sneakers with lights, rejects them, "Those are for BOYS."
-When asked anything about color preference, replies pink. (BUT, when choosing favorite outfits, often does not choose pink.)
-Awareness of girls vs. boys playing together at school.
I also recall when I was a child a (younger) girl I knew turned 3 and decided she was a boy. She had a variety of names in turn we were required to call her (Rusty, Brian) and asked for a football for her birthday. This lasted about a year. As far as I know, she has had no gender identity issues since, and was biologically a normal female. I think she was rebelling against the gender role she was seeing assigned to her.
None of the women in my or mr. flea's family are very girly; you all know me and my sister, and mr. flea's sister and 4 year old neice are both athletic, mostly tomboyish types. And Casper, compared to the average 3 year old girl of my acqaintance, is not very girly, either: she likes her tiara and tutu, but also her cowboy boots. We tell her she's clever, brave and strong at least as often as we tell her she's pretty. She will never be a general in the Princess Army. But I can see that right now she's learning that her role in society is "girl," and what that entails, outside of the messages we can send her at home.
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