Gender Is Inborn

In the past, I have written about (Making A Man Of Me) how we all have an inner sense of gender that is a part of our very being and that gender is inborn in all of us. In Maine, a family in the late sixties and early seventies tried to raise their daughter gender neutral (There is also a current family in Sweden that is trying the same thing and I wrote about it here) and the daughter wrote about her experience in a Newsweek article.

My Name Is Jesse
But I am not a boy. Inside my parents' failed experiment with gender neutrality.

By Jesse Ellison | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Mar 23, 2010

When I was 2 years old, my father started building a big house behind our tiny starter house. For days leading up to the arrival of the giant trucks and backhoes coming to dig out the foundation, my mother tried to get me excited. "Don't you want to watch the big trucks?!" she'd tease. When they finally arrived, the neighborhood boys parked themselves on our property, transfixed. I glanced out the window and immediately turned back to my toys, ignoring the commotion. As my mother recalls, "It was really a wake-up for me."
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In 1978, the year I was born, feminists like my mother were embracing the notion that gender roles were entirely rooted in the way that you were raised. In the 1970s, the feminist fringe was giving up bras, shaving, and diets; they were lighting their own cigarettes and opening their own doors. It was the "new feminism," and where the first movement was concerned with legal equality, like the right to vote, these women were focused on de facto equality: asserting that it was nurture, not nature, that made women and men different. To bust out of gender oppression also meant to assert that there was absolutely nothing different about our biological makeup.
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We all thought that the differences had to do with how you were brought up in a sexist culture, and if you gave children the same chances, it would equalize," my mom says. "It took a while to think, 'Maybe men and women really are different from each other, and they're both equally valuable.' "

As we learn more and more about gender identity I think that we learn the there is something deep within us that tells us our gender. When children are born intersex and the doctors try to “correct” the child’s gender, we are finding that the children are letting us know their true gender is not what the doctors assigned them at birth. We find that the outward clues of our gender are wrong some of the time and that maybe instead of assigning gender at birth, that maybe we should wait until the child tells us their gender. What a radical idea!