hi

Gendered socialization is unequivocally real. Boys and girls are treated and socialized differently before they're even born.

Female babies are disappearing en masse, because male babies are more valued.

From an extremely early age, parents respond to their childrens' emotions differently based on gender. Mothers over-estimate the crawling abilities of their infant sons compared to infant daughters.

Mothers speak to their infant daughters more and talk them more about emotions than they do their sons.

By the age of 2, boys already show an avoidance to the color pink and other items traditionally seen as feminine, laying the ground work for early demonstrations of misogyny in childhood.

When children enter pre-school, there is no difference in math abilities between boys and girls. But such gaps begin to appear as children grow older.

The vast majority of girls report feeling unsafe going outside, and at least 2/3 of girls have reported experiencing sexual harassment at school by the time they 16.

Further on in education, women will understimate their scores, while men will overestimate their scores. Women will perform worse on tests when first told that women, on average, perform worse.

Researchers argue that the prevalence of sexual assault against women is so high specifically because of early gendered socialization. The men who commit sexual violence consistently demonstrate specific ideals about gender and perform hostile masculinity.

The patterns reach well into adulthood, influencing occupational choices.

I could literally go on and on and on. There are countless studies and entire fields of academia dedicated to researching this. The fact that children are socialized differently paced on assigned or percieved gender is really not debatable.

I am sympathetic to the fact that transphobes have warped the concept of socialization to insinuate that trans women are destined to be violent or predatory, or that trans men are destined to be submissive and helpless. However, people weaponizing these frameworks does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist.

Furthermore, individual people's nuanced experiences with gendered socialization does not mean that these patterns don't exist on a large scale. Any interaction with society will confer the influence of gender biases, especially upon children to are extremely vulnerable to both subtle and overt social cues.

Thinking of it as like a language, where so much stuff is taught by exposure, all the "gendered manners" that are taught in single-sex situations (the proverbial thing of "girls act differently when there are no boys present/boys act differently when there are no girls present") which are the situations where a kid is taught how to perform "their" gender in the most nuanced and complicated ways that signal to other people of the same-gender that "we are the same type of person" - and, trans people are often cut off from that until they come out, meaning that they have to learn the "basics" as adults.

Likewise I see so many trans people say "Bold of you to assume I was socialised! I was treated as a weird thing." And I don't know how to point out that the things that get a child treated as a "weird thing" and put outside of the bounds of propriety are themselves different for children being raised-to-boyhood or raised-to-girlhood. Thinking about England because I don't want to extrapolate outside of where I personally know, a "girl" might get treated as a tomboy-outsider-weirdo for wanting to play toy soldiers or play in the woods, but a "boy" would probably be seen as normal for that. Likewise, a "boy" might be punished really badly for liking makeup and dresses, but a "girl" wouldn't be. Seeing "You can't say I was socialised as a boy, I was constantly getting in trouble for putting on my sister's clothes, and treated like I was disgusting for crying and being emotional!" And just... Yes! Because people that the patriarchy wants to turn into "boys" will be punished for showing femininity, that is how male socialisation works! Likewise "I was treated as a tomboy and put in a third gender category because I was sporty and outdoorsy, and punished and called monstrous and sent to see a psychiatrist for not playing with dollies" - That's female socialisation, because a "boy" who was sporty wouldn't be put into into third gender category for it, and wouldn't be called monstrous for having no interest in dolls.

Obviously the exact things that are gendered change from culture to culture, but that applies to everything, everything is culturally bound and affects different people in different ways and to different degrees, but we still try to talk about the broad trends which carry through cross-culturally (which has been a big part of feminist consciousness- Recognising that although the ways that women are treated worldwide aren't the same, that there are repeating themes...)

This is one reason that paying attention to intersex theory and experiences is really important for trans liberation and gender liberation both: I don't think you can really understand gender socialization without paying attention to case studies of children whose gender has been problematized at an early age as well as those who are perceived and socialized as "normally" gendered children. Obviously trans adults can come from children from both normatized and problematized childhood gender experiences, and individual caretakers of a gender or sex divergent child may respond to that child in a range of ways. But it's really worth noting that socialization theory does have room for socialization experiences that differ from the presumed-cis, presumed-perisex norm, and I think that talking about those examples can resolve some of the rejection of gendered socialization among trans communities.

Have you considered that this is how your presence feels?

Have you considered that this is how your presence feels?

Have you considered that this is how your presence feels?