In the class, we explored the website called Black Girls Dangerous, which I felt personally has full of interesting stuff. In particular, one of the articles, which is about the letter from a mother to her gender-creative son’s pre-kindergarten class, had a lot of implications worth considering. Today, I’m going to talk about how big influence the culture and society have on gender creation of kids. Reading this article recognises us the importance of experiences and situations at young age. Later, I want to mention the differences between what we call modern Western society and non-Western society, reflecting my own experiences.

In the letter, she says ‘We have told Ocho that he can be whichever gender he wants, and that if he doesn’t want to choose, he doesn’t have to.’ For me, a person who has been grown up in the society where parents rarely imagine their child is gender-creative nor admit that, this letter sounds surprising and shocking, in that she gives him (her) not only a choice between boy and girl but also a choice of non-decision. This may be a new trend, especially among modern western society.

In Japan, since they are very small, boys and girls have been treated quite differently. This has an enormous influence on kids’ gender recognition. I’ll give some interesting examples. First, in Japan, we add gender specific word to all kids’ first name; ‘kun’ to boys and ‘chan’ to girs (for example, I’m called ‘Aoi-chan’). And this is socially structured. For example, every kindergarten, elementary school and junior high school checks the attendance with this name every single morning. For example, I was called my name ‘Aoi-chan’ every morning by my teacher. Let me give you another example. In Japan, we have strict gender colour; blue for boys and red for girls. This is not that they prefer their colour, but half socially decided. For example, it’s usually mandatory that all elementary school boys use blue or black backpack and girls use red one for school. (However, it’s interesting that these days we can find yellow backpack.) This backpack, ‘randoseru’, is a symbol of elementary school children, which has a lot of cultural meanings. Furthermore, school uniform has also a function as a decisionist of kids’ gender. Since kindergarten, they have the school uniform, which is gender specific; pants for boys, skirts for girls. As these example shows, since they are very small, they are strongly recognized their biological sex so that they are assumed to behave as their sex and don’t even recognize they can be different. In this sense, they have far less chances to be opposite or trans gender, compared to the situation in modern society like one in the letter. The difference of the number of children with gender-creative issues between western countries and Japan is partly because of this.

 Therefore, I can now point out two things as my conclusion. First, experiences and situations at young age have a significant impact on their gender identity. Before developing their own idea about gender, they have been treated as their biological sex by the society. So, they take it for granted. In addition, there is a difference among cultures. Generally, in what we call modern western society, they are getting to be more generous to gender-creative people and the same thing can be said around issues of gender-creative kids. On the other hand, in other countries, the old-fashioned gender norm is still dominant and kids have relatively few chances to recognize their own gender identity and behave as an opposite or trans gender person. To look at kids’ gender issue has many significant implications, so I would like to continue to do further research on this topic.