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The impact of the environment on the gender identity of children
An IGAS report proposes an “educational pact for children” in order to fight against sexist stereotypes in reception facilities. Recommendations that will undoubtedly revive the hot debate on gender theories.
Photos from the U stores catalog of December 2012
The General Inspectorate of Social Affairs has just released its report on “Equality between girls and boys in early childhood care arrangements” requested by Najat Vallaud Belkacem. The report makes the following observation: all policies promoting equality come up against a major obstacle, the question of systems of representation which assign men and women to gendered behaviors. An assignment that seems to be developed from very early childhood, especially in reception methods. For Brigitte Grésy and Philippe Georges, nursery staff and childminders show a desire for total neutrality. In fact, these professionals nevertheless adapt their behavior, even unconsciously, to the sex of the child.Little girls would be less stimulated, less encouraged in collective activities, less encouraged to participate in construction games. Sport and the use of the body would also constitute a melting pot for gendered learning: “beautiful to see”, individual sports on the one hand, “quest for achievement”, team sports on the other. The rapporteurs also evoke the “binary” universe of toys, with more limited, poorer girls’ toys, often reduced to the scope of domestic and maternal activities. In children’s literature and the press, the masculine also prevails over the feminine.78% of book covers feature a male character and in works featuring animals the asymmetry is established in a ratio of one to ten. This is why the IGAS report advocates the establishment of an “educational pact for children” to raise awareness among staff and parents.
In December 2012, the U stores distributed a catalog of “unisex” toys, the first of its kind in France.
A rising debate
Local initiatives have already emerged. In Saint-Ouen, the Bourdarias crèche has already attracted a lot of attention. The little boys play with dolls, the little girls make construction games. The books read feature as many female and male characters. The staff are mixed. In Suresnes, in January 2012, eighteen agents from the children’s sector (media library, nurseries, leisure centers) followed a first pilot training aimed at preventing sexism through children’s literature. And then, remember,during the last Christmas, U stores made the buzz with a catalog featuring boys with infants and girls with construction games.
The question of equality and gender stereotypes is increasingly debated in France and sees politicians, scientists, philosophers and psychoanalysts clash. The exchanges are lively and complex. If little boys say “vroum vroum” before pronouncing “mummy”, if little girls love to play with dolls, is it related to their biological sex, to their nature, or to the education given to them, therefore? to culture? According to the gender theories that emerged in the United States in the 70s, and which are at the heart of current thinking in France, the anatomical difference of the sexes is not sufficient to explain the way in which girls and boys, women and men, end up sticking to the representations assigned to each sex. Gender and sexual identity is more of a social construction than a biological reality. No, the men are not from Mars and the women are not from Venus. IFor these theories, it is not a question of denying the initial biological difference but of relativizing it and understanding to what extent this physical difference subsequently conditions social relations and relations of equality.. When these theories were introduced into SVT’s primary school textbooks in 2011, there were many protests. Petitions have circulated questioning the scientific validity of this research, which is more ideological.
The opinion of neurobiologists
Anti-theories of gender will brandish the book by Lise Eliot, American neurobiologist, author of “Pink brain, blue brain: do neurons have a sex?” “. For example, she writes: “Yes, boys and girls are different. They have different interests, different activity levels, different sensory thresholds, different physical strengths, different relationship styles, different concentration abilities and different intellectual aptitudes! (…) These differences between the sexes have real consequences and pose enormous challenges for parents. How do we support our sons as well as our daughters, protect them and continue to treat them fairly, when their needs are clearly so different? But don’t trust it. What the researcher develops above all is that the differences that initially exist between a little girl’s brain and a little boy’s brain are minimal. And that the differences between individuals are much greater than those between men and women.
Advocates of a culturally fabricated gender identity can also refer to a renowned French neurobiologist, Catherine Vidal. In a column published in September 2011 in Liberation, she wrote: “The brain is constantly making new neural circuits based on learning and lived experience. (…) The human newborn does not know its sex. He will certainly learn very early on to distinguish the masculine from the feminine, but it is only from the age of 2 and a half that he will be able to identify with one of the two sexes. However, since birth he has been evolving in a gendered environment: the bedroom, toys, clothes and adult behavior are different depending on the sex of the young child.It is the interaction with the environment that will orient tastes, aptitudes and help to forge personality traits according to the male and female models given by society. ».
Everyone gets involved
There is no shortage of arguments from both sides. Big names in philosophy and the human sciences have taken a stand in this debate. Boris Cyrulnik, neuropsychiatrist, ethologist, ended up descending into the arena to castigate the theories of the genre, seeing only an ideology conveying “a hatred of the genre”. ” It’s easier to raise a girl than a boy, he assured Point in September 2011. Moreover, in child psychiatry consultation, there are only little boys, whose development is much more difficult. Some scientists explain this shift by biology. The combination of XX chromosomes would be more stable, because an alteration on one X could be compensated for by the other X. The XY combination would be in evolutionary difficulty. Add to this the major role of testosterone, the hormone of boldness and movement, and not aggression, as is often believed. ”Sylviane Agacinski, philosopher, also expressed reservations. “Anyone who does not say today that everything is constructed and artificial is accused of being a“ naturalist ”, of reducing everything to nature and biology, which nobody says! »(Christian Family, June 2012).
In October 2011, before the Women’s Rights Delegation of the National Assembly, Françoise Héritier, a great figure in anthropology, came to argue that standards, expressed more or less consciously, have a considerable influence on the gender identity of individuals. She gives several examples to support her demonstration. A motor skills test, first, carried out on 8 month old babies outside the mother’s presence and then in her presence afterwards. In the absence of mothers, children are made to crawl on an inclined plane. The girls are more reckless and climb steeper slopes. The mothers are then called in and must themselves adjust the inclination of the board according to the estimated capacities of the children. Results: they overestimate by 20 ° the capacities of their sons and underestimate by 20 ° those of their daughters.
On the other hand, the novelist Nancy Houston published in July 2012 a book entitled “Reflections in a man’s eye” in which she is irritated by the postulates on the “social” gender, claims that males do not have the same desires and the same sexual behavior as females and that if women want to please men it is not through alienation.Gender theory, according to her, would be “an angelic rejection of our animality”. This echoes Françoise Héritier’s remarks before parliamentarians: “Of all animal species, humans are the only ones where males strike and kill their females. Such wastage does not exist in animal “nature”. Murderous violence against females within its own species is a product of human culture and not of its animal nature ”.
This certainly does not help us to decide on the origin of the immoderate taste of little boys for cars, but which reminds us to what extent, in this debate, the traps are frequent to succeed in identifying the part of the cultural and the natural.