Today, while Ruby was in the bath, I was reading a magazine (Wondertime). She happened to look at a page with a big advertisement and said, “brown! boy!” It was a picture of a boy with brown hair. I wasn’t surprised that she got the color right, but found it interesting that she was able to identify that it was a picture of a boy. I didn’t realize she had already picked up on that distinction.
So, I paged through the magazine and, for every picture of a child (baby through about 7), I asked her if it was a boy or a girl. She was correct more often than not. I noticed that for more androgynous kids (usually babies), she was likely to say they were a girl. Most of the more obvious (to me) ones she got wrong were long-haired girls. Later, I looked through the pictures a few times and tried to discern a pattern, but I couldn’t.
We’ve raised her, so far, without obvious gender cues like wearing pink. I tend to refer to other children as a “kid” rather than a “boy” or a “girl.” And yet she’s still managed to crack the code of who is a boy and who is a girl, without much help from her parents. It’s pretty amazing.