Do children have essentialist beliefs about gender?

Researcher Kathleen Corriveau said [emphasis mine]:

"We asked questions about moral violations. When children form opinions, some things are moral—you shouldn’t hit people, you shouldn’t steal—and others are conventional: you shouldn’t wear socks on your hands. Our question was, how are children judging religious violations—as moral or conventional? We asked children about people who were part of their religious group who were doing some sort of violation—like, “You’re Jewish and you’re eating pork”—and [then asked] about someone that’s not Jewish and is eating pork.

What we’re finding—and this is hopeful—is when the person they’re making a judgment [about] is a member of their religious group, they’re viewing it more as a moral violation; it’s really bad. But if that same violation is by someone that’s not a member of their religious group, they’re more accepting. In some locations, children treat religion as a highly essentialized category, like gender, [but] in other locations, children treat it like a preference for a baseball team—not a big deal."

— Polarized Parents Are Raising Ideologically Divided Kids. How Do We Stop the Cycle? Boston University’s Kathleen Corriveau, who studies why children believe what they do, says social exposure may be the key to ending the transmission of polarized beliefs. Kathleen Corriveau, interviewed by Rich Barlow, The Brink (Boston University), August 4, 2026

She was talking about her previous "five-year study—spanning 18 countries from the US and Australia to nations in Europe, Asia, and Africa—that probed how religious beliefs in particular shape attitudes" of children ages 4–12, as Rich Barlow explained. (Separately, she has a new research project in the Developing Belief Network, "a global collaborative studying the development of religious awareness.")

My initial reaction is to wonder whether, in some locations, children treat gender as essentialized; elsewhere, as less essentialized?

One could simply repeat the research to investigate that question, but, in today's propagandized climate, the researchers would be accused of "gender ideology" simply for asking children a "leading question" of whether man and woman might not be predetermined, fixed categories. Of course, there is no such thing as gender ideology; it's just something that far-right people accuse you of when you point out basic facts, like other people's beliefs and practices around gender. The far-right promotes the appearance of gender homogeneity, claiming that homogeneity is natural and diversity is ideology. This pressures people out of even asking questions about diversity.

Conversion therapy is still legal in Britain

Conversion therapy should be dead, but it isn't, and that's why I share this on Dead Men Blogging, from Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube.

ICYMI, March 20: "It's finally ready: the biggest episode of Philosophy Tube ever! The sequel to "I Emailed My Doctor 133 Times." This is my investigation into conversion therapy: where it came from, why it's still legal in Britain, and how it's being done right now on the NHS with the knowledge and assistance of certain members of the British government." Philosophy Tube on Patreon.

(2 hours 10 min)

Then, this. (1 hour 51 min)

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Image: Bertel Thorvaldsen's sculpture of Christ. Copenhagen Cathedral. Image by Gunnar Bach Pedersen © public domain Wikimedia Commons.

On gendered argumentation in 20th-century New York

Just learned of this book:

It's about "the New York Intellectuals—a heavily Jewish scene, formed around Cold War liberalism and high modernist literary tastes, that profoundly shaped everything from art criticism to foreign policy," as David Klion, contributing editor to Jewish Currents, explains today.

Klion says:

"A rare work of academic history with crossover appeal to more mainstream readers, Write Like a Man is also the first book to give full attention to the fraught gender dynamics that shaped the New York Intellectuals. Most of the group was male, defined by names like Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Howe. Grinberg not only gives fair due to the most prominent women in the group—chiefly Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Diana Trilling, and Midge Decter—she also ingeniously demonstrates how gender shaped the actual writing produced by both male and female New York Intellectuals.

The title comes from a killer 1963 quote from NYRB co-founder Jason Epstein: 'With women in that crowd, the first thing you thought about was whether they were good-looking and if you could sleep with them. But if a woman could write like a man, that was enough.' To Grinberg, 'writing like a man' refers to a mode of rigorous, swaggering, aggressive argumentation rooted in the legendary cafeteria alcoves of then all-male City College, where many of the future New York Intellectuals spent the 1930s engaged in verbal duels with Stalinists. It's a style still recognizable today, and Grinberg portrays it as a means of assimilation for the sons of poor Yiddish-speaking immigrants trying to assert their masculinity in an America that stereotyped Jews as meek and effeminate. Grinberg’s female subjects, as the Epstein line suggests, held their own in the group because they were able to master this style—though as Grinberg also shows, the women in the scene who came from different backgrounds (either as gentiles or, in Arendt’s case, as a German Jewish emigre with formidable Old World academic credentials) received more deference from their male peers than the shtetl-descended women who were often treated simply as wives."

More on Jason Epstein

Michael Castleman explains how Jason Epstein invented trade paperbacks:

"In 1953, Jason Epstein was a recent Columbia University graduate working in publishing — temporarily, he thought — as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. He lived in Greenwich Village, a short walk from the funky but glorious (and now defunct) Eighth Street Bookshop, which counted among its patrons Jack Kerouac, Susan Sontag, E.E. Cummings, Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka.

To Epstein’s wide young eyes, the place was paradise. He visited after work, sometimes lingering for hours. But his editorial assistant’s salary paid so little (forty-five dollars a week) that he couldn’t afford hardcovers, and that was all Eighth Street Bookshop stocked.

One day Epstein asked the store’s owners if they might be interested in selling less expensive paperback editions of their hardcovers to appeal to working folks and young people like him.

Not Pocket Books. Heaven forbid!

No, Epstein explained, he envisioned a larger format and better paper..."

Excerpted from Michael Castleman, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing (2024), excerpt reprinted in LitHub

Related

The Birth of Doubt: Confronting Uncertainty in Early Rabbinic Literature (2020)
Moshe Halbertal, trans. from Hebrew by Elli Fischer.
Series: Brown Judaic Studies.

Argument Isn’t Everything: On Creativity in Philosophy, Justin Weinberg. Daily Nous, December 10, 2025

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Virginia, 1629: An incident in intersex & trans history

In 1623 — as Kit Heyam writes in Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender — Warraskoyack, Virginia, "an English colonial settlement, on Powhatan land," had a population of "twenty-nine white and four Black people." This included a person named Thomas Hall, who worked as a servant to two men. Hall's story was that they had grown up as a girl in England, then dressed as a young man to fight on the Île de Ré in the 1620s, then resumed employment as a woman in needlework for a few years before sailing for America in 1627.

The small community in Warraskoyack had differing opinions of Hall's gender, which seems not to have been a problem for about a year, but in early 1629 became the subject of debate and investigation when Hall was said to be having sex with a person known as "great Bess," who was a maid to a plantation manager. Hall also wore women's clothing and claimed to like sex with men too.

Heyam writes that, in 1629, "around one third of the Warraskoyack population had directly involved themselves in the task of establishing whether the person they knew as Thomas was 'man or woman'." Hall, when asked directly, asserted that they were both. One of Hall's employers likewise answered that he believed Hall to be both. The community then "sought to prove the 'truth' of Thomas(ine)'s gender by inspecting their genitals repeatedly and violently." No one agreed whether Hall's genitals were male or female, and "the case was passed to the Jamestown court," which decided that Hall should be treated as both "a man and a woman."

Heyam points out that "intersex bodies have always been made to stand for more than they are: for God's judgement, for hte supernatural or monstrous, for threats to the patriarchal order. People whose intersex traits are obvious have rarely been able to fly under the radar. While trans history is often hidden behind ambiguous motivations for gender-nonconforming behaviour, intersex history is often violently laid bare before an invasive medical, religious or literary gaze." Unfortunately, some "trans people have appropriated intersex traits and identities to validate our genders or access medical treatment." Nonetheless there are some similarities between trans and intersex experience, including that "medical and legal professionals" try to interfere and to change trans and intersex people's bodies against their wishes. "The same doctors who were keen to change intersex bodies, which they saw as in need of 'correction', were reluctant to help trans people, whose problems they understood as psychological, not physical." Some people therefore asserted that they were intersex because it was a way for them to seek hormones and surgeries.

The life of Thomas Hall can be seen as part of intersex history, trans history, or both.

Please do check out the book Before We Were Trans because it is full of insightful ideas like this.

History: Denim jeans for workers, not 'men' or 'women'

Jeans by Mabel Amber, who will one day from Pixabay

Denim jeans are for workers:

"Women had begun wearing pants — specifically, denim jeans — because they were granted practical permission in industrial factory work during World War II. Women had not earned 'the right to wear pants' as a symbolic legal right, or as a matter of formal equality. The police had simply chosen, for obvious reasons, not to arrest them for wearing pants to and from work. Their pants were tied to their work, to the class status of being a worker in the formal labor market and the public sphere."

— "The Left Hand of the Law": Anti-Drag Law's Policing Ought to Inform Political Responses, Jules Gill-Peterson, Sad Brown Girl (Substack), Feb 27, 2023

Later, jeans are not explicitly men's clothing, but not necessarily women's clothing either:

“Those who do not want to change their anatomy but do want to change their gender behavior fare less well in establishing their social identity. The women Holly Devor called ‘gender blenders’ wore their hair short, dressed in unisex pants, shirts, and comfortable shoes, and did not wear jewelry or makeup. They described their everyday dress as women’s clothing: One said, ‘I wore jeans all the time, but I didn’t wear men’s clothes’ (Devor 1989, 100). Their gender identity as women, but because they refused to ‘do femininity,’ they were constantly taken for men (1987, 1989, 107-42). Devor said of them: ‘The most common area of complaint was with public washrooms. They repeatedly spoke of the humiliation of being challenged or ejected from women’s washrooms. Similarly, they found public change rooms to be dangerous territory and the buying of undergarments to be a difficult feat to accomplish’ (1987, 29). In an ultimate ironic twist, some f these women said ‘they would feel like transvestites if they were to wear dresses, and two women said that they had been called transvestites when they had done so’ (1987, 31). They resolved the ambiguity of their gender status by identifying as women in private and passing as men in public to avoid harassment on the street, to get men’s jobs, and, if they were lesbians, to make it easier to display affection publicly with their lovers (Devor 1989, 107–42). Sometimes they even used men’s bathrooms. When they had gender-neutral names, like Leslie, they could avoid the bureaucratic hassles that arose when they had to present their passports or other proof of identity, but because most had names associated with women, their appearance and their cards of identity were not conventionally congruent, and their gender status was in constant jeopardy. When they could, they found it easier to pass as men than to try to change the stereotyped notions of what women should look like.”
Judith Lorber. Paradoxes of Gender. Yale University, 1994. Chapter: “‘Night to His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender” (PDF). p. 21.

Reflecting gender in a family tree

Gender is an important part of life stories. An individual’s gender history can impact their relationships with their parents and siblings. It can also affect the person (or people) they marry and whether and how they come to be parents. This information is not always private; it can become part of family history.

As the amount of online genealogical data grows and as technology improves for creating family trees, new and more flexible ways of representing gender may arise.

Deciding what story to tell

Some genealogists maintain a “purist” position that a family tree should properly dedicate itself to outlining biological relationships. Within this approach, each individual on the tree will have one mother and one father – the people who contributed their DNA to form that person.

This approach poses problems for many people’s family stories. First of all, it does not reflect the reality and significance of adoption. One solution is to draw both family trees for the adoptee: the birth family and the adoptive family. If space permits, both trees can be drawn on the same page using different colors or backgrounds. This is often presented as a “roots and branches” visual design for young adopted children who are drawing their own family tree. With the child in the heart of the tree trunk, the birth family members are the “roots” of the tree and the adoptive family members are the “branches.”

A different problem (or, perhaps, opportunity) exists for people who claim more than one gender role over their lifetimes, and especially for those who have children, whether biologically or through adoption. How does one decide whether the indicate the person’s role as “daughter” or “son,” “wife” or “husband,” and especially as “mother” or “father,” where the person may have filled multiple roles at different times?

A blanket rule always to label a person’s sex in some particular way – whether based upon their birth sex, their surgically reassigned sex, the gender in which they spent the majority of their life, the gender on their marriage certificate(s), the way in which they contributed DNA to one or more children, or the “Mama” or “Papa” name by which their children called them – is a kind of stereotype and assumption that is no more proper or accurate within a family tree than it is in any other sphere of life. What is most relevant for one person may not be as important for another. The information in all of these spheres together may not present the individual consistently as one sex or the other, and even if it does, the person may have a different story to tell.

If the person is alive, they can, of course, be asked for their preference about the name and gender they want to use in the family tree. The document may be shared within the family or eventually stored as a publicly accessible record, so it is important to honor the lives of the people mentioned within it, which most likely means representing their gender as they would choose to represent it themselves.

Go back enough generations, on the other hand, and all of the ancestors are deceased. These people cannot be asked for their opinion, so the researcher must make a determination about how to present them.

One person whose life story poses such a question about gender representation is Deborah Samson, an American female who disguised herself as a man named Robert Shurtliff to fight in the Revolutionary War, and later returned to live as a woman, marrying a man and bearing children. (Her story is told in the recent novel Revolutionary by Alex Myers.) When faced with a real-life character like this, one must determine how to present their story. Other genealogists might find a relationship to a castrated man who may have held third-gender social status (whether he appreciated it or not) in places like China, India, Turkey or Italy. Again, there is a challenge in deciding how to present the family story.

Online tools

Once the researcher is ready to make a declaration about an individual’s gender, whether it is provisional or final, the next steps will be limited by what the medium allows. Most people today who draw up their family trees will do so on a computer. Each program has a different way of capturing and displaying gender.

Ancestry

One of the largest genealogy sites on the Internet today is Ancestry (ancestry.com). Users can make multiple family trees and optionally make the information available to share with other users. Their trees may be for their own families or for unrelated people in whom they have a research interest. Within the family tree, each individual has a profile that can contain multiple photographs or portraits and other media files. People without photographs are represented as white silhouettes. There are three gender options, which control the default silhouette: “male,” side-facing with short hair on a light blue background; “female,” side-facing with slightly longer, wavy hair on a light pink background; and “unknown,” facing straight ahead, bald in appearance, on a light gray background. The system asks for “Last name” before the gender is assigned. After it is assigned, the same field is called “Surname” for males and people of unknown gender, and “Maiden name” for females.

While Ancestry requires that one of these three gender options be selected for each person in a family tree, it does not restrict marriage or parent-child relationships based on the gender of the individuals involved. Users can also make a “custom” event on the individual’s timeline and label it however they please. This has the potential to be used for gender transition markers, as one example.

Find a Grave

Another large website is Find a Grave (findagrave.com) which allows users to create “memorial pages” devoted to individual graves, organized by cemetery. Find a Grave is technologically much simpler than Ancestry.com, but it has become a large resource because of the sheer amount of information that volunteer users have placed on the site for over 120 million graves as of 2015.

On a memorial page, the deceased individual may be assigned a first, middle, and last name, along with a nickname (which will appear in quotation marks) and a maiden name (which will display in italics), plus a prefix (Mrs., Sir, etc.) and a suffix (Jr., Sr., etc.). The nickname and maiden name fields may be co-opted for a person who had multiple names in multiple gender roles, if those names are relevant to that person’s life story, of course. Multiple images can be uploaded. These are usually photographs of the gravestone but can be photographs of the individual during life.

A optional section called “Family links” connects the memorial pages of immediate family members. The options are “Father,” “Mother,” and “Spouse” (along with “Year Married”). Multiple spouses can be added. It is only in the designation of “Father” and “Mother” that binary gender is relevant on Find a Grave. There is no pink and blue color-coding as on Ancestry, and Find a Grave can display a biographical text paragraph on the front of the memorial page without making the user “drill down” into sub-pages for that information.

What will users imagine next?

Some users’ ideas may be more creative – or simply more accurate – than existing software will allow them to input into the system. Genealogical work is highly collaborative, so it is likely that new conventions will emerge and that new technologies will be introduced to accommodate them.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.