Gender Roles

Well, despite any noises we may have made about letting Fiona pick her own gender (I mean, both her parents did spend way too much time in academia in their twenties), our daughter has started noticing that boys and girls are, well, different. And one thing she's been doing lately is saying things like "Mommy Girl. Daddy Boy. Fiona Girl. Aunt Kathy Girl. Pop Boy." as she figures out who belongs to which category.

Sooner or later, Fiona's interest in boys and girls and her interest in Pooh was bound to collide. It hasn't occurred to her yet, however, that Pooh is pretty much a boys' world. It's occurred to her parents that Kanga is the only female, and she gets stuck playing "mother" while everybody else heads off to have fun; on the other hand, Disney may be changing that in the future (and to digress from a digression: the writer of that linked article and its headline obviously has no idea that the bear's name is Winnie-the-Pooh or Pooh or Pooh Bear, but never Winnie).

Anyway, back to gender roles--Fiona hasn't figured out that almost all the characters in her favorite stories are boys, but we are getting a window into what she thinks are boy characteristics versus girl characteristics. Her verdicts:

Tigger: Boy
Roo: Girl
Eeyore: Boy (I suppose the voice is a giveaway)
Piglet: Girl
Owl: Boy
Pooh Bear: Boy. No, Girl. Yeah, Girl (she had to think about this one for a while).

No word yet on Rabbit. Or Christopher Robin, for that matter.