ABSTRACT
Babies are not born with a crystallized self-awareness of their sex and gender. Such self-awareness evolves gradually in early childhood. While growing up, children learn to make consistent and systematic use of genital information as a criterion for the classification of their own and others’ sex and they increasingly develop an understanding of the various aspects of gender. Gender identity is not only the ability to classify oneself and others as male or female but also has strong affective components (Egan and Perry, 2001). Long before children have a sophisticated understanding of gender, they display either female or male gender role behavior (Martin, Ruble, and Szkrybalo 2002).
