ABSTRACT
Children learn gender categories from extracting patterns they experience when “exposed to a culturally-relevant social practice.” For instance, noticing that when an adult is pushing a stroller, it is much more often a woman, or when someone is building a house, it is more often a man. Many gender studies instructors use the following riddle I alluded to earlier to illustrate the ubiquity of gender schema: a boy and his father are riding in a car together and they suffer a terrible accident. The father is killed and the son, badly injured, is transported to the hospital to undergo surgery. The suppression of emotion also comes with other costs. At the extreme, it is manifested in the psychological condition known as alexithymia, which literally means “no words for feelings.” People with this condition exhibit emotional numbness, almost as though they are sleepwalking through life.
