Tyrannosaurs Can Be Female, Too

Despite the movements of women's suffrage and feminism, modern society still features gender-based stereotyping, and some stereotypes have at least some basis in biology. Genes aside, our kids learn gender roles as eagerly as they learn everything else in their environment. It's hard to completely eliminate gender bias—I know I tried, but I'm sure I didn't succeed.


It is interesting but not shocking that my young girls tended to talk about their cuddly stuffed animals as female, using “she” and “her” and female names, but that only a few of the plastic dinosaurs were identified as female—and that the Tyrannosaurs always seemed to be male. T-rex is often portrayed as a “vicious” and necessarily “violent” predator—and my kids had somehow picked up on the idea that males tend to be more aggressive than females (which is true of some species but not others, and nothing to do with predation!).

Naturally, when we read books about T-rex, and when we saw dinosaur exhibits at museums, I had the opportunity to point out that around half of the Tyrannosaurs were, in fact, female.


Apparently, however, from what I read in my journal entries, I did not point out every stereotype my kids referenced in play. I remember that there were times in which we discussed sexism head-on, but that was probably when the kids were a bit older. And as they matured, I imagine that the kids may have policed their own sexist assumptions in play.

(They sometimes policed others' sexism, too! I vividly remember some boys telling Lindsey that only boys could climb trees. She informed them that they were being sexist, and the boys were horrified. They ran to me to tell on her—saying, “Lindsey said a bad word!” I had to teach them what sexism means and that, although being sexist is bad, saying the word sexist isn't bad!)

Building Blocks and Toy Guns

Over the years, we had a lot of little boys over to play. Often these boys were about the same age as either Mindy or Lindsey, and usually they played well together. Here are a few of the very general tendencies I noticed (again, these tendencies could be biological or societal in origin—or, more likely, both):

• The younger girls tended to use blocks to build enclosures for dolls and stuffed animals. That meant low walls—usually only one block high—and doorways and gates and pathways. These block creations tended to spread out and out, taking up entire floors of rooms at times. And the block play tended to be just a set-up for the longer pretend play with the dolls and toy animals.

In contrast, the younger boys tended to build towers. Only one block wide, these creations went up and up until they toppled down with a tremendous crash. Sometimes the towers went up and up and then there would be pretend play—about 15 seconds' worth, ending with a gorilla attack, lightning, or bombs—anything that would bring down the towers with a crash.

• When the kids were older, both sexes tended to use and enjoy Legos more than wooden blocks. Both boys and girls tended to create enclosures that had both height and length/width—realistic buildings that could hold Lego people. Some of the boys tended to elaborate on the building part of the play and never really got around to playing with the Lego figures inside their creations, and some of the girls tended to rush through the model building but lavished a lot of time to the conversations and actions of the Lego people. Most boys and girls, however, struck a pretty good balance between model building and pretend play with figures.

• I knew mothers of boys who didn't want to buy toy guns for their sons. They often complained to me that everything became a gun—not just their sons' fingers, sticks, and blocks, but even vegetables, action figures, and dolls. I didn't have that worry. When my daughters asked for weapons—say, when they were very “into” the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and wanted a rifle for protection and hunting, or when they were enraptured by a book about Native Americans and wanted a bow, some arrows, and a knife—I gladly bought toys to fill these “needs.”

In their pretend games, my girls almost always used weapons as protection against wild beasts or as tools to hunt for food. Some boys who came and visited played along with these scenarios, but others seemed to gravitate toward the weapons as fun in and of themselves, and they would usually destroy play scenarios by randomly “shooting” everyone else. Of course, this caused bitter complaints: “You're ruining our game!”

(One little boy actually used our rather heavy wooden “rifle” as a weapon, on several occasions, and conked others in the head. After two such incidents, I decided to put the rifle away before he came over.)

I doubt if the boys who loved*loved*loved guns at age 5 and 8 are now, as young adults, any more violent or any more apt to use an actual weapon than the boys who used the guns only for hunting and protection.

From age 3 to 6, my girls tended to choose frilly dresses over more practical shorts and jeans. For weeks at a time, my girls chose their father and papa over their mother and grandma (at least for fun—boo-boos tended to be another matter altogether). Through all their preschool years, when toy boats and cars were available, my girls preferred dolls (although those dolls sometimes loved a nice boat or car ride). My daughters learned and participated in gender roles all too well—but they also participated as I discussed bending gender lines and expectations, too.

And I think it all turned out pretty well.

Journal Entry 5

Thursday,
September 17

Camille arrives this morning seeming very droopy. I realize that she (1) has to get up earlier than my girls, and (2) has to get dressed / brushed / ready / and out of the house early, too.

Luckily, she soon cheers up when I offer to read to all three girls. We sit down and read Who Sank the Boat? and The Puppet Theater Fairy Tales.

The girls begin to play, as they often do, with dolls. This time it's Cabbage Patch dolls, because Camille has brought hers over to play with the others' dolls. The three girls carefully dress Caroline, Carrie, and Baby Lynette.

Suddenly the fully clothed dolls are left on the floor, unplayed with—and the girls are busy dressing themselves. Actually, they aren't “dressing” so much as “dressing-up”: wrapping themselves with long swaths of cloth of all colors and patterns.

“We are children from other lands,” Camille tells me, arranging her drapery artistically.

“Oh! Cool! What other lands?” I ask.

She looks blank and turns to the others, who just keep on winding more cloth around and around.

“Mmm...” I say. “Camille, you look like you're Thai. From Thailand?” I suggest.

She turns back to me with a serious face. “Yes, that's what I am,” she solemnly agrees.

“Where do you think I'm from?” Mindy asks.

“Gee...you look Indian, from India.”

“Yes, that's what I am,” she says with a huge smile. I realize that she has reused Camille's exact words. We are beginning to sound like one of those kids' books that uses repetition like verse.

I turn to Lindsey, who is wearing bright woven fabrics: “Gee...you look South American,” I tell her. (I don't know why I went all continental on that one. Just because she's young and wouldn't know Peru?)

“Yes, that's what I am,” she says, instinctively playing along with the repetition motif.

The girls move away from me and interact with each other, three strangers from three different lands. I start unloading dishes, then move to sort some laundry. The latter task puts me near their play, and I realize that the girls have created some elaborate plot in which somebodies' fathers are dying.

I don't know what that's all about.

That reminds me that Mindy has suddenly been “into” males. She told me last night, “When men are in the house, I like to follow them around and be with them, more than I like women.”

This was startling to me, and I asked the natural question: “Men? What men?”

Mindy looked up at me. “Daddy and Grandpa, of course!”

Yeah. Of course. What other men could there be?

Remembering that conversation with a smile, I take a load of laundry out to the garage. When I get back into the house, Mindy asks me to comb her hair in a “fancy Indian style.”

G-ulp. I'm not that good with hair. And I have no idea what a fancy Indian hairstyle would look like!

Still, I try my best, and Mindy seems completely satisfied with the half-up style with pinned-up-swirls. Naturally, I instantly get two more hairstyling “clients.” Funnily enough, Camille and Lindsey don't ask for “fancy Thai” and “fancy South American” styles (which, honestly, is a very good thing for my lack of hair knowledge)—they want just what Mindy has. I battle with a knot in Lindsey's hair, with bobby pins and hair clips, and with covered elastic bands—but eventually I triumph over hair and hair apparatus and am looking at three “fancy” coiffures.

Mindy reminds me of a cartoon she doesn't watch but that she catches glimpses of as we tune in the next show, Muppet Babies. Mindy says, “Remember that show, Mom? The horse in that show is MAGNIFICENT!” I can hear the capital letters in her voice. Mindy goes on: “I'm going to dress this horse just like him!”

She gets out one of her toy horses with long lavender hair. I notice that, although her play with hairstyling and lavender horses usually assumes that the horses are female, this time she's using “he” and “him.” Very interesting.

The other girls get out horses, too, and all three begin to comb and adorn horse tails and manes. Mindy holds up her finished product, saying, “Oh, do you look MAGNIFICENT!” Then she turns to another horse who is still languishing in the toy box.

Camille suggests, “Let's sing that Mr. Rogers' song 'I Like to Tame My Time,' okay?”

Another TV show we don't watch. Mindy doesn't know the song but agrees to sing it and struggles to follow along.

—Oops! I guess she does know the song a little (from somewhere), because she is now leading!

After the song is over, Camille proclaims, “I want my horse to look magnificent... beautiful... cute... magnificent!”

All I can think of is how magnificently beautiful (and cute) these girls are.

***

When a substantial number of their toy horses are styled, the kids lose interest. I help them pose their Cabbage Patch dolls and fancy-haired horses and then clean up the combs and clips mess. As soon as we're done with all that, Mindy makes a break for the dinosaur “activity books” I had laid out on a table, ready for the moment when the kids wonder “what now?”

Soon all three are coloring dinosaurs. Camille chooses a crayon carefully—lemon yellow—but then takes the time to ask if that particular dinosaur was, in fact, yellow.















So we have a rather long conversation about dinosaur colors. I get out some of the books we've been reading, and the kids talk about the colors that the illustrators used. We talk about the fossilized remains of dinosaurs that scientists use to learn about them. “Even the few times we have a print made from where the skin pressed into mud,” I say, “that doesn't tell us the color of the skin, does it? Like a footprint in sand is the color of the sand, not the foot.” The girls “get” that, and conclude that we have no way of knowing what color the various dinosaurs were.

We discuss how illustrators and toy makers decide on dinosaur colors, and I say something about some modern reptiles having coloration that helps them blend in with their surroundings, so they can hide. “Like green lizards and snakes that are camouflaged among plants,” I explain.

Camille, looking at an illustration of bold purple-and-orange dinosaurs, innocently asks, “Were plants purple and orange back in dinosaur times?”

So then I talk a bit about plant pigments that absorb the sunlight that plants need to make food, and how some of these pigments are red or purple, but most are green. I casually use the word chlorophyll when talking about the green pigments, and it doesn't faze the kids a bit, but who knows how much of all of this they will actually absorb?

In the meantime, the girls have some pretty brightly colored dinos emerging from their pages—including Camille's lemon-yellow dinosaur!

Mindy has moved on to doing a dot-to-dot picture. She asks me what comes after 9 (surely she knows already!?), and I calmly say ten while pointing to the number 10. “And after that comes eleven,” I say, pointing to the number 11. “What do you think comes after 11?” Mindy easily draws to the 12-dot and is merrily on her way—but then pauses again to ask me what comes after 19. “Two-O, which is the number twenty. Then 21.” She easily deals with 21 through 29 and then pauses to ask— —you guessed it!— “What comes after 29?” I explain, still patient, but I'd love it if she figured it out on her own!

As they color and dot-to-dot and help dinosaurs find their way through mazes, the girls sing songs from “Free to Be You and Me.”

“Let's play Dino Lotto,” Mindy suggests. All three girls find it easy to find matching dinosaurs (and other prehistoric creatures), but Lindsey starts to get a little upset when Camille and Mindy fill up their lotto cards before she can hers. I distract her with a toy she really likes right now, a pegboard.

“Now some books,” Camille suggests. We read two books about dinosaurs and then a library book called Tell Me a Trudy. Lindsey plays with the pegboard while we read, but when I finish the Trudy book, she announces that she is hungry.

I make a quick, nutritious snack for my two girls and finally coax Camille into eating breakfast. While they eat, I put away the library books, dino lotto game, and dinosaur activity books. What dinosaur-related item should I put out next? I consult a list I had brainstormed into existence a while ago, see a measuring activity, and think, “Good plan.”

I go out to the garage and find the metal measuring tape. I put it, a ball of yarn, and the sidewalk chalk onto a table, and Mindy's interest is instantly roused. “What's that?”

“A measuring tape and some yarn and the chalk,” I answer.

“Yeah, but what's it for?”

“Well, after you guys finish eating, and we clean up, you'll see.”

Lickety split, I soon had 3 filled bellies, a cleaned-up table, and the girls' attention.

“What's that stuff for?” Camille repeated.

“Well, remember we keep talking about how huge and long the dinosaurs were?” I ask the girls.

“Yeah!”

“Well, we keep reading that scientists think supersaurus was about 100 feet long, but I was wondering if we know how long that really is? So I thought we'd find out. And that means going outside, out front.”

Enthusiasm greets this suggestion, and we go out to the sidewalk. I make a mark near the corner and stand right on that mark, and I direct the kids to each take a piece of chalk and walk away from me in a straight line. When they think they've gone 100 feet, they should make a mark on the sidewalk and then write their name by their estimation. (I explain that estimation means guess.)

The girls walk and walk and keep turning back to look at me. Finally each of them stops and makes her mark.

“Are you going to guess, Mommy?” Lindsey asks.

So I walk to a spot—carefully NOT counting out paces, because I just want to see what my intuition tells me is the right length—and I mark a line and my name on the sidewalk.

“Now let's check our estimates,” I say.

We use the measuring tape to mark the yarn every ten feet (I have to run into the house to get masking tape and a Sharpie pen), and then we carefully use our jumbo yarn-tape-measure to mark 100 feet.

It turns out, we were all pretty far off—our guesses were all way too long!

Once we marked the 100-foot length, I consulted some notes I'd made and did some more quickie measurements and marks on the sidewalk. Then I take the kids on a “Dinosaur Walk.” As we walk along the sidewalk together, I say, “This is the supersaur's head. Here is its neck...keep walking...keep walking! Okay, now we're to the body...still the body. And here is the tail...more tail...and still more tail!”

The kids love it! They run inside to get some dolls, then they take turns leading their dolls on the same dino tour, sticking pretty close to the words I'd used even though their proportions are a little bit different. They clearly get the main idea that sauropods had loooooooong necks and loooooooong tails.

As we walk back to the house, the girls see a telephone pole and pretend it is a looong sauropod neck. They crane their necks to look up at the “dinosaur's head.”

Suddenly this changes into a game of “I Spy,” which we play for several turns. Mindy and Lindsey seem most intent on noticing little natural items that will stump the rest of us, and Camille seems intent on making it a word game. The game starts off with a rhyme, “I spy with my little eye...” before getting into the guessing-game part: “something green!” But she keeps up the rhyming, the sillier the better. “A green machine? A green...a green thing? A green bean? Oh! A green queen!”

* * *

Home again, the older two girls decide to sew. They get out some fabric and their school scissors. I decide I had better supervise and bring some laundry over to fold while I keep my eye on things.

Mindy says that she is going to sew “a dress for Caroline and overalls for my little bear.” Camille states that she will make a costume for Baby Lynette. (Carrie, Camille's Cabbage Patch doll, is languishing nearby, no doubt waiting for someone to offer to sew something for her!)

Lindsey shows no interest in cutting fabric and sewing. Instead, she has grabbed the plastic fold-up ruler that came with a toy tool bench and is “measuring” everything.

The girls talk about measuring, and Camille asks to borrow the ruler. She then measures Caroline and Carrie. She passes the ruler over to Mindy, who also measures and compares the two dolls.

“They are the same!” Camille states correctly. “That means they are born on the same day,” she concludes...not so correctly.

I open my mouth to challenge her logic, but Mindy is answering, so I shut my mouth again and wait to see what she says.

“I guess so....:” Mindy starts. “When was Carrie's birthday, Camille?”

Camille says that her doll's birthday was in May.

“Well, mine's is in June,” Mindy starts to reply. “Wait!—Mom, when is Caroline's birthday?”

Cabbage Patch dolls arrive with a name and a birthday already printed on the adoption papers, so there is one “right” answer, and I provide it: “November 1.”

Camille says, “Oh, Carrie's is December 1.”

I'm confused as to Carrie's birthday being in May AND December. But I shrug off all concerns about logic because I'm so pleased that Lindsey has started to help me match socks and fold laundry. With her help, I quickly finish the load.

Lindsey gets some dolls to play with. I take the laundry into the bedrooms and put it away, then hurry back to supervise the sewing project.

I chuckle when I hear Camille lecture her doll, “Carrie, you're only five—you don't know much—I haven't taught you. Wait until you're six!”

Even funnier, a few minutes later, is Camille spouting off about her doll's desire to have more than one costume for Halloween. “It's frustrating!” Camille complains to us. She turns back to her doll, saying, “Carrie, please, would you stop all this nonsense?”

* * *

I have to run a few errands, so we all get ready to go out. We go to the copy shop and then stop by the grocery store to buy a few needed items. I tell each girl that she can choose one piece of fruit to buy and eat.

Camille asks, “Can I choose fruit juice?” She holds up one of those special individual-serving all-natural fruit juices, and I say sure. Possibly a mistake, because Mindy and Lindsey immediately decide they want juice, too.

Sigh. Less fiber, more sugar (fructose), and probably fewer vitamins. Oh, well.

I give each girl money so she can buy her own juice, and then I pay for my larger order. As we go out to the car, Mindy asks if she can keep the ticket.

“Ticket?” I ask.

“This ticket,” she says.

“Oh, the receipt,” I answer.

“What's a receipt?” Lindsey asks.

“Those little bits of paper are called receipts,” I explain. “And they show that we paid for the things we bought. They're sort of like proof.” I turn to Mindy. “Yes, you can keep your receipt if you want.”

When we get home, the girls drink their juice and rinse the bottles. Then the two older girls resume their “sewing projects,” which now involve draping and knotting, plus some large-scale stitching with needle and thread.

Lindsey has found the T-rex model and is trying to talk to Camille through it. Camille doesn't answer. After several attempts, Camille finally responds: “I won't talk to you, because you're bad.”

We discuss the word bad in relation to behavior, and I ask if meat eaters doing what they have to do, to stay alive, are really being bad. Lindsey defends T-rex, saying that he can't help what he is. (I notice that, in this world of mostly-females, T-rex is a “he.”)

In the meantime, Lindsey is looking around for something non-upsetting to feed T-rex. “What can we feed him, Mom?” she asks.

Picture: A tyrannosaur considering behaving badly?

“Steak?” I suggest.

“Yeah!” Mindy and Lindsey both say.

Camille seems okay with a meat-eater eating steak, too. (Maybe I should've challenged the logic on this one, saying something like “Steak from a cute little cow,” but I go the easy route and let them distance meat words from animal words. I'm really being practical here—I don't want to risk Camille upsetting her parents by becoming a vegetarian at age 5, plus I don't want Camille to upset Lindsey, who is getting a bit tired at this time of the day, by continuing to call her chosen plaything “bad.”)

Picture of T-Rex, by Mindy 9-1987. The T-Rex seems to be ignoring the child and going for the tree!

Now all three girls seem to think the tyrannosaur is a good guy. The older girls are using scraps of fabric to clothe him, which involves getting out the ruler again and measuring him. Soon Lindsey informs us that he is ill. They make a call to the dino doctor to find out what to do.

Camille has rummaged through the dinosaur model box and discovered the two-headed dragon (we just don't have enough dragon models for their own box!). She has the dragon tell Mindy to go get more meat. “We're running out of meat!” she says.

It turns out that Camille's dragon is sick, too. More phone calls.

Lindsey feels that a green pillow would comfort T-rex, and we all help her use scrap fabric to make one. As he lays down on the finished product, Lindsey says, “He has mucus. He's going to die!”

The other two girls make sympathetic comments...

What with the scissors and the needles, I had to be right in the thick of the threesome a lot today, and it has given me a chance to notice how much Lindsey adds to the richness of play. When I am not so near their play, it sometimes seems that she is mostly a disruption to the older girls' pretend scenarios, because I hear more from the girls when there are problems than when there is collaboration.

The girls make a move to go outside to play. I insist on them helping to clean up the scraps of fabric, and then they race outdoors. I finish up putting away scissors, needle and thread and then sit down with my notebook to write all of this stuff down.

I don't know what they're playing outside, but I hear through the screen door the word “protoceratops.” A few minutes later, the girls go through the house and into the garage, calling back to me, “We need hammers.”

“What? Why?”

I am picturing actual tools and a whole new level of supervision, but Mindy emerges from the garage with three croquet mallets. She begins to answer my question. “We need them to dig out the fossils we found.”

Camille explains, “You and Jim are paleontologists, and we are your children.”

Mindy goes on, “And we found a bed of fossils.”

The kids have scrounged a plastic container from somewhere and return to the back yard. I see that they are hammering at the dirt with their croquet mallets, and then collecting pieces of rock in the container.

“Look at all these fossils, Mom!” Lindsey says through the screen door.

Mindy is so excited by two of her finds, she comes in to show me. “Look, Mom, dinosaur teeth!”

I ask, “Is the dinosaur a meat eater or a plant eater?”

Mindy holds up one of the rocks, which is rather round, and says, “Plant eater.” Then she holds up the other rock, which is sharp, and adds, “And a meat eater.”

A few minutes later, Maria arrives, and the girls get to tell her about the sewing projects and the sick dinosaur and dragon and the bed of fossils. Another day summarized in a few excited bursts...

But it's hard to truly explain all the rich complexity that is a day!