How We Learned Sex-Role Behaviours in the 1940s

Eight decades ago, when I was born, the terms “transgender” and even “gender” did not exist - people had never heard such words.

My parents announced my birth in the Sydney Morning Herald under the Births announcement in typical form (names changed):

SMITH (née Jones), October 4, at Nurse Carter's hospital, to Mr and Mrs A.B. Smith --- a daughter.

Sometimes birth notices included first names. Girls were commonly Margaret, Elizabeth, Beverley, Anne. Boys' names were commonly Kevin, Peter, Michael, Robert. The names, like the babies, were unequivocally sexed.

I have been pondering how it would have been if one of those youngsters were to undergo what we now call "gender transition". How did we children learn how to behave as girls or boys? How did we understand our place in the world? What would we have had to unlearn in order to leap over the divide?

My oldest memory is of me standing in front of my mother asking, "When is the baby coming?" My mother was holding a broom with a green wooden handle and wearing a pinny that I remember well because after she died, I kept that apron. My mother had made it of unbleached calico. She had cut it carefully to save material, sealed the edges with green bias binding, and embroidered it with the picture of a woman holding a tennis racket.

I wonder if any male contemporary of mine longed to wear drag, to sway and flounce in such a sombre, sensible apron, indeed in any dress or blouse cut and sewn by his thrifty mother in that age of rations and restrictions.

At that time, when I was two and a half, my mother, like all women in our suburb, was a stay-at-home housewife who spent her days cooking, cleaning, washing, walking to the corner shop, talking to Mrs next door over the fence. There was no man there, nor indeed in most houses. They were Away at the War.

The new baby was, like me, a girl. Around us lived other girls and boys and we played together on the street, which was safe enough because there was no traffic; fuel was needed for the war effort and cars were up on blocks, their tyres removed. We preschool boys and girls played the same games using the same few toys.

Still, there were differences. One day, I was astonished to see a boy stand in the middle of the road, a stream of what I thought was water rising up in an arc from the middle of his short pants. Girls could not do such a thing, would not even if they could. We girls did not piddle in public. We ran home to the toilet, hiding ourselves from view. Our bodily functions were private, hidden, indeed shameful. Later I discovered that boys actually enjoyed peeing in public, competing to see whose wee could go the highest.

Now I wonder if any modern man who says he is a woman needs first to take on that sense of shame, that need to hide his bodily functions.

Sometimes our mothers would take us down to the nearby river, us girls in costumes that covered our bottoms and tops, boys in swimming trunks. We would all wade into the soupy water, flop our arms around, float a bit. Then . . . the boys would take off their trunks, hang them from the posts of the swimming enclosure and swim naked! We girls giggled, from shock really. We would never have dared to do such a thing!

In those days, none of us went to day-care or preschool. Our first experience of organised togetherness was school. There the reality of male privilege was overt. In the school playground was a fine sandpit. We all longed to play in it, girls and boys. The problem for me, a girl, was that the sandpit was allocated to the boys four days a week. The girls got a turn only on Fridays. At the age of five, I already knew that was unjust. As an adult, I understood the rationale, though unjust. Boys, even five year old boys, had more energy than girls, more need to let off steam. They also knew how to create trouble if they were thwarted. Best to give them what they needed/wanted. Any boy at that school who wanted to be a girl would have to relinquish a cherished right.

When I was seven years old, my family moved into a building with flats above shops and a shared backyard. The children there were five boys, my sister and I. I loved playing with those boys - cricket, wrestling, boxing, climbing the peach tree and throwing the green fruit at one another. Two things happened to spoil it.

A male neighbour told my mother that her two daughters, aged four and seven, should stop running around like the boys in shorts only. We should each wear a top to cover our nipples. Now I wonder for whose benefit that man spoke. Was it to ensure that my sister and I learned feminine modesty? Or was it to protect us from the leers of the paedophile who lived among us, actually in the flat next to ours?

One day a male playmate came home from convent school and said, "Sister said boys shouldn't fight with girls," and we were banished from the wrestling and boxing matches, relegated to observer status only. We were learning to be the audience.

Modesty, seemliness, inhibition, restraint, passivity. How does one who has learned boyish bravado with impunity learn to adopt such ways?

So now, eight decades after I was born, I wonder if today's children learn similar sex-role lessons to those of my generation.

Do the men who now say they are women long to take on the aspects of femininity we learned as girls - thrift, restraint, modesty, passivity, deference to male privilege? I suspect not.