Pardon me, miss. I didn't notice you're a dude.

I've been holding off on writing this post for several months because I didn't want it, if written, to be misconstrued. So let me be upfront and say that what I've written is not intended to be judgmental in any way. Rather, it's an observation about Japanese culture and people who are my age and younger and is a sharing of me putting my foot in my mouth as a result of the ambiguity that is prevalent around me.

A person's sex is biologically determined. Unless a mutation occurs in a person's sex chromosomes during gestation (which results in an intersex individual [formerly known as hermaphrodite]), a person is going to be born either XX (female) or XY (male). However, a person's gender is sociologically determined. Familial norms, cultural influences, and other factors determine the degree to which a female is feminine or a male is masculine. So what is considered normal or desirable by one culture for its women or men may not be normal or desirable by another culture.

Having been raised in the Midwestern/Southern U.S. culture where gender, historically, has been quite narrowly defined, I've come to view masculinity through a particular lens:  Masculine men don't like pastels. They don't have long hair. They don't carry purses. They don't wear pointy-toed shoes. They don't wax their eyebrows. And they don't want to be skinny. Yet gender ambivalence is greatly prevalent here among younger males. So imagine how challenged my ideas of what's acceptable became when in my first weeks here I saw men who were completely opposite of what I'd been socialized to believe they should be. The aforementioned things apply to many younger Japanese men I've seen. And as parents generally impose their tastes on their children, it has been very difficult for me to know if some of the children whom I teach are boys or girls.

At my two youchien (kindergartens), the different classes are distinguished during recess time by different hat colors. At the smaller school there are only two hat colors -- pink and yellow -- while at the larger school there are four hat colors -- red, blue, pink, and yellow. It is so difficult for me to determine a male child's sex when he is wearing a pink hat and his little face is surrounded by long hair. It is also difficult for me to determine a female child's sex when she is wearing a yellow hat and her little face has no hair surrounding it because it's cropped short. The same is true with my shougakusei (elementary school students). Unless they are wearing skirts, there are some students whom I don't know to be female because their faces are androgynous and their hair is super short. Equally frustrating is the tendency for the youchien no sensei (kindergarten teachers) to call some boys by the diminutive -chan, which means girl, rather than with the diminutive -kun, which means boy. Thankfully, I've never called a boy a girl or vice versa at my youchien, for time has proven a boy to be a girl and a girl to be a boy.

I don't know why I feel the need to know the sexes of my students, since knowing them doesn't change who they are. But the discomfort I feel from not knowing if the child with the pageboy haircut and the rainbow sweater is a girl or a boy is quite unsettling. Today a ninensei (second grade) boy got his feelings hurt when his classmates laughed (at him or me, I don't know which) because I, still unable to distinguish his sex after nine months of teaching him and not being wise enough to touch a super-feminine girl on the head when trying to teach the difference between he and she, called him a girl. His oniisan (older brother) and buddy both have short haircuts. So I wonder if he'll show up at school tomorrow or Monday with a new hairstyle. I hope he doesn't. If he likes his hair as it is, I hope he keeps it that way and doesn't let my ignorance influence his self-expression.

Until next time...

UPDATE (02/04/11): Sure enough, the kid got a haircut last night, well, more like a trim. It's still longish. And he's still got bangs. But the ends don't curl under like they did yesterday. However, after today's lunch clean up, I saw that his place mat which protects his desk is pink. If I hadn't stuck my foot in my mouth yesterday, I would have gone away from today's lunch time still thinking that he's a girl.