Abstract
Early in childhood, children already have an awareness of prescriptive stereotypes—or beliefs about what a girl or boy should do (e.g., “girls should play with dolls”). In the present work, we investigate the relation between children’s own prescriptive gender stereotypes and their perceptions of others’ prescriptive gender stereotypes within three groups of children previously shown to differ in their prescriptive stereotyping—6- to 11-year-old transgender children (N = 93), cisgender siblings of transgender children (N = 55), and cisgender controls (N = 93). Cisgender and transgender children did not differ in their prescriptive stereotypes or their perceptions of others’ prescriptive stereotypes, though the relationship between these variables differed by group. The more cisgender control children believed others held prescriptive stereotypes, the more they held those stereotypes, a relation that did not exist for transgender children. Further, all groups perceived the stereotypes of others to be more biased than their own stereotypes.
| Original language | American English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 638-646 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Social Psychological and Personality Science |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 1 2020 |
| Externally published | Yes |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Clinical Psychology
- Social Psychology
Keywords
- gender preferences
- gender stereotyping
- middle childhood
- prescriptive stereotypes
- transgender children