I- Personal Inventory: The Gender Journey
Step One: Transport yourself to the time when you were a junior in high school. Picture yourself in one of your classes. Pay attention to where you are sitting and the way you arc sitting. Then think about the following questions:
1. What were you wearing and how was your hair styled?
2. What kind of shoes, jewelry, or makeup were you wearing?
3. How was your bedroom at home decorated? What were the colors? What was on the walls?
4. Who were your friends outside of class?
5. What kinds of activities did you participate in outside of school?
6. What clubs or organizations did you belong to?
7. What did you do for fun?
Step Two: Now picture yourself in seventh grade. Again, situate yourself in one of your classes and ask these same questions.
Step Three: Next, imagine yourself in second grade and once again ask the questions above.
Step Four: Finally, take one more step back in time to the day you were born. Imagine the excitement of your family and answer the questions below:
8. Were your parents expecting a boy or a girl?
9. What do you imagine your parents and other relatives might have said when they discovered what sex you were?
10. What kind of clothes and stuffed animals and toys do you think people bought for you?
Step Five: Now pause for a moment. Take a breath. Imagine that same instant of your birth, but this time envision that you were born the opposite sex. With this new identity take a parallel journey forward through time. Visualize yourself, again, at the moment of your birth and ask the same questions through the perspective of your new gender identity. Move through the same experiences and questions from second grade to seventh grade, and finally to your junior year in high school. Ask all of the same questions you asked the first time.
Step Six: When you complete this journey forward through time as the opposite sex, take a moment and write down all of the things that were the same and all of the things that were different depending on what sex you were born as. Were you dressed in pink or blue as a baby? Did you wear dresses or pants to school? Did your friends play baseball, dolls, or both? Did you sit with your legs crossed or wide open? Did you curl or blow-dry your hair or just let it hang after washing? Did your bedroom have pictures of dancers, animals, race cars, or athletes hanging on the walls?
Source: Orenstein (1994).
II- Personal Inventory - Childhood and Gender Quiz
Instructions
Mark the answers that come closest to matching elements of your life. Don't skip any ques¬tions. Select the one answer that comes closest to matching your experience, even if that is only one small part of the response that applies to you. When you have completed the quiz, total your score.
1. Which of the toys or games below were your favorites to play with as a young child?
a. dolls, paper dolls, tea sets, play kitchen toys (I point)
b. Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Monopoly, Yahtzee, checkers, chess
c. action figures, toy guns, toy cars and trucks, toy tools
2. What kind of interactive play with other children was your favorite?
a. playing dolls, house, hopscotch
b. playing board games, riding bicycles
c. playing softball, football, baseball, play war or forts
3. As a young child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
a. a mother or father, model, teacher, dancer, nurse, secretary
b. a musician, salesperson
c. a firefighter, police officer, truck driver, doctor, lawyer, architect, athlete
4. What household chores were you responsible for as a child?
a. setting or clearing the table, helping with cooking, dusting, washing dishes
b. cleaning bathrooms, sweeping, making your bed, keeping your own room clean
c. taking out the trash, raking leaves, mowing the lawn, shoveling snow
5. Which of the statements below comes closest to what you were told (or what you learned by observing) as a child about what you were supposed to do if your body or feelings were hurt?
a. "Oh, sweetheart. I'm so sorry that happened. Go ahead and cry. I know that hurts."
b. "If you're hurt really badly, go ahead and cry if you have to. But you don't have to make such a big deal out of everything."
c. "Buck up. You're a big boy/girl now. Big boys/girls don't cry. Be a little man/little woman)."