I used to believe that we started learning about what it means to be a man when we started talking, maybe around the age of 2 or 3. Then I learned that we actually start receiving messages about our gender, the expectations, roles and characteristicis given to us because we are born male or female the moment we are born. When the nurse, doctor or midwife says, "its a boy," or "its a girl," the process begins. Everyone around the baby starts to treat it in specific ways and expects the baby to behave in specific ways based on the very simple biological difference observed at birth.

It's pretty obvious that boys are treated differently from girls. They are talked to differently, held differently, dressed differently and responded to differently when they cry. It makes it almost impossible to determine how much of our identity we are born with and how much of it develops from these initial experiences.

Recently I've had another revelation. My partner and I are expecting a baby and the most common question we are asked is, "are you having a boy or a girl?" Some people ask if we know "what it is," or "what are you having?" This has made me realize that we actually are already being socialized around our gender before we are even born. People treat the unborn fetus differently based on what sex it is. People already prepare a room or buy clothes for their baby based on whether its a boy or girl. There are baby stores and companies actually called things like Pink or Blue and Pink Blue Baby Group. I had naively assumed that in 2009 we were moving past these simple ideas that boys like blue and girls like pink.

What I'm learning is that we still expect our boys to live inside a very small box of who they should be, what they should like, how they should act and what they can feel. And we start expecting these things before they're even born.