Being an only child, I never felt that gender really affected me. My mum used to do the “girly” things with me like playing with my barbies, baking and watching Disney princess films because my dad didn’t like baking and detested Disney films. My dad would do the “boyish” things like taking me walking, playing football and taking me to football games because my mum hated football and the thought of climbing up a mountain made her want to scream. It still does. I was allowed to do whatever I chose, it didn’t matter I was a girl.
I was taught in a very small primary school in the highlands of Scotland with only 6 in my year. 3 girls and 3 boys. I remember the teacher rarely splitting us up into groups of three , boys vs girls, but at the time, we really didn’t mind. If the teacher had asked us to go off into our own groups of three, we would have chosen that anyway!
I didn’t really recognize that gender ever affected me till I started high school. When puberty hit, the girls in my school started fancying boys and going off to talk about the captain of the boys football team which I found an extremely tedious topic of conversation and did my best to avoid… So i just played football with the boys at lunch and didn’t care what the girls said. It only had an impact when competing with other schools because boys and girls were asked to play on different sports teams, and i wasn’t interested in competing.