From the reading Creating the Fiction of Gender from Messner, I found the article quite interesting because I never really thought about the question of when people started to segregate sex and gender in sport. It is mentioned in the article that Messner’s son “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and children are from heaven.” (Messner, 2002, p. 1) The message I inferred from this quote is that when we were all children, we didn’t know the difference between men and women; but as we grow up, however, we started to divide people by sex and gender. The concept of sex and gender that people acquired in their early childhood could be traced to television where the commercial and TV shows showed certain “stereotype” things that certain gender should acquire.
The article also mentioned an interesting point that “the children: formal sex segregation” which Messner mentioned the AYSO had 87 boys’ teams and 69 girls’ teams, but the formal cross-sex competition was never existed among those teams. (Messner, 2002, p. 11) From early childhood, children had no concept of boys and girls could compete together, therefore, in the later stage, the concept of cross-gender competition do not really exist.
Given the context and information in this article, I think the fiction about gender and sex we adapt is from the childhood. According last class, Dr. Spencer talked about that sex and gender are two different concepts. Male and female can both be masculine and feminine. However, in our society, most people always think that men should be masculine and women should be feminine because we were taught to think this way from our families and education.
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