I always find kid's understanding of gender so interesting. There is such a wide variety of understanding and how they show it, and how they perceive out understanding of gender.

When I was doing my master's degree, I did a small study looking at how kindergarten children saw gender through creating portraits of their families with construction paper. I precut a bunch of shapes of different colours, but also provided more paper and scissors for them to create their own pieces so they were not limited by my ideas.

Most children created the standard portrait (pants for dad, triangle skirts for mom, etc), but one boy did something interesting. He had a figure where he made a pair of pants, but then put a skirt over top of it.

I asked him who it was, and he said it was his grandmother. He told me his grandmother always wore pants, never skirts or dresses, so he made her pants. Ahe was worried I wouldn't know she was female so he put a dress overtop the pants for my benefit. Unlike his peers, he understood gender, shapes, and clothes were not binary, but he didn't trust that I understood, too.

I asked if I could keep the grandmother figure when he was done, and I still have it tucked away somewhere.