Adventures in Gender Identification

Miss D has recently gained some strong opinions about males and females. I noticed it a week ago when we saw a young boy riding a pink Barbie bike down the street and she said "That's not a boy bike, that's a girl bike!"

I was surprised of course, and asked her why it was a girl's bike- I think it eventually came out because of the pink. I explained that colors do not make some thing "boy" or "girl" and that girls could have red or blue things and boys could have pink things but I don't know if it really sunk in.

Then yesterday, she told me I was her best friend. (yay! I will remember this day forever!) but she went on to say that Dada was not her friend because he is a boy. This went on all day and carried over to our friends Mr. and Mrs. H when they came to visit. (Mrs. H being friend and Mr. H being not)

While it is amusing, when I tried to delve deeper into it she said that boys were different from girls and that's why they were not her friends. i told her it's often very nice to have friends that are different than we are. But again, not really seeing the sink-in.

I'm not sure if it comes from school (she's around older children a lot) or television or a combination of the two. I haven't done any research yet but I suspect it's pretty normal to self-identify this way. I'd be curious to hear from others though- on what if anything should be done to combat this sort of thinking?

A cool article on the subject