Vanessa LoBue, assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers-Newark, has contributed an article at The Conversation that was forwarded to me. When do children develop their gender identity?

It turns out that for young children, initial concepts about gender are quite flexible. In my own research, I’ve found that children don’t begin to notice and adopt gender-stereotyped behaviors (e.g., preferring colors like pink or blue) until the age of two or three. A few years later, their concept of gender becomes quite rigid, and although it becomes more relaxed by middle childhood, even adults have trouble going back to thinking about gender as something that’s flexible.

--LoBue

Last week in a federal court in California, US District Judge Dean Pregerson allowed a case against Pepperdine University to proceed "on the basis it may have violated the prohibition against gender bias under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 by engaging in anti-gay discrimination against members of the women’s basketball team. Haley Videckis and Layan White sued the University, charging employees of the school with harassment by conducting a lesbian witch hunt.

At one point Coach Ryan Weisenberg held a team leadership meeting at which time he said that

lesbianism was a big concern for him and for women’s basketball, that it was a reason why teams lose, and that it would not be tolerated on the team

Adi Conlogue, an athletic academic coordinator of the team, allegedly in 2014 would hold meetings with each of the players to determine their sexual orientation as opposed to focusing on their academics, asking questions about their relationships and whether they slept with their beds together.