The legacy of Title IX

On a patch of lawn outside a taqueria, my sons, Didi and Gege, tossed a football around. When my friend’s toddler daughter tried to join in, I told them to be careful and not to knock her over.

“You can be the cheerleader,” Gege told her.

Cute, yet it also troubled me, because it reflected the gender roles getting cemented into my sons’ brains, despite the best efforts of me and my husband to demonstrate that girls and boys, women and men can play hard.

Over the past couple of months, they’ve became rabid basketball and football fans, memorizing the names of players, checking the box scores in The Chronicle’s Sporting Green, and watching games with the avidity they once had for Pokémon and Thomas the Tank Engine.