kate_nepveu | Infants and gender

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Infants and gender

A few weeks ago, I was rather taken aback when a child development book twice suggested that parents "encourage the development of gender identity by using the words boy or girl when you address your baby." My immediate reaction was, "Surely, in our society, the last thing I need to worry about is SteelyKid not knowing she's a girl? And, how bad would it be if she didn't have a strong gender identity?" (Sex and gender are very small parts of my identity. Free-associating "being a woman" gets me "stupid reproductive system," and free-associating "being female" gets me "stupid fashion industry" and "sexism." Other things that often get lumped with sex and gender are separate in my head.)

(My reaction to the book's statements was also colored by the "Avoid" list shortly after, which included "Worrying that telling your baby she is a 'good little girl' is a sexist remark. Political correctness is not an issue when you're teaching your baby gender identity.")

But this made me realize that I did call her "girl" a lot, without conscious thought: "hey, baby girl," or "oh, good girl!" Since then, I've made more of an effort to use her name: it's something I've been trying to do anyway, and it is also one syllable and thus fits the cadence just fine.

Edit: To clarify: it's far more important to me that she be a good (happy, smart, strong, wonderful) SteelyKid than a good (etc.) girl, and so I want to get in the habit of expressing that early. I hope the distinction is self-evident.

* * *

Twice, strangers have assumed that SteelyKid was male. The first person, on hearing that she was not, asked somewhat indignantly, "So why's she in blue?" (She was wearing a brown shirt and was in her car seat, which is gray with green-blue accents. The second time, she was also in her car seat, and was wearing green.)

And yet yesterday, I was sorting through some hand-me-down clothes from a family with two boys. I kept a lot of blue clothes, but found myself setting aside a number that were just too little-boy—for no reason that I could clearly articulate to myself, except that I couldn't see myself putting them on her and so there was no point in keeping them, even though I was aware of the irony and uncomfortable with it. After all, before she was born, some people said that we should find out her sex so people would know what clothes to buy. My reaction was that an infant, who didn't know what pink or blue signified, would hardly care; that I hated the overwhelming emphasis on an infant's sex (i.e., "What are you having?" to mean "Is it a boy or a girl?"); and that I thought color-coding them by sex was kind of dumb. (I didn't usually say this out loud.) And yet.

Edit: To clarify: until SteelyKid has preferences, we're going to dress her in stuff we like, because we're the ones who have to look at it. And we don't like frills or most pink.

No conclusions, just observations.

What are your thoughts about infants and gender?

Edit 2: SteelyKid says, "I grasp after just the right words to express my opinions on this!"

(Okay, actually, that's her asleep, showing the startle reflex from the prior flash picture, which didn't come out well. And now that she's asleep enough, I put her down, and will make a stab at answering some comments now that I have both hands free.)

(Note that the outfit she is wearing contains pink.)

(Hah. Five minutes after I wrote that, she woke up with a wet diaper and an empty stomach. I should've known.)

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Not having a kid, and having gone to a very very liberal college, I agree with you completely.

I'm not sure what the point is of TRYING to teach your kid gender identity. Why, even in the 1950's would you need to/want to do that?

I'm also with you on gender being a small part of my personal identity. I almost consider the adjective "geeky" to fill the niche in my identity that "masculine" or "feminine" would fill otherwise...

What's wrong with being a girl, and proud of it? Men and women are different. Not better or worse, just different. Unfortunately, society makes being a girl a bit harder, but hiding that you're women doesn't seem like the best way to fix that from over here, on the admittedly male side of the fence.

After species, gender is the first classification we make when meeting another human being in most circumstances, and that's only logical given the importance such identification plays (on a very low level) evolutionarily. It is literally wired into our brains on the most fundamental of levels; you can only fight against that so much.

Now, cultural trappings of gender are another thing entirely, and I applaud your efforts to shed some of those, but if you find yourself telling her she's a good girl...really what harm could there possibly be in that?

Of course, I typed all that just because I felt stupid driving by to post that I adore your icon. Love, love, love!

During our vacation, everyone we met referred to Hulda as a boy. It's not just a matter of culture coding gender differently, we get that in Sweden too. Yes, she has short hair. (Because it's that horrible thin blonde hair that tangles. We need to cut it even shorter.) Yes, we dress her without gender coding. (Red, purple and pink, especially in hand-me-downs and the things her grandmother buys, but also a great deal of bright orange, green, blue and even black. Sometimes dresses, but mostly shirt and pants.) Yes, she interacts with the world without fear and runs around like a little puppy. (Because that's what children do, if they're outgoing and not taught otherwise.)

I think every month we can delay her gender socialisation is a victory.

...and it still bothered me to hear her called a boy.

I appreciated the story of a couple who sent out their birth announcement with the usual name, date & time, weight, but intentionally did not mention the sex of the child. They took a lot of flak for it.

My parents had two girls that wore pink and green and blue and yellow, and they played whatever they wanted, and got the kitchen set and the building blocks and the tee-ball post and storybooks, and the first time I realized I was really a girl was when the boy from next door claimed he would never play with me because girls were yucky and wanted you to marry them.

So yeah, the world will point out her gender to her plenty; I think having a space at home where her gender is of minimal importance is a great thing.

And I also identify as "writer" and "goober" and "movie buff" and about ten other things before I hit my biological gender, which I associate mostly with cramps and discrimination. ;)

Ohhhh, I need to do some work in this area. Because I'm finding that it's easy to avoid the intense-gender-socialization thing for a girl, but harder now that I'm expecting a boy.

I'm really happy about the path we've taken with Alex. She wears pink flowery stuff (especially now that she has decided that she prefers dresses to pants) and also wears dinosaur T-shirts and comfy sneakers. Her two favorite toys are her dollhouse and her building blocks. She loves insects and science and digging in the dirt and helping me cook and acting out nurturing play scenarios with her tiny little plastic animals.

But. Except. One of the things I did this weekend was sort through our baby clothes to see what we have and what we need. (We shipped a bunch of things to relatives, for example, and won't be getting them all back.) So there I was, sorting baby clothes into two piles: "things the Niblet can wear" and "things the Niblet can't wear." Alex asked me what I was doing. And then, sounding genuinely confused, she asked: "Boys can't wear pink? Why?"

Apparently she never noticed. And there I was, reinforcing gender stereotypes for both my son-to-be and my existing daughter. Crap.

...And yet, I still don't really want to dress him in head-to-toe pink and flowers. Introspection suggests that I'm not worried about what effect it will have on him. I'm worried about what people will think about me, if I dress my son in his sister's pink hand-me-downs. Crap crap crap. Mama has some mental work to do.

Also? In my mind, anyone who invokes the phrase "political correctness" to bolster their opinions automatically loses.

Somehow, mijo has managed quite well to figure out that he is a boy even without my having ever deliberately set out to teach him.

And believe you me, what we deliberately set out Not To Teach Him about gender stereotypes he picked up very very well once he went out in the world. We spent most of his younger years (ages 3 to Now--which is 14) deprogramming him every day after school and/or exposure to my "family."

And despite all of that--my attempts to deliberately undermine dominant gender paradigms with him--he is a boy. He's just a boy that does not identify his masculinity as being directly proportional to how "not girl" or "not gay" he acts. He's just a boy who self-identifies as a feminist and schools his buddies in the locker room about gay rights. He is a boy that defends those weaker than he is when necessary and yet doesn't associate his manliness with being *violent.* He's a boy, now, that believes that men *do* nurture. These are qualities that are, unfortunately, Notable among his peers.

So, that's been my experience. He didn't need to be *taught* to be a boy. He needed to be taught, however, what being a *boy* should not mean. If we'd have just left that crap alone, I don't think we'd be happy.

Well, fortunately this is an issue I have to deal with personally, but from observing other people's kids growing up, I can assure you that you don't need to worry about actively indoctrinating SteelyKid in the ways of gender identity. Society will take care of that quite handily.

I am honestly baffled by the pinkness of little girls which goes on these days. I live next door to an elementary school, and see the little kids going to school every morning, and the youngest girls are overwhelmingly dressed in pink. That isn't the case for the older (4th grade-ish) girls, and it's not like pink is female-exclusive for adults. So...?

Twice, strangers have assumed that SteelyKid was male. The first person, on hearing that she was not, asked somewhat indignantly, "So why's she in blue?"

I find it terrifically satisfying explaining to people like that that pink for girls and blue for boys has only been the custom since the '50s. It's amazing how upset people get when they hear it had previously been the reverse. Boys in pink is evidently earth-shattering.

At least some of these things seem to be dying out. I remember looking through an old knitting pamphlet of my mother's and running across a very earnest explanation of how to convert a boy toddler's outgrown sweaters into a girl's. Because they couldn't button on the same side, you see.

I personally wish we could not tell children what gender they were--and treat them all as just children--for at least the first few years. And I hate how people feel like they have to know a baby's gender before they even know how to interact with him or her, when for babies pretty much the same basic set of behaviors is appropriate for both.

And then we claim men and women are inherently wired differently. They may be, but we have know way of knowing, because we begin adding the socialization factor so terribly young. I wish there were a way of escaping it, and I have no idea what that way might be, given how intensely set most of the population is on knowing and putting gender foremost from birth.

In my dream world, gender is like hair color: we notice it (in adults, anyway), and maybe we have preferences, but it's a very tertiary sort of thing, noticed behind all sorts of other things that play greater roles in who we are.

My thoughts are that 1) yes, you don't want to socialize with massive stereotypes 'n' such, but 2) it salts my cocoa when people play all gender-coy if for no other reason than that it awkwardizes pronouns.

Basically, she is a girl, people are goign to place way too much significance on that fact, and it's not really practical to try to obscure it to prevent them from overemphasizing it.

When I had my daughter (1981) there was a lot of emphasis on non-gender clothes, talk, activities, yadda. Since I loathe pink, I was pretty much with it in the clothes department. Also, rompers were studier than frilly stuff.

But I don't recall making all that big an effort in daily language. I pretty much let her try any toy or game or activity, whether or not it was gender labeled, so she had a big, low rider black tricycle because that was the one she wanted, she had a Mario Brothers game setup because that was what she wanted, but when she showed an interest in makeup, I bought her some (since I don't own any) to give it a try. I think most of her gender socialization came from peers--she chose friends of both genders, liked being active.

I do remember one thing. She was bald until 18 months. Most people thought she was a boy, because of all that blue and the rompers. Her hair came in around the time she was two, but thin and scraggly, as often happens with blondes. So I whacked it all off, close to her head, so it would grow in thicker. After her bath, she eyed herself in the mirror, and said, "Tip a boy?" (her nickname was Tip, and she tended to talk about herself in the third person) "Nope, still a girl, but a girl with short hair," I said. She was fine with that.

The first person, on hearing that she was not, asked somewhat indignantly, "So why's she in blue?"

Clearly, the answer to THAT ridiculous question is "Because that's what she wanted to wear today." (Alternatively, "It's the one she hasn't spit up on yet.")

What are your thoughts about infants and gender?

Cheekily, I think that infants don't care about gender.

Less cheekily, I'm with Skwid. I don't think there's anything wrong with acknowledging that you're sporting a pair of X chromosomes. Sure, toss the cultural crap to the side of the road and buy the girl bulldozers and GI Joe figures if that's what makes her happy, but I don't find anything particularly wrong calling a girl a girl.

I'm learning that kids do a fine job of figuring out their own identities - gender, sexual orientation, social identity - pretty well without any active "teaching" on our parts. It's when we try to reinforce gender identities that things go all pear shaped.

We've tried really hard not to overthink it - we haven't actively taught gender identity, but we haven't actively tried to keep everything neutral, either, letting them make up their own minds about who they are.

So far, I think that has worked. They don't think and act in terms of "what boys do" and "what girls do", but rather in terms of "what people do".

What are my thoughts?

The first person, on hearing that she was not, asked somewhat indignantly, "So why's she in blue?"

White-hot rage, that's what. What the fuck gave that person the right to question your dressing choices for your child? I cannot BELIEVE people.

I say that gender identity is not THE IMPORTANT thing to impart to your child. Generally, children come into gender identity themselves. I really hate that I wasn't allowed to play with dolls. Hell, if I had, maybe I'd have turned out straight!

My two sons and two daughters are now 25, 24, 21, and 17, and as far as I can tell we didn't do anything radically wrong regarding gender. That may well have been dumb luck, who knows? I would say that three of them are fairly gender-typical and do correlate their gender with their biological sex, and one not so much, at least in superficial aspects such as clothing and activities, with apparently no problems concerning that, and all of them have been pretty much that way from very early days.

I doubt that any kid benefits from hearing people ask, "Are you a boy or a girl?" but I suspect that it poses problems only for those who are old enough to have started to feel some gender confusion or dysphoria. Likewise, a kid who has started to feel consistent identity as male or female probably isn't harmed by the occasional misidentification by strangers.

I don't think there's any problem with calling your kid "a good girl" or "a good boy" as long as you're alert to any signs that the kid is uncomfortable with that designation.

Without having read the other comments:

What are your thoughts about infants and gender?

Infants don't need one.

:^)

I grew up with a fairly weak sense of gender identity, which I think is part nurture and part nature; I ended up in blues and greens as a child because I had an identical twin and we needed some way for people to tell us apart, and I remember often taking boys' parts in pretend play for no particular reason.

I never really felt unwomanly or conflicted about my gender; I was into My Little Pony as much as Ninja Turtles; and I accessorize my men's shoes with a Hello Kitty purse. So I think it was good for me, though I don't know if that belongs in the same category as "I got spanked and I turned out okay!"

Listening to people of our parents' generation talk about child-rearing and gender, I suspect that there was a vogue for rearing children in a basically non-gendered environment, that went by the wayside. Anyway, all the photos I can find of my childhood have me in every color BUT pink. (They also have my brother wearing dresses as a toddler, because he wanted to wear them [and had older sisters who modeled the concept], and he did not turn up any more weird than is average.)

It drives me bananas that clothing is so much more gendered now than it was when I was a child. The purple velour outfit (with gold stars!) that I and both my siblings wore would be impossible to find today: no trucks or baseball bats, so it's not boyish enough, and colors too dark and bold to be girlish. It's ridiculously overperformed gender.

Also, pink is not a flattering color on many people! Against my skin tone, it looks awful!

I am horrified by the notion that parents should make efforts to "teach" gender identity.

It's funny -- we totally had this problem with the girlchild and have never had it with the boy. People still think she's a boy, and I'm going come on, look at the child! She's five years old and binky and has little delicate girly features and, oh yeah, wears all the pink she can get ahold of (I still mostly hate pink, but she gets a lot of pink hand-me-downs).

Admittedly, she has a gender-neutral nickname, and I do buy her boys' (plain) jeans because dangit, if I am going to buy new pants they are going to go for both kids and I can't see making a little boy wear pink flares, but still.

I think people are very into the gender-coding very early. It's distressing. And just wait, soon you get to deal with the princess thing. Bleargh. This is a republic! I don't want to be raising a princess!

Think of it as a junk filter: you have now discovered this is a baby book you need spend no more time on.

I didn't elect to find out the gender of my first child before birth and bought only light blue clothes because I hated all the stuff that was very obviously gendered. I liked the blue clothes! Those clothes were used for the next two children but needed to be replaced for the fourth, which is why she ended up with pink stuff as a newborn.

The one thing I have noticed down the track a little is that it becomes increasingly difficult to buy non-gendered clothing past the 0-3 month range. It is also better to buy boys' clothes for girls because
a) the sizings are more age appropriate without exposing navels and
b) the material used is often more sturdy. Which says a lot about the clothing industry rather than about the parents. There is another whole rant I could get into about marketing shelf bras to 3 year old girls who "want to look like mummy" but this is not the time or place.

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