Sex vs. Gender*

Allison asked me yesterday if we would keep the sex a secret with the second child as well, and my only answer is that I really don’t know. On the one hand, I have become increasingly opposed to the gendering of infants. But on the other hand, I’m getting really tired of feeling like I have to justify myself constantly. Most likely either we won’t find out or we’ll just cave and find out and tell everyone and save ourselves the trouble. But for now I will attempt to explain the reasoning behind all this.

When we decided to keep the sex of the baby secret, it was probably 90% practical and 10% ideological. The twin practical reasons were that we wanted to maintain the anticipation and day-of excitement for everyone else (ditto for name secrecy—we figured it would make the birth announcement that much more interesting), and that we hoped to end up with mostly gender-neutral baby stuff. Again, the reason for the gender-neutral stuff was 90% practical. A little bit of me liked the idea of not bombarding the baby with gendered messages from birth, but really it was mostly that we are hoping to use the same stuff for multiple kids. (And I promise, this was not an elaborate scheme to torture people. We didn’t think it was such a big deal.)

But the further we got into this process, the more these decisions became ideological and carried bigger stakes. It seems that our society sanctions an adherence to gender norms when it comes to children that is much more extreme than is considered permissible with adults anymore. Most people wouldn’t consider teasing a man who was a good cook and no one blinks to see adult women with short hair and wearing blue jeans or attending baseball games. And yet when it comes to babies and young children these ideas are still applied wholesale. We’ve heard many a comment along the lines of, “you have to find out the sex because then you’ll know if Joe will get to coach baseball or if you’ll be going to ballet lessons.” Seriously?! And they’ll go further, laying out the next ten years of our lives, based solely around the sex of this child, determining the child’s interests and entire future based on one characteristic. It is as though people forget that babies and children are individual people rather than pre-programmed machines.

Sometimes I wish we hadn’t found out the baby’s sex, because it seems like we’d have stronger ideological ground to stand on in these confrontations. But, like with most things, our reasoning was practical. Then we’d only have to fight over one name instead of two, we’d know whether it was worth doing research into circumcision, and really it just bothered me that the doctors knew anything about our child we didn’t know, whether it was the sex or the length of its eyelashes. The unexpected benefit is that it is nice to use gendered pronouns since the English language does not have any gender-neutral pronouns used for animate objects. “It” is something we only use for inanimate objects, and in my case not even for things I care about like stuffed animals or my car.

But all of this pales in comparison to my reactions to the gendering of baby stuff. And, my hatred of pink aside, the thing that really has enraged me is the nature of these gendered messages, as well as how much more offensive the girl ones are than those for boys.

Boys’ stuff centers on modes of transportation (cars, airplanes, construction equipment) and sports and the sayings on them are either just silly or characterize boys as troublemakers and mischievous. I’m not thrilled about boys being put in boxes, but at least these particular messages don’t seem destructive or limiting. They encourage exploration and activity.

Girls’ stuff, on the other hand, focus on images of flowers and kittens, passive objects to be admired for their appearance, half of them contain the phrase “princess” somewhere, or contain messages that characterize girls as narcissistic, manipulative, and materialistic. Seriously, the messages on some of the girls’ onesies make me want to throw something. Here are a couple I can think of off the top of my head: “My finger may be small, but I have my Daddy wrapped around it” or “If Mommy won’t give me what I want, I ask Grandma” or “Grandma bought me this with Grandpa’s money.” Is this really the ideal we want girls to strive for? And a friend told me the other day that she has to buy boys’ shorts for her 22-month-old daughter because the girls’ shorts are so short her diaper sticks out. Why, oh why are we sexualizing 2 year olds????

And so, while I’ve become addicted to buying baby clothes off the clearance rack, you can rest assured that none of the onesies with messages (either mischievous or materialistic) are in the collection I have brought home. There are lots of teddy bears, animals, and dinosaurs, which seem more age appropriate anyway. And the discussion of culturally-constructed definitions of age-based traits and interests is a conversation we can have another day.

* Sex is a person’s biological identity as male or female, based on chromosomes and reproductive organs. This is what is visible on sonograms or in prenatal testing. Gender refers to the traits a society associates with members of a particular sex, many (or most, or all, depending on your position) of which are not inherent but rather the result of internalized messages from one’s culture (hence, why gender norms change over time—they aren’t biological but cultural). (Yes, even as I blog I am still an academic. You are just lucky this footnote doesn't come complete with citations.)