From The Guardian UK: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/22/punish-kids-cross-gender-play-abuse
The trappings we put onto gender identity – the colors, the clothes, the assumed preferences – are all cultural, not natural
Jill Filipovic
theguardian.com, Friday 22 November 2013
A few weeks back, I went to my first baby shower. My friends have only recently started getting married and having babies – although not necessarily in that order – and I was psyched to pick out a set of adorable baby clothes for the twins to whom my friend had only weeks earlier given birth. I popped into a cutesy Brooklyn baby shop and said I was looking for a baby shower gift for new twins. Her first question: “Girls or boys?” One of each, I said. She pointed me to the section of girls’ clothes, all pink, and boys’ clothes, all blue.
I said:
It’s a little weird how all the clothes are pink for girls and blue for boys, isn’t it?
She agreed, and said they had one yellow outfit, but then said that nearly everyone who comes in demands the gender color-coding. I ended up buying burp cloths and bibs printed with zigzags – one yellow and one grey.
Gendering kids starts immediately after birth, when we wrap a baby in a pink blanket or a blue one. Babies have no idea what they’re even wearing and just need to be kept warm. It’s parents who buy into the binary, and the rest of us who are thoroughly uncomfortable when they don’t. There’s the yellow aisle of gender-neutral toys and apparel, but show up to a baby shower with a pink onesie for a male baby and see what kind of looks you get (believe me, I was tempted, but given that there was a baby of each gender it wouldn’t have been quite as effective).
The boy/girl divide gets even more pronounced as kids get older, but there’s more of a stigma for boys who cross it than for girls. Most progressive parents these days will buy their daughters building blocks or sign her up for a sports team, but they’re a lot less likely to get their son a baby doll or sign him up for ballet. Kids, though, are natural gender-transgressors. Of course they soak up our cultural gender norms and respond accordingly, and even the most feminist parent can attest that it’s impossible to keep a daughter totally protected from Disney Princess mania or a son entirely away from war and gun play.
But as influenced as kids may be by the culture outside their front doors, they’re still newbies to the whole gender role thing, which means they break the rules more often than adults. And that freaks out some parents, especially when the rule-breaker is their son. Katie may be a tomboy because she likes to climb trees, but if Kevin likes to wear dresses? He’s a sissy, he’s not acting like a boy, and he might be gay.
That parental anxiety was highlighted this week in a Dear Prudence column in Slate, where a mom wrote in concerned about her husband’s over-reaction to their son’s penchant for playing dress-up in mom’s shoes. Dad makes the kid remove the shoes, then punishes the kid when he gets hysterical – all over donning a pair of ballet flats. The dad in question isn’t an unusual tyrant; parents across the US punish their sons for playing dress-up, painting their nails, wanting to grow their hair long, or engaging in other activities that the parent deems “feminine”.
Continue reading at: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/22/punish-kids-cross-gender-play-abuse
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