Something old, something new

I’m back after a long hiatus, with a new baby and (at least some of) the same old struggles. Big Bobbin is now 6 (six!) years old (how did that happen?) and New Moo is 9 months.

While I was out shopping this morning, the woman at the checkout in the charity shop said “hello, little man!” to New Moo. I gave the lady a friendly smile and said “little girl, actually!” and tried to get Moo to wave hello. However, any further baby-chat was immediately lost in a tide of nervous apologies from the checkout lady: “Oooh, I’m sorry! Little girl! It’s so hard to tell when they’re that age! It’s cos she’s got short hair, ooh I am sorry, of course she’s a girl, isn’t she lovely…” and so on, while I attempted to interject reassurances: “It’s OK! Really, it’s fine! I’m not bothered! It is hard to tell! She doesn’t mind what you call her!” … and so on.

The thing is, I genuinely don’t mind if you guess my baby’s sex and guess wrongly. You’ve got approximately a 1 in 2 chance of being right, it’s fair enough to play those odds; but if you get it wrong, the thing to do is so “oh sorry!” or even just “ah OK!” and then MOVE ON. It doesn’t matter. Either you’re going to talk to me again, in which case you’ve got a chance to get it right next time; or you’re not, in which case it really doesn’t matter. (I also don’t mind if you don’t guess. Why do you need to guess?)

“If it doesn’t matter,” you may ask, “why bother correcting them at all?” Good question. I don’t always bother. However, these incidents are part of a bigger picture. I think there are three main reasons why people guess “boy” for my baby (and for babies in general):

1. Male is the default. For everything. For example, listen to adults talking with kids about their stuffed animals, or about pictures of animals in books, and they will all be addressed as “he” by default (“look at the monkey, what’s he doing?” etc). Even I find myself falling into this habit/trap, despite conscious efforts to vary it (“what’s she doing?” or “what’s the monkey doing?”). Same deal with animated trains, trucks, dancing teapots, whatever: all male unless proven female. So it’s no surprise that all babies are “he” unless there are obvious femaleness markers, which brings me to…

2. Clothes. You can’t tell a baby’s sex by looking at its face. They basically all have short hair at 9 months (and obviously hair length is not a reliable indicator of biological sex anyway, yada yada). If you want to make absolutely sure people read a baby as female, you dress it in pink dresses and high heels, and if necessary literally glue a bow to its head (I wish I was making this up). The corollary of this is the assumption that if you don’t do these things, it must be a boy, because why would you let your little girl be misgendered when the tools exist to prevent it?

Here’s what Moo was wearing at the time:

Red, white and blue Moo

And for comparison, here’s the colours I was wearing:

Stripy mummy

All her clothes are hand-me-downs or bought from charity shops; she basically wears whatever fits her and is clean and weather-appropriate at the time. I like bright colours, so she’s more likely to be wearing brights than pastels, but really, I’ll take “fits and doesn’t smell of wee” over more subtle aesthetic choices. The same applies for my clothes: what’s clean, what fits, most likely to wear black or bright colours. The difference is that there’s basically no chance I will be read as male, even in gender-neutral jeans and tshirt: I’m 5’1″ with a waist-length pigtail and a 40C chest. I wouldn’t mind people guessing wrongly or asking me about my gender, but I would be quite surprised! But with a baby there are no such obvious markers, so…

3. The safest way to get it wrong is to guess “boy”, because of a probably mostly subconscious understanding that maleness is the ‘better’ option so it would be much worse to misread a boy as a girl than the reverse (there’s a whole raft of problems and assumptions which I don’t really have time/space to unpack here, but to put it briefly, would you rather risk calling someone else’s kid a “tomboy” or a “sissy”?).

Given all that, when I can be bothered – or when I just forget that it’s easier to stay quiet – I want to try, gently, to challenge those assumptions a little bit.

*

A few minutes later, in another shop, an old man said “Hello, little fellow! That’s a nice smile!” to Moo. I smiled back and carried on with my shopping.

Little people, big shame

Sorry about the long break — I just wish I could tell you that it was because I’d been completely unable to find any awful examples of the pink/blue ‘colour bar’ in kids’ stuff. Sadly the truth is quite the reverse: there seems to be more of this crap every day, it gets demoralising, and I run out of new things to say about it. But I still think the thing I’m saying — over and over again — is worth saying; so here we go, diving into the two-tone torrent once more.

Not sure if this is a new development or if I’d just missed it before, but on a recent trip to the toy shop Playmobil are (now?) segregating their minifigs by gender:

Not my bag

These pictures show more clearly what figures are actually in each set:

In the blue corner…

Blue set (names as listed on miniaturetrading.com): Samurai, Ninja, Miner, Mechanic, Spaceman, Police, Viking, Space Hero, Blue Knight, Bandit, Yellow Alien, Snowboarder.

… and in the pink corner.

Pink set (names as listed on miniaturetrading.com): Green Bride, Indian, Asian Woman, She Elf, Women’s Tennis, Violinist, Skating, Medieval Lady, Runner, Siren, Hairdresser, Yellow Fairy.

It’s pretty much what you’d expect (at least if you’ve been looking at this stuff for as long as I have): all of the male roles except ‘Yellow Alien’ are active, related to what they do; 7 out of 12 of the female roles are just about being female (with an added layer of racial/cultural stereotype on top of that for some of them).

For me, though, the really depressing thing about this (apart from the fact that Playmobil, like Lego, used to do cheerful smiling minifigs with no obvious gender cues) is that while on the surface the pink/blue colour-coding just denotes the gender of the figure in the bag (in case that’s the main thing you care about for your play figures — remember you can’t choose a specific character), it’s quite clear if you look around the rest of the toyshop that the colour-coding always denotes who the toy is for. So in this case the message is clear: girls play with figures of girls, boys play with figures of boys, and never the twain shall meet.

This makes me particularly angry at the moment because my daughter (age 3) has recently started saying things like “we didn’t want to play with [name] because he’s a boy”, and “I don’t like George [Pig] because he’s a boy” (I think she’s partly just parroting a good friend of hers who comes out with stuff like this all the time). Most of her friends are girls, and that’s partly just accident (the friends of mine who had kids around the same time all have girls; girls vastly outnumber boys in her class at nursery) but when she says things like this I cry a little inside. Sometimes I ask her if she can tell me why she doesn’t want to play with boys, and sometimes I gently remind her that Daddy’s a boy, and her friend [name] at nursery is a boy, and they’re fun to play with aren’t they? I don’t know how much difference it makes: I’m swimming against the tide. But given that she’s apparently already got people telling her that girls don’t play with boys, I could really do without a multi-million-pound industry pushing her to believe that she’s not even meant to act out make-believe stories with boy characters in them.

Social engineering

GoldieBlox have been in the news (by which I mean the blogs) a lot lately because of their Princess Machine video. In case you missed the memo, GoldieBlox do engineering toys for girls, by which they mean a) they’re pink, and b) they’ve got stories, because girls need everything to have a story. Think I’m making this up? I’ll let the founder tell you in her own words on the project’s kickstarter page:

GoldieBlox goes beyond “making it pink” to appeal to girls. I spent a year doing in-depth research into gender differences and child development to create the concept. My big “aha”? Boys have strong spatial skills, which is why they love construction toys so much. Girls, on the other hand, have superior verbal skills. They love reading, stories, and characters.

GoldieBlox is the best of both worlds: reading + building. It appeals to girls because they aren’t just interested in “what” they’re building…they want to know “why.” Goldie’s stories relate to girls’ lives. The machines Goldie builds solve problems and help her friends. As girls read along, they want to be like Goldie and do what she does.

Goldie’s toolkit is inspired by common household objects and craft items — things girls are already familiar with. Plus, the set features soft textures, curved edges and attractive colors which are all innately appealing to girls. Last but not least, the story of Goldie is lighthearted and humorous. It takes the intimidation factor out of engineering and makes it fun and accessible. [my emphases]

So the starting point is still “making it pink” (i.e. reinforcing the message that girls can’t use the real engineering stuff, only the special pink girl versions), but hey, it goes way beyond that … into even more bad science and stereotype. Those differences in spatial abilities may well be cultural rather than biological, but why let that get in the way of a good generalisation? Boys love construction toys. Girls love stories (and “household objects and craft items”). That’s just the way people are! It’s nothing to do with the way society genders these behaviours from before children are even born; it’s just that boys have the meccano gene and girls have the fairytale gene! (If you don’t fit into either category — ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ — then maybe you’re allowed to make your own mind up about this stuff, but there’s no way Goldie’s going to think that far outside the Blox.)

Yes, in some cases there are neurological differences between boys and girls. But in many such cases the differences between boys and girls are far smaller than the differences within either boys or girls (there were lots of good examples of this in Pink Brain, Blue Brain, far better written and better researched than I’m going to manage in a blog post).

And don’t even get me started on the idea that “soft textures, curved edges and attractive colors […] are all innately appealing to girls”. Since she’s just asserting this without any evidence, I’m going to assert (with just as little evidence to back me up) that all kids would probably like soft textures and attractive colours if given the chance to enjoy them, it’s just that approximately 50% of those kids are told from the minute they’re born that liking soft things and bright colours will make them effeminate and/or gay, and that this is about the worst thing that could happen to them.

*

Anyway, I started writing this and then discovered that Shakesville already said all this and all the other things I was going to say, better. So I’m not going to rehash that article any further here; instead I’m just going to point out that girls are clearly already allowed to do engineering because look, pink Meccano:

The pink car and the blue car knew their place

So boys get a primary-coloured kit for building cars, while girls get a pink-and-purple kit for building sexy cars with eyelashes (and despite the fact that the blue version is the ‘advanced’ one, the pink version is the more expensive). You can argue that girls would never touch the toys “for boys” anyway so giving them pink versions is “better than nothing”, but to my mind covering construction toys in pink, hearts, fluttering eyelashes and Princesses (yes, GoldieBlox does princesses too, despite pretending they’re all anti-princess) is just reinforcing the stereotypes: even if girls want to build cars, they have to do it in a girly way (and they can’t build proper cars anyway, just cartoonishly anthropomorphised cars); they can’t possibly use the same toys as boys, because otherwise people might try to use their Meccano and Lego and so on to build the apparatus required to climb out of the pink and blue boxes.

Dressing up

A few months ago now (OK, this post has sat in drafts for a while) when I came to pick my daughter up from nursery I found her wearing a pink ‘fairy skirt’ (something like a tutu). “Her trousers and her spare trousers both got wet and it was the only thing we could find!” they said cheerfully. Fair enough if true, but I couldn’t help wondering whether they’d’ve miraculously managed to find a clean pair of trousers if she’d been a boy…

“She loves wearing it, she’s been doing little twirls around for us,” they gushed. All well and good – dressing up is fun, twirly skirts are fun. But I wonder how much of it was her own doing and how much was pressure from the nursery staff? They seem generally keen on encouraging her to look in the mirror, play with her hair and so on. “Are you going to wear your pretty skirt at the weekend and show all your friends?” they cooed at her. “Yes!” she said. I sighed inwardly at the thought of the likely battles ahead of me when she insisted on wearing the skirt to bed, or in the bath, or somewhere similarly impractical.

Anyway, we got home with only one mention of the skirt (“[name] is wearing a skirt!” “That’s right, darling”) and she got out of the bike and stomped into the house, pink fairy skirt flouncing behind her. I was just wondering whether to try to interest her in make-believe such as playing at being a fairy or a dancer, since she was wearing the skirt anyway (cue a moment of anxiety as I realised I had no idea what fairies actually do) when she turned to me and announced “[name]’s skirt is Not Nice. Take it off.” She hasn’t mentioned it since even though it’s been sitting around in plain sight (so that I don’t forget to return it to nursery next week).

*

A few days after that she was wearing navy shorts, a blue/grey/orange striped tshirt with a little tiger icon on it, orange/grey striped socks, and her blue trainers. She had a couple of red hairclips in her past-shoulder-length hair, to try to keep it out of her eyes. To me she looked like a little girl wearing normal summer play clothes.

As we walked to the shop, she stopped to try to catch a baby woodlouse (as you do). While she was grubbing around on the pavement and I was absent-mindedly talking to her (“do you think it’s going to play with the other woodlice? Don’t eat the moss, darling, it’ll give you a tummy-ache”) a passer-by stopped to grin at her and say “Ooh, what are you doing down there?”

She was too engrossed in the woodlouse to answer, so I replied on her behalf: “Trying to play with a baby woodlouse,” I said, with a rueful grin. “Ooh, does he like woodlice?” she asked. I didn’t comment on the pronoun but replied “Yeah, she loves all the creepy-crawlies.” (It’s true – she asks to stroke snails, she thinks woodlice are hilarious, she has been known to say “Excuse me, ant” as she walks past an ant, she loves bumble-bees and ladybirds, she’s quite interested in spiders as long as they’re not too close to her.) “Oh, it’s a little girl! Oh, sorry, in shorts and tshirt I couldn’t tell,” said the woman. “No no, that’s fine, they all just look like toddlers at this age,” I smiled. “Oooh, yes, of course, she’s a pretty little girl, I can see now,” she went on. I gritted my teeth. What I wanted to say was some or all of the following:

“Well, yes, I think she’s pretty, but then she’s my daughter, so I’m kind of biased. On the other hand, she looks basically fit and healthy and (unusually) reasonably clean, and those things combined with her blonde hair and blue eyes probably mean that white people are moderately likely to describe her as ‘pretty’. I’d rather people valued her for reasons other than her appearance, but I’ll concede that random passers-by don’t know anything about her except her appearance, though that doesn’t really explain why they think they need to comment on it. She totally doesn’t care if you think she’s a boy — she barely knows what a boy or a girl is. I honestly don’t mind if you think she’s a boy when you see her passing in the street — it doesn’t bother me (though it does annoy me if you make assumptions about what she’ll do/think/be based on your guess/knowledge about her sex). If you ask me if she’s male or female, I’ll tell you; and (for the sake of not confusing her) I’d rather you used female pronouns to refer to her, because that’s what everyone else uses to/about her; but other than that her sex is pretty much irrelevant, and her gender is basically whatever her parents choose to present her as, because she doesn’t really have any concept of gender yet.

“She likes playing with woodlice because they curl up in a ball when you poke them with a blade of grass, and to a two-year-old that’s pretty damned hilarious. You really don’t have to call her ‘pretty’ to make up for thinking she was a boy. I don’t mind if she’s not feminine and I don’t mind if she’s not pretty. I don’t feel the need to balance her attractiveness against her liking creepy-crawlies, because I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive, and both of them are orthogonal to her biological sex and her gender.

Basically what I’m saying her is: SHE’S ONLY TWO. Let her get on with her life.”

Of course, I didn’t say any of that, I just smiled vaguely and said to my daughter “Shall we say ‘bye-bye’ to the nice lady now? Are you going to come and help mummy with the shopping?”

*

I don’t really have a worked-out conclusion or a neat moral to derive from this. It’s just interesting (and extremely frustrating) to see how much importance people seem to place on clothes. I mean, when my daughter fishes the tiger costume out of the dressing-up box at nursery, people don’t assume she’s going to start attacking gazelles; and really, when you think about it, it’s all just dressing-up.

Eyewash?

This is a bit of an odd one:

Car wash, yeah!

Spotted outside Halfords: two types of screen wash. The blue one is the default (£3.49) and the pink one is the ‘advanced’ version (£4.49).

Now, I admit I’m already suspicious of Halfords because of their hideously gender-stereotyped kids’ bikes, so maybe I’m reading too much into this, but… when there are two versions of a product, one pink and one blue, everybody knows that the pink one is for girls and the blue one is for boys. Which would mean that the ‘advanced’ screen wash is being targeted at women. And I’d bet, ooh, at least £4.49 that the two screen washes are basically identical but Halfords are hoping to be able to push women towards the advanced one, because (they assume) women don’t know anything about cars and will be more easily persuaded that they need the ‘better’ stuff.

Am I thinking outside the glovebox here? Or just running on empty?

Royal Blues

The papers have been on fire (sadly not literally, despite the heatwave) with speculation about whether The Royal Baby would be a boy or a girl. I’m not going to write at length about the problems with gender binarism or the ridiculous superstitions used to justify the occasional success of guessing the outcome of something that’s more or less a coin toss. You can (and should) read about that stuff yourself. I’m just going to look at some of the colour-coded reactions to the joyful event.

A few days ago it was announced that the fountains of Trafalgar Square [would] be lit in pink or blue, depending on the gender of the newborn. And lo, this came to pass, as the Tower Of London turned blue, the fountain at Trafalgar Square turned blue, and the London Eye turned red, white and blue (this last just to taunt us with the reminder that it’s actually possible to celebrate the birth of a human using other colours). I confess that the idea of blue fountains somehow annoyed me less than pink fountains would have done; I think it’s just because blue is less marked.

The other official celebratory gesture was the announcement that babies born on the same day as the new prince are to receive a silver penny made by the Royal Mint. (The text of the news article doesn’t even have to explain why there are two different colours of pouch for the coins.) You can also buy these coins from the Royal Mint, where they explicitly say pink for girls and blue for boys. The difference in wording for the items is interesting to note, too (all emphases mine):

This special version of the coin comes in a beautiful pink pouch, with a matching pink gift card that can be made even more special with a personalised message. This charmingly presented gift set is an adorable baby gift for a new little girl, and one that she will treasure throughout her life.

The coin comes housed in a drawstring pouch that, in turn, is held in a pleasingly illustrated gift card. Both of these are in the charming pale blue associated with newborn baby boys, making it the perfect birth or christening gift for sons, grandsons, nephews, brothers or any special little boy you know.

The differences are interesting. The description for girls gushes about how it’s beautiful, colour-coordinated, personalised, and adorable, and the focus is on the little girl treasuring the pretty coin; the description for boys picks out the practicality of the bag, the pleasingly illustrated (not ‘beautiful’ or ‘matching’) gift card, and suggests that it’s a birth or christening gift, not an adorable baby gift (that is, more formal and objective language for the boys, more subjective and cutesy for the girls). There’s something odd going on with the way the pink and blue themselves are described/mentioned, too: pink gets mentioned twice and doesn’t have to be explained as being Girl Colour; blue gets mentioned only once, reduced to ‘pale blue’, and referred to with the distancing ‘associated with newborn baby boys’ (only newborn baby boys need a colour, and we’re not doing the associating, it’s just a tradition, you can ignore it if you want).

I’ve mostly tried to stay away from the unofficial royal baby merchandise, for the sake of my blood pressure (NB I will not be answerable for my actions if I see someone wearing a non-slogan along the lines of KEEP CALM AND PRINCE ON), but Matalan got this through my human firewall by the cunning expedient of sending me an email:

Well what did you expect

Of course it’s a morass of pastel pink and blue, but the surprising thing is how odd it looks to see baby clothes emblazoned with “little prince”. “Little princess” is ubiquitous on pink baby clothes, but clothes aimed at boys more usually seem to feature words like “hero”, “soldier”, “little man”, or else words glorifying things that would be naughtiness in girls: “little monkey”, “little monster”, etc. I also note that it’s “Mummy’s little prince”: at some point I’d like to do a fuller examination of my observation that in babywear, boys are nearly always “Mummy’s little X” and girls are nearly always “Daddy’s little X”. Is this some kind of weird Oedipus/Electra thing going on?

The really interesting one, though, is the “Born to Rule” babygro, only available in blue (marked ‘while stocks last’ in the marketing email, it already appears to have vanished from Matalan’s website). Perhaps in all the excitement over the new prince they’ve forgotten that for the last 61 years we’ve been ruled by a woman.

Be a bloody train driver

I don’t expect much from Boots, but they managed to disappoint me even further with their own-brand toddler reins:

Rein check

Do I need to break this down? “Train driver”: active, useful, in control; also, you know, an actual thing you could aspire to be or do. “Little cupcake”: passive, pretty, designed to be eaten…? OK, maybe I’m being silly with the last one of those; but really, at best it’s just a nonsense term of endearment. Which is fine, but in that case why not make both say something sweet-but-meaningless like “little darling”? (You just know that if they’d chosen a more direct equivalent for their ‘boy’ version it’d be “little monkey” or “little monster”.)

I ranted about this to my husband when I got home. “She’s not a cupcake or a train driver! She’s just a toddler! She’s a human being!” The human being in question turned and looked quizzically at me. I turned to her and asked “Go on then, what would you rather be? A cupcake or a train driver?” She thought for a second and said “train driver!”

The title of this post, as you probably know, is taken from the excellent cartoons by Jacky Fleming:

Jobs for the girls

I still reckon ‘train driver’ is a better career option than ‘cupcake’, though.

But I think the thing that annoys me most about these designs (as I’ve said before about similar things) is how lazy and irrelevant they are. It’s totally phoned-in. “Yeah, do one pink, one blue, of course, and, I dunno, boys like trains, and girls like cake. I’ll email you some clip-art and a cliché. Will this do?” I could come up with six better suggestions before breakfast. If I was designing reins for toddlers I’d want them to be cheerful, I’d want the designs to suggest movement and freedom (because naturally you don’t want to think that you’re curtailing your child’s movement by using reins, you want to think that you’re helping them learn to roam around safely); perhaps yellow reins with a bee design (“buzzing about”) or a yellow duckling (“quack!”), or red reins with a ladybird (“fly away home”) design, or blue reins with white clouds and the silhouette of a bird (“high flier”?)… That’s just off the top of my head. Pay me and I’ll come up with plenty more.

Of course, part of the problem here is the relentless insistence on making every item of toddler clothing into a declarative statement of (parental aspirational) identity; slogans like “Daddy’s Little Princess” are ghastly for all sorts of reasons, but really, “Mummy’s Little Astronaut” or “Future Prime Minister” would feel just as silly when imposed on someone who’s not yet 3. My general rule of thumb is to avoid using clothes (or anything else) to put words in my daughter’s mouth; but having said that, I am tempted to print tshirts saying “My own little person”. Would you buy one?

Hard to handle

“Introducing the new Brighton range of furniture from Asda. Within the range you’ll find cabinets, chests of drawers, dressing table and wardrobes – all with ‘his and hers’ handles.”

Pull the other one

“The new 4 Drawer Beech effect Chest of Drawers can be customised to suit your child; if he’s a budding footballer you can change the standard handle to a football or if she’s a little sweetheart, you can change it to the adorable heart handle and as they grow older you can change the handle back to the generic grey pull.”

I never thought I’d see a situation where “the generic grey pull” would sound like the best of the available options.

Someday my pinks will come

The blame for the ‘pink princess’ thing can be laid fairly squarely at the door of Disney: back in 1999 they realised there was a way that they could sell more tat to little girls, and the seemingly bottomless Disney Princess franchise was born, peddling a wide range of pink plastic stuff with which to accessorise your clothes, your room, your life.

Not all the Disney Princesses actually wear pink:

Princessant

From left to right: Snow White, Pocahontas, Belle, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Tiana, Aurora, Jasmine, Ariel, and Mulan (who seems to be wearing pink and blue).

Yep, you read that right: more are wearing blue than are wearing pink. Not that you’d know it to look at the Princess merchandise: a Google Images search for Disney Princess toys or Disney Princess accessories is as pink as Barbara Cartland’s bedroom (though one blue Princess bedroom design does sneak in from this page, on which we’re told “While your daughter has a toy, film, books and accessories … nothing will compete to design the ultimate Disney princess bedroom for her to be his upside down quite a bit in.” I think — I hope — it loses in translation.)

But back to the Princesses. Here’s Sleeping Beauty, blending into the background:

Princess Monochrome

Your child can look like this for just £25 thanks to the Disney Store:

A handbag?

“Extend their fancy dress options with this gorgeous Sleeping Beauty gown. They can wear Aurora’s classic pink dress in velour and satin with organza details, costume gems and a hooped skirt.” I’m not sure how it’s extending their fancy dress options — I’d say it’s doing more or less the opposite, to be honest — and I’m fairly sure Sleeping Beauty didn’t have a handbag; but let’s just have a look at that “classic pink dress”. Here’s Sleeping Beauty in an official Disney postcard from 1970:

Colour wheel

The colour she’s wearing will come as no surprise to those of you who read my earlier post full of princesses. Here’s a Sleeping Beauty poster, also from 1970:

Fairytale pastels

Not only is she wearing blue, but the prince is wearing pink. You could still get away with this as late as 1981, on this Sleeping Beauty book cover:

Purple reign

But if you look back at the modern version, the colours have been reversed.

Disney do something similar with Mulan: she wears a variety of clothes in the film; the classic image of her shows her wearing green and blue:

If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow…

She’s often seen on horseback:

Pony girl

She wears armour, for crying out loud:

Battle dress

but the costume Disney sell is primarily hot pink (admittedly with some equally lurid electric blue):

China girl?

And why the balloons? A toy bow and arrows would surely be more appropriate.

Amidst all this pinkification of Disney’s princesses, though, I derive a crumb of hope from the fact that Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother is allowed to a) wear blue, and b) be old (even rarer than non-pink among Disney heroines) even in the more recent two straight-to-video sequels:

Bibbidi-bobbidi-blue

Maybe there is still a chance for her to wave her magic wand and restore the colour balance so the rainbow will come smiling through.

Over the rainbow

A Guardian article a few weeks ago about a teenager transitioning from female to male prompted me to try to dig a bit deeper than my usual off-the-cuff mockery of tiresome pink-box-blue-box marketing. (Today seems an appropriate day to post it, as it’s a topic that often causes fireworks…) Here’s the first paragraph of the article:

Should we have known? With hindsight there were plenty of clues. Katie had always been something of a tomboy – never a “girly” girl and most definitely not a Barbie girl – and we had begun to suspect that there was a possibility that, as adolescence progressed, she might turn out to be attracted to women rather than men. After all, my side of the family had previous form in this respect, so it crossed our minds and we did joke about it.

There’s so much confusion of sex/gender/sexuality here that I hardly know where to start, but I’ll try to pick it apart a bit.

First, have a think about the women you know. Do they all dress in sparkly pink fairy costumes and enjoy making cupcakes? Sure, some of them may do (and there’s nothing wrong with that), but all of them? I’d be surprised. Now, why should all female children be expected to behave like that? Not all girls are “girly”. Not all women are hyper-feminine “Barbie girls” (and of course no real woman has Barbie’s figure). This shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody who has actually met other human beings.

Second, how sad that a girl gets labelled as a “tomboy” if she doesn’t conform to some peculiar 1950s/Disney stereotype of extreme femininity. We already have a word for active, boisterous girls: it’s “girl”. The word “tomboy” is a bit problematic, really; a lot of people actually see it as quite a positive thing (hey, she’s active, confident, not bound by gender stereotype) without realising that the word is reinforcing the idea that these behaviours are “boy” behaviours — that if a girl is confident and active, she’s acting like a boy rather than acting like a confident, active girl. I’m certainly not saying that everybody who uses the word “tomboy” thinks this, or is deliberately reinforcing the stereotype; it’s just worth considering the connotations. (Someone else makes this point much better.)

Third, even if we accepted for the purposes of argument that there are totally different, non-overlapping modes of dress/behaviour for girls and boys, clothes do not make you gay. I’m not going to say “dress/behaviour has nothing to do with sexuality” because obviously it’s a lot more complicated than that: different clothes and behaviours do act as signals of gender and hence of default sexuality; people’s sexual/social choices can be affected by their personal perception of their gender, and conversely people can and do choose to project aspects of their sexuality by their choice of dress/behaviour, and there are all sorts of other complicated interplays of physical/social/cultural/sexual identity and desire that I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of here. We don’t exist in a socio-cultural vacuum, these things are all signifiers, and it would be naive to claim that a dress is absolutely and always “just a dress”. But honestly, wearing trousers and climbing trees will not turn your daughter into a lesbian. (Taking this nonsense to its logical conclusion, if a pair of trousers had the magical powers to make a girl into a boy, why shouldn’t they make her into a gay boy? Gay boys wear trousers too!) It’s as if people find it more comprehensible that gay people are the opposite sex at some mysterious level than that they are attracted to the same sex. Don’t even ask me where bisexuals are supposed to come into this worldview.

By even going down the route of explaining that clothes don’t make you gay, though, I feel that I’m tacitly endorsing homophobia. If wearing trousers did turn girls into lesbians, or wearing pink made boys gay… so what? Would it be so terrible if your child was gay? One common response to this is “Oh I wouldn’t mind for myself but they’d get so much discrimination and I want to spare them that.” When I hear that response from parents I’m happy to assume good faith, to assume that it’s genuinely coming from a place of love, but… you want to protect your child from other people’s homophobia by perpetuating the idea that gayness is something terrible to be avoided at all costs? Just think that through for a moment.

And then, of course, “we did joke about it”. I bet that helped a lot, if the teenager in question was also wrestling with their sexuality, and the jokes were all revolving around the sorts of prejudices already unpacked above. (Yes, I know, joking and joshing within families can be loving and affectionate, can strengthen family ties, and so on — my immediate family have a long and happy history of mercilessly mocking each other — but teasing teenagers about sensitive subjects like sexuality is a risky business. Mind you, at the other end of the scale, my parents barely mentioned sexuality — in retrospect, I realise, because they genuinely weren’t fussed about whether I turned out to love boys or girls or dancing bears — and I interpreted that silence as fear or disapproval, and consequently felt I couldn’t discuss it with them. I guess the take-home message here is that parents of teenagers probably can’t win…)

I should make it clear that I am absolutely not claiming that the teenager in the article wouldn’t have wanted to transition if they hadn’t felt the strong arm of the gender police; I don’t know the details of their specific case (beyond what’s in the article), and I don’t know what causes gender dysphoria any more than I know what causes people to develop one sexuality or another (the jury is still out — or should that be still closeted?). But it makes it desperately hard to think clearly about the questions and choices involved (on a personal or general level) if you’re stranded in the middle of a sea of unexamined stereotypes; if everybody is expected to be pink or blue, what do you do when you find that you are (or your child is) orange or purple or green?

Edited to add: I have tried not to mis-gender the teenager in the article; one person has already pointed out some errors, which I believe I’ve fixed. Please note that by using the article as a jumping-off point for talking about society’s reaction to people they believe to be girls, I don’t mean to imply that Ben is female. However I realise now that to say “Katie/Ben” was incorrect and impolite, so I’ve changed it to something which is hopefully more acceptable. If there are other errors then please forgive me (and feel free to point them out); they’re a result of ignorance (which I hope can be corrected) rather than dismissiveness or dislike.