Gender Schmender

[matril]

I had another topic in mind for my next post, but that'll wait for later. I need to ramble on for a bit about something that (shockingly!!) I take very personally.


Since it seems like everyone I know is pregnant lately, I've been seeing a lot of excitement about ultrasounds and baby's genders in people's Facebook statuses and such. Now, I don't want to be a hypocrite - I was plenty excited to see the ultrasounds for my children, and plenty excited to find out the gender. But I get all squirmy and unhappy when people express a strong preference for one gender or the other (and it's usually girls - to make up for years of girl-bashing, apparently). It's also maddening when they make broad generalizations like a girl will be so fun to dress up (in spite of the fact that all babies are squishy-faced, helpless things with flailing limbs and feet that can't keep socks on for more than a minute at the time - and indistinguishable in terms of gender unless you look inside the diaper) or a boy will be ever so active and hard to handle (as if all girls are unfailingly quiet and demure from birth onward). Your baby will be your baby, an individual defined by so many, many more things than gender.

So why do we focus on gender? Well, the most obvious reason is that, barring extremely obvious birth defects, it's the only thing we can find out before birth. And it's fun to have the news ahead of time, to have something concrete to visualize. It's just the over-visualizing, the over-generalizing, that bugs me. Parenthood is one series of surprises after another. It's human nature to try to settle on something sure and solid, but let me tell you - knowing which gender your child will be guarantees pretty much nothing.

I know why this irks me so disproportionately, of course. Autism, the default reason for anything that makes me cranky. :P Gender is a pretty frivolous thing to fuss about when your child has severe developmental delays. Also, I get fired up about arbitrary gender roles - pink for girls and blue for boys? Pfft. My nephew's favorite color is pink, and good for him. Boys are rough and tumble and girls are quiet and nurturing? Double pfft. Some are one way, some are another, and some are something else altogether. Emma is a girl, sure, but she's also a budding mathematician, a world-builder, and a breathless chatterbox. Ryan has enough energy for five children, but he's also a ridiculously enthusiastic cuddler, and he loves dress-up as much as Emma. Luke's traits are tricky to disentangle from his autism, but he's definitely very affectionate, and given to long periods of introspection (while watching/making things spin) interspersed with bounding hyperactivity. Yes, I have two boys and a girl, but mostly, I have Luke, Emma and Ryan. My older sister and I, fifteen months apart, were close enough in personality and temperament (though I was the meaner one) that when our little brother came along, my parents figured all the differences sprang from him being a boy instead of a girl. Then our little sister was born and squashed that theory by being different from everyone. :)

I nearly drowned in a sea of pink at Emma's baby shower. It took all my willpower not to be snarky about it. Baby girls are not cuter than baby boys. My children, in fact, were pretty much identical as babies. What, are we seriously afraid a bit of pink and lace is going to turn our little boys gay? That's just insanity, in more ways than one. Sometimes I wish we could just go back to dressing all babies in long frilly white dresses.

Comments

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

Daniel insists that pink is for girls and blue is for boys and is obsessed with construction equipment, yet has no problem traipsing around kindergarten in one of the dress-up box's princess dresses :) (I think he's channeling his inner baroque courtier, myself - now there were men who fearlessly strode the world stage in stockings and lace). To be fair about the dressing up issue, I think part of it is that there are so many MORE clothes out there for little girls! Apparently dresses and cute tops and leggings and little girl jeans can be reinvented endlessly, but for boys you get romper suits, t-shirts, overalls and if you're getting really fancy, polo shirts and miniature ties. And that's it.

I've seen the preferring-a-girl thing quite a bit, especially with people who are adopting or undergoing fertility treatment. I don't mean that many of them take concrete steps to ensure that they *only* get a girl, but there's a lot of "it would be nice if ..." My own completely unverifiable and grossly oversimplified theory is that it's because when you start getting deep into the throes of either adoption or fertility treatment, it's something that you *really* have to want, and also it seems like for various reasons the women end up doing most of the active work (either getting paperwork together or doing the shots). If women are the driving force behind it, they may tend somewhat towards preferring daughters (especially if they think this is their ONLY chance) because they know what a mother-daughter relationship is like and presumably most of them have some interest in replicating it, as they do want children after all. I can't really explain it in an ordinary context though, except possibly that nowadays saying "I'd like a boy" might be seen as sexist but "I want a girl" is OK because girls were/are disadvantaged in a lot of places. (Weirdly, we know a LOT more people who've had girls than boys. In Andrew's office, for example, there are about fifteen people. Almost all of them have children, but only three - including us, obviously - have even one boy. Do programmers not make a lot of Y sperm?)

[matril.livejournal.com]

There is a definite disparity in the production of girls' clothing versus boys' - so the idea of girls being fun to dress up keeps perpetuating itself. Sigh. I guess my annoyance stems mostly from having almost zero interest in clothing (with the exception of costumes and medieval garb), so it annoys me when people think girls=fun with pretty clothes.

There's a lot of different factors that influence people's boy/girl preferences, and it varies of course from couple to couple....I admit I was leaning toward wanting a boy after Emma, just because I wanted to see what it was like to have a boy without autism - but if Ryan had been a girl instead, I hardly would have been devastated. And we certainly spent many a month worrying that he had autism as well. Parental hopes and expectations are...complicated. And it goes way beyond the simple boy/girl issue. I just worry about kids growing up with complexes because they happen to have a different sequence of genes than what their parents were expecting. And then I have to remind myself that it's none of my business unless it's my own kids. :P

[robogock.livejournal.com]

Gender is useful to fuss about in terms of naming, particularly if the parents have different tastes in names. Knowing the gender means only having to agree on one name (well, or two if you consider first and middle). (Of course, there's a whole argument to be made about whether names should be gender-specific, but the fact of the matter is that they are.) Also, since English doesn't have a good non-gendered pronoun for people, knowing the gender lets you refer to a baby as something other than "the baby" or "it."

That said, I don't actually disagree with anything you posted, just thought I'd add a comment.

[matril.livejournal.com]

Names and non-neutral pronouns are definitely a big factor in wanting to know the baby's gender. We certainly needed lots of time to figure out names we could both agree upon, and it was helpful to be able to narrow it down to one set of names, boy or girl.

It's just when people try to extend the implications of gender anywhere beyond the basic pronoun distinction that I want to pull my hair out....