Before DesignDude was conceived, I was hired by ThisNext to build its baby/parenting vertical, which is more robust (but no less boring) than it was when I arrived. What can I say — baby stuff is mundane, now matter how many celebrities you tie to it. But as a real-life dad, I still see the sexy side the baby world, and I tend to have a lot to say about the imposition of gender identification at a very young age.
Case in point, I was at a baby’s first birthday party on today–the kind attended by a group of new parents who somehow managed to nearly simultaneously procreate. A toddler a few months younger than my own was playing in a wading pool alongside my daughter and a couple of other kids. As my wife and I had brought water-proof diapers (and he was wearing a standard diaper), my wife offered his mother one of ours. The mother gladly accepted, but within 20 minutes she began complaining about what wearing a pink diaper might do to her son, psychologically. Lame (but dependable) joke in a sexist/homophobic culture, right? I would have loved to have left it there, but she began to offer anecdotes of a couple occasions in recent memory in which her boy had been mistaken for a girl. (As we have regularly dressed our daughter in all blue, or simply in hand-me-down boys clothes, I can speak from firsthand experience that most adults cannot tell the difference between a toddler boy and a toddler girl.) She eventually went on to put shorts over his diaper (regardless of the fact that he had been playing in the water in a standard diaper alone for half an hour when we first arrived) to save him what she saw as the embarrassment of having been seen by friends and family at age one in a pink diaper.
I find this kind of thing corny, but it would be a unreasonable and a little pretentious for me to suggest that I feel the need to speak up for the rights of pre-gender-assigned youth when I come across this sort of behavior in parents. So, of course, I let it go and simply complained to my wife a little bit about it at the party and on the way home. I didn’t give it much more thought before coming across a young boy of maybe two at a park later that day. As my daughter loitered in a sand-surfaced play area this child pushed a pink stroller carrying a baby from the cement exterior into the sandbox. She immediately ran up to him and put out a hand to touch one of his stroller’s handles, at which point he batted her hand away and strolled on into the sand.
She didn’t seem too bothered, but I consoled her with the suggestion that he didn’t want to share his stroller. Meanwhile I looked on in appreciation at this boy’s ability to get away with a pink stroller if he wanted to. (This is the kind of thing I find thrilling, and, related or not, I’ve made no secret about my near-hope that my daughter emerges as a lesbian.) He later parked the stroller next to a swing, which his (I’m assuming) dad was pushing him on, and my daughter ran across the playground to check out his stroller again. I pulled her away from the stroller twice, but she persistently went back for it again. On the third occasion, the boy’s guardian apologized for the kid’s inability to let anyone else touch his stroller or the doll sitting in it. I looked up to see the swinging boy’s fixed gaze and furrowed brow, both of which, from the intensity of his expression, seemed no less a statement than “Don’t fuck with my shit, you little bitch.” I found the whole exchange pretty awesome, and a timely antidote to the disappointing lesson I witnessed earlier in the day.
