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| A baby-sized pink dress. Image source. |
Wrote this when I was 24 weeks pregnant
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In a previous post I talked about how in China they're not allowed to tell us the baby's gender until the baby is born. But I also heard that most international hospitals will tell you anyway. And then Hendrix and I went for our 2nd-trimester anatomy scan ultrasound and there was, ahem, some STRONG HINTING that it's a boy.
I'm convinced it's a boy. Hendrix, on the other hand, lacks confidence in our ability to correctly interpret the strong hinting, and insists we "don't know" what kind of genitals our baby has. At any rate, I'm committed to not telling anyone anyway. As I said in my previous post about the baby's gender, I'm really uncomfortable with people putting all these gendered expectations on my child before they're even born. Let them wait until the birth, and then they can bring their inevitable gendered expectations.
So anyway. One fun thing that happens when you're pregnant is people give you all kinds of baby clothes. So I'm looking through this huge pile of baby clothes that friends gave me, and there are a few dresses. Super frilly pink and purple dresses. And my feelings are "uh it's too bad we can't use this because our baby is a boy" and then "okay why do I think boys can't wear dresses, isn't that a bunch of patriarchal bullshit? what's wrong with me?"
Sooooo ... like how should I think about this?
Well let's back up and talk about baby clothes as a concept. This seems to be an entirely different thing than non-baby clothes. Because the baby isn't able to make choices about what they want to wear. They don't "want" anything; they don't have preferences about their clothes. They just need to be not hot or cold or too tight or scratching their skin. But babies don't know or care about the cultural significance of different colors or patterns or whatever. They don't know about gender or gender expression.
So really, baby clothes have nothing to do with the baby's preferences. Instead, it's the parents' preferences. Which makes this such a fundamentally different thing than what clothes mean for everyone else. For anyone over the age of, uh, 3 maybe (???), they choose their own clothes as a way of expressing their personality- and that includes gender expression. But babies don't.
Furthermore, it seems like the gendering of baby clothes is mostly a way for the parent to communicate to other people what their baby's gender is. Because newborn boys and girls look the same. You can't tell their gender from looking at their face or how long their hair is or anything like that. I think this must be the explanation for why baby clothes in stores are so extremely gendered. I was in the US for a bit during the first trimester and when I went to shop for baby clothes I was just *shocked* at how over-the-top it was ... like everything "for girls" was obnoxiously pink and said "daddy's little princess" ...
But it must be because baby boys and girls look the same, and people get nervous if they can't tell what some random stranger's gender is, so therefore you have to make it really really obvious with your baby's clothing.
I, of course, think the whole thing is ridiculous. And I don't care if people think my baby is a girl, when he's really a boy... like, Baby doesn't understand gender, so why does it matter?
But. Does that mean I'm gonna put him in a dress? ... It really bothers me that I'll have to make decisions for him about his gender expression.
Gender is a social construct. What that means in this case is that the idea "boys can't wear dresses" is a cultural norm with no absolute objective reason why it "must" be true. If you look at different cultures around the world or different time periods in history, there are examples where men wore clothes that we might call "dresses," and everyone thought it was completely normal. So I might argue that in an ideal world, nobody would think it was weird for a boy to wear a dress, and therefore I'm totally gonna have my baby boy wear dresses sometimes.
But no. It's a social construct, but it's still very real. If my little boy wears a dress, and then people tell him he's doing something wrong, their criticism is real and his feelings about that are real. (This would not be when he's a baby; this would be when he's old enough to understand that people are criticizing him.) In an ideal world, people should accept it, but we're not in an ideal world, and we have to acknowledge that reality and manage it in practical ways.
Like how a woman might tell a creepy guy "I have a boyfriend" even if she doesn't have a boyfriend, in order to get him to leave her alone. In an ideal world, he should leave her alone simply because she has the right to be left alone if she wants, but that's not the world we live in. It sucks, but sometimes you have to invent an imaginary man, for your own safety.
And so I don't want to put my boy in a dress. Of course, if he says he wants to wear a dress, then I support that 100%. But if he doesn't state any preference- or maybe when he's too little to care- then I don't think I'll put him in the dress. Because yes, people *should* accept it if a boy wears a dress, and people *shouldn't* make fun of him, but that's not the world we live in. To even understand what's happening, my baby would need a whole lot of cultural and historical background information. He would need to understand why "gender is a social construct." I can't just throw him into that if he's not able to understand it. All he'll know is "Mommy is a feminist and now people are mocking me and it feels bad"- and those feelings are real and I care about that. So if he doesn't state a preference, then I won't put him in a dress.
I guess? I mean, if he's only like 1 month old then he doesn't care.
I'm thinking about when I was a little kid, and adults would tell me "it's great to see a girl winning awards in math" and I hated that. I was good at math because I'm good at math, and it has nothing to do with gender. Now that I'm an adult and a feminist and a woman working as an engineer, I understand where they were coming from when they said that, but as a little kid I didn't have any of the historical background information to understand it. As a little kid I didn't experience sexism in that way; my parents and teachers encouraged me to follow my interests in math and science, this felt completely normal and natural to me, and it bothered me so much when people would bring up gender, as if there was something *weird* about girls being good at math and science.
My point is, as adults we take for granted that everyone knows society has certain opinions and values, and then we communicate our own opinions and values by using those societal norms as a reference point when we state what we believe. But little kids are too young to even know what the societal norm is- because it's not obvious or objectively true. It's a social construct. You need years of experience living in the culture in order to understand it- and then you end up internalizing it without ever realizing it doesn't have to be this way. So when we tell kids "I think XYZ" what we're really saying is "I don't agree with societal norm ABC and instead I believe XYZ." And for a kid who isn't even familiar with societal norm ABC, it sounds completely bizarre for someone just to come out of nowhere and be like "I think XYZ."
It's like if I, an American living in China, told Chinese people "Here are a bunch of reasons I'm really glad I didn't change my last name when I got married." In China, there's no tradition about women changing their last name when they get married. It just doesn't exist, and people don't think about it, and it would come across as really odd for me to have so many *feelings* about *not* changing my name, because why on earth would someone change their name anyway?
(I'm trying to figure out how to teach my kid- who, by the way, is mixed-race and will grow up as an immigrant no matter where we live- what a cultural norm is, meanwhile conservatives seem to think it's impossible to explain to their kids that gay people exist...)
So back to the question of dresses... My current thinking is that, when my kid is old enough to have preferences about clothes, I can take him shopping and we'll go to the "boys" section first, because I guess he would want to wear stuff similar to other boys. But also I'll tell him we can totally look in the "girls" section too. Really there's no such thing as "boys clothes" and "girls clothes." The store labels them that way, but that's just their opinion; it doesn't mean you have to follow it. Wear whatever you want.
But honestly, the issue of "yes, boys CAN wear dresses" is probably not that important in terms of how I raise this kid. He can live his whole life never wearing a dress and never wearing anything from the "girls" section, and there wouldn't be anything harmful about that at all. (Though I do think it's important that men are educated enough about women's clothes to know that the pockets are useless, the sizes don't make sense, high heels are not comfortable, and so on- just some basic facts that are obvious to all women. Men should know those things because this is the reality that half the population lives with every day.) "Boys can wear dresses" isn't the hill I want to die on, so to speak.
What's actually important is teaching him how to take care of his mental and emotional health. This is an area where societal norms about being "manly" are really harmful to men. Men are taught that they shouldn't be "emotional". They shouldn't cry. They shouldn't go to therapy. Women typically have a bunch of friends that they can talk to about personal problems, and get support, but men aren't "supposed" to do that. So this is what I'm most concerned about, when raising a boy. If he stays within the gender binary in terms of clothing choices, well, whatever, that won't harm him. But the mental and emotional health stuff, that's actually important.
So. I guess the point is, I totally support my boy if he wants to wear "girl" clothes, because I don't believe there's such a thing as "boy clothes" and "girl clothes" anyway. But I won't push him to do that; I'll treat "boy clothes" as the default for him, because I don't want people to make fun of him. Is that the correct, "feminist" way to approach this? I don't know.
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I guess I can post a bit of an update to this; I wrote the above post when I was pregnant, but now I have months of experience buying clothes for this child and dressing him. Basically we dress him in blue a lot. Like we're basically completely following the stereotypical "boy" baby clothes. Oh, wait actually he does have 1 pink t-shirt which is COMPLETELY ADORABLE and I love when he wears it. And he wore a lot of "gender neutral" [whatever that means] stuff when he was a newborn, because I didn't tell anyone the gender before he was born, so they gave us "gender neutral" baby clothes.
But basically this is much less of a big deal than I thought when I was pregnant. We kind of just have a certain gender expression in mind, subconsciously, and we dress him in clothes consistent with that. And it's not really a big deal. Definitely when he's older, he can choose to wear whatever he wants (as long as it's appropriate for the weather). But for now, we choose, and I guess we just chose to dress him in blue and there's not anything wrong with that.
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