Gender Cues, Babies, and the UK
As many of you may know, the University of Kentucky’s colors are blue and white. As you can see, the women’s basketball team at UK wears blue and white:
The women’s uniform in the UK cheerleading squad is also blue and white:
And yet, when I look for UK onesies:
Obviously, I can buy blue onesies for Elisha and Miriam; I have no compunctions against dressing them in blue. I’ll admit, though, that I’m a touch bothered that pink onesies are even an option. One thing that I never understood before having children was the obsession with gender identification. Because babies pretty much all look alike, gender can only be identified by their clothing. It is extremely common for people to assume that either Elisha or Miriam or both are boys because of the way we dress them; indeed, some family members have expressed hostility at our gender neutral clothing choices. People don’t seem to have schemata for dealing with situations of gender ambiguity, even in relations with babies.
Even in the context, however, I find the availability of UK onesies irritating. Sure enough, people are going to assume that your girl is a boy if you put her in a blue onesie (although I suppose you could tie a ribbon in her hair or something). And the solution to that is… buy products that don’t actually reflect UK women’s team colors, and that seem to assume a supporting rather than a participatory role? Nobody on campus wears pink with the UK logo; everyone wears blue. But your girl baby needs pink, because otherwise somebody might mistake her for a baby boy, and then who knows? She might grow up to be a lesbian or something…
I think the solution is obvious: dress the children as you wish, but then pin a “girl” sign on them.
If you were in Texas, this would be an even bigger deal. There’s a school district in the Dallas suburbs who has a 5 year old boy in isolation because he has long hair. This violates the dress code and so he is taken to a room every day with a teacher’s aide and made to sit there alone.
Link please. (Sadly) I’m not doubting you. I just want to read more.
Needville ,Texas.
And it’s even a religous issue
Trying again on the link
You are overthinking this. Sure you can get onesies in pink with the UK logo. You can also get women’s T-Shirts in pink with the logo of any major university. A quick survey of bookstores online at the University of Texas, Notre Dame, LSU, etc all show women’s apparel available in pink. Having a teen and now college freshman young woman I have seen this trend going on for about 5 years now. There are a lot of young women that like pink, so the bookstores sell them what they want and they extend it to all age groups.
Watching the OU-CT Valentines day women’s basketball massacree should be enough to put anyone off pink-
http://www.newsok.com/multimedia/video/66707805001
I always like to freak people out by noting that a century ago pink was a boy’s colour and blue a girl’s colour. (The reasoning being that pink was a hot colour and blue a demure, calming ‘girly’ colour.)
Pinkness was rife through male culture. Look at the uniform of German panzer crews in World War Two: black to hide the grease stains, but with pink piping.
Pansy divisions indeed…
Dress them in onesies from women’s colleges. There’ll be no ambiguity with a baby in a Mount Holyoke onesie.
It being Kentucky, it’s hard to believe that you can’t find them onesies in any of a variety of camouflage patterns. I think girls look best in Realtree Ghost, but plain Woodland is always a good choice.
Obviously if you want well-adjusted children you dress them in these.
I don’t care at all for pink in lieu of the real color. My wife likes pink. A lot.
I thought real female fans didn’t wear pink unless they were rooting for Palermo. What did I miss?
On a larger scope: Watching women play basketball, with women cheerleaders doing their thing during stoppages in play, is a bit disconcerting. The latter sorta seem redundant.
Or…somebody could just be tired of having to answer “she’s a girl”, when strangers ask what sex their bald (or nearly so), androgynously dressed child is.
Not to mention some women actually like pink. Not my wife, thankfully, but some women.
Sometimes a duck is just a duck, Rob.
OMG, Jeeeeez H. Christmas. I wish parents would stop obsessing over this shit. Look, babies all look the same. ALL LOOK SAME. I’m not trying to indoctrinate your child into gender stereo types, I don’t think women should be a “supporting rather than participatory role” (whatever the heck that means in the context of a BABY ONESIE askdjgf!). I’m pretty sure your baby doesn’t care and will not suffer long term trauma just because you dress him or her in any damn color.
I just want to be able to use a pronoun when asking questions about or referring to your baby. That’s all.
I just want to be able to use a pronoun when asking questions about or referring to your baby. That’s all.
Two options:
1) “How cute! Are they a little girl or a little boy?” (If you specifically want to know their sex, and it’s not coming clear from name or other details. Certainly this is a vital piece of info if you’re about to change their diapers and want to be prepared to avoid a fountain of pee!)
2) “How cute! How old are they/what’s their name/etc.?” (If sexing the infant is not an immediate priority).
(Singular they/their/etc. has a long history in English – Shakespeare, Bible translations, Jane Austen, Dickens, etc, although it was labeled as incorrect in the early 19thC by writers who apparently mistook English for Latin.)
A very interesting post about Gender and Baby Boys’ Clothes from Rachel’s Tavern:
“. . . I’ve also see baby boy clothes with policemen, construction worker, mechanic, pilot, and soldier themes. Activity themes involve clothes the promote going on safaris, hunting, fishing, eating, playing sports, and one outfit my little guys have promotes making robots … What strikes me about baby boys clothes is how much they promote activity and paid labor force work. Even as infants, we start to socialize baby boys into occupations. You rarely find occupation themed clothes for girls. Little girls clothes often have flowers, frills, and some animals (i.e. butterflies), but they don’t have occupational themes. They also rarely have activity themes outside of shopping or cheerleading. . . ”
For folks who feel all this is just overthinking an obvious duck, why is “what sex are they” such a major and thorny question that people will both endlessly ask and parents will be, apparently, too tired to answer – compared to, say, how old are they, which can also be pretty tough to tell, and seemingly a lot more immediately relevant, or their name, which is basically unguessable?
Also: We were just at Babies R Us today getting new clothes for our little one – 2 months old, and finally as big as an average newborn, yay! There was, as usual, an almost literal handful of nongendered baby clothes, with everything else clearly marked as little boy or little girl. I mean, think how hard designers have to be working to not turn out a few more gender neutral clothes, how many colors and subjects and phrases and combinations they have to painstakingly avoid! Why?
At my supermarket checkout today, cover of InStyle mag screamed something like, “Why is Angelina dressing [whatever the f*** her name is] like a BOY?”
Can I throw a bomb? Here it is: some women seem to have babies just to play dress-up with a live dolly. OK. You may fire when ready, Gridley.
Sure, why not. The missus has a lot of fun picking out cute outfits for our daughter. I do take some pride in the fact that my baby is often the most stylishly dressed one.
Still, sometimes I do dress her like this
I blame John Calipari.
Robert,
As the father of 13-month-old twin girls, what you dress them in actually has little bearing on the inanity of comments gathered from the community. We are often out on the town with daughter 1 in pink and daughter 2 in purple. The most common question: “A boy and a girl?” Seriously. Yep, the kid in the purple shirt with hearts on it is obviously the boy. We have theorized that people presume what they consider the most desirable outcome – for white people, it is usually “A boy and a girl?” but our town has a large Asian immigrant population, and their question at least a third of the time is “Two boys?” Yes, wearing purple and pink hearts, two boys.
I think it’s really less than gender reinforcement (not that that isn’t an issue in play) but more about the school attempting to squeeze a few more dollars out of a fan base.
Professional sports teams have ‘fashion’ apparel which is generally just the usual logo but in different, non-standard colours. Why wouldn’t a college try and get in on some of that?
I don’t think the gendered colors actually help people identify babies’ genders. 99.9 %of our kid’s infant clothes were gifts and most were blue. People would still refer to him as “she”. I’ve heard the opposite from parents with baby girls decked out in pink frills. My theory is hair: a baby with hair is a girl; one without is a boy.
I don’t really care if somebody I don’t even know uses the wrong pronoun, but I would use the correct one or his name in the course of the conversation, and people only picked up on it half the time.
Silly rabbit. Never buy apparel from southern/religious universities!
Coincidentally, my alma mater’s colors are ALSO blue and white. And no pink onesies either! Although there is a pair of pink socks. But check it out, and if you order before the Husky Women win the national championship, you’ll look prescient!
http://www.huskywear.com/ADIDAS_All_Over_UCONN_Huskies_Infant_Onesie_p/adidasalloveronesie.htm
It’s only fair to let her grow up hetero and then, if she chooses, become a lesbian when she’s old enough.
How hard can this be? A striking blue-and-white onesie with the Wildcats logo emblazoned above the phrase Women’s Basketball. Way more appealing than random pink stuff. (Unfortunately I don’t think I ever got any good Scripps clothing from my sister; that might be another untapped market.)