The big gender debate

SassyB - 6 Sep 17

I don’t do controversy or provocation very well so forgive me if this offends anyone – that’s not the intention at all – but I’m going to talk about gender. Or the fashion for a lack of, so it seems.

The past few weeks my Facebook feed, Twitter and the internet in general has been full up with what appears to be the words-du-jour: gender neutral. (Yes I know, cookies. Shows you the kind of articles I read online.) You just have to Google the words gender neutral to be hit with a barrage of stories, including the most recent one that prompted me, the ultimate fence-sitter, to post a comment online – John  Lewis and it’s new gender neutral range.

I get it, I really do. Nothing bugs me more than walking into a shop and being met with a wall of pink for the girls and a wall of blue for the boys. I often get sick of mostly only having a choice of the same prints too – monsters, cars, fire engines or robots – but then I love a good dinosaur and digger so I can’t complain too much. I really hate baby pink and neon pink, diamantes, and bunnies and unicorns and cute slogans on girl’s clothes… you catch my drift. But it’s not the clothes themselves I have a problem with, it’s the perception that those colours and prints are meant for those sexes and it’s all the rubbish that goes with it.

For example, when I went to buy my little boy a toy sweeping brush recently I found it in a pink corner of the shop alongside the dolls, the play ovens and the toy hoovers – pink being perceived as a girls colour, of course, and therefore the connotation is that all toys to do with the chores and babies are only for girls. (The brush, incidentally, is also pink but he couldn’t care less. He can sweep until his heart’s content now without almost wiping me out with a full-sized one.) It’s THAT which really gets my goat.

John Lewis introducing gender neutral clothing is as much a step in the right direction as it is a bit of step to one side. Putting dinosaurs on a dress doesn’t mean we’re any closer to society finding it acceptable for a boy to wear it, sadly. Labelling clothes for boys and for girls doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll catch little Johnny and little Jane in the same outfit at nursery any time soon. To my mind, putting clothes in their own section of a shop, with their own special labels doesn’t normalise being gender neutral, it makes it into a ‘thing.’ Surely if you’re raising a child to be gender neutral, you don’t need a dedicated clothing line. You’d just take them into a shop, pick whatever you/they want from whatever part of the shop you/they want to get it from and buy it. If they don’t know or don’t care what’s meant for a boy or what’s meant for a girl – why does it even matter? We shouldn’t be getting hung up on ‘forcing’ gender (or not, as the case may be) on our children; we should be more concerned about ‘forcing’ our perceptions on them. Tackle that and, suddenly, it won’t be newsworthy if a little girl wears a t-shirt that says “future astronaut” instead of “princess”.

To a small child, a toy is just a toy. A piece of clothing is just a piece of clothing. A colour is just a colour. There are no perceptions around it until they grow up and start to be influenced by external sources – adults, friends, the media etc. What they see and what they hear will play a part in shaping who they want to be. That’s why we must always show them the best of ourselves; show them understanding, compassion and empathy. Just show them that it’s ok to be whatever and whoever they want to be.

I feel strongly enough about letting a kid be a kid to be writing a blog about it. But I’m also proud to say I have a little boy. Anatomically and physically, he was born a male and so we are raising him as one. If he’s a little boy that picks out a princess dress to wear for the day, then so be it. I won’t be making a big deal out of it. And until he can tell us he feels otherwise (and believe me, we’d never love him any less) then we will continue to treat him as a him. So maybe we could dial down the gender neutral stuff and just teach tolerance. Then at least we’re all safe in the knowledge that, boy, girl or otherwise, we’re raising decent human beings.

SassyB

Mum to one and step-mum to another, working and living in the Midlands. I used to write about other people, now I'm trying my hand at writing about myself. Pretty much only had a baby so I could dress someone up in a costume at least once a week...

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