Boys Will Be Boys Read online

  If genitals and chromosomes and gender identity are essentially non-reliant on each other (even if they still often work in tandem), how in the heck can they be used as a blithe explanation when boys behave badly? It isn’t the state of being a boy that prompts aggressive or sometimes criminal behaviour, because there’s no such thing as a universal boy. When people chuckle and dismiss bullying or aggression as a simple case of ‘boys being boys’, they’re not only maintaining a particularly one-dimensional idea of laddish masculinity, they’re also diminishing the authenticity of boys who cannot or will not perform this version of boyhood.

  After all, what happens to the boy who prefers glitter to guns?

  Somewhere around the thirtieth week of my pregnancy, I found myself sitting in a throng of people at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, all of us waiting to be seen by a midwife for a routine check-up. My phone’s battery was about to die (a common theme in my life, as anyone who knows me will confirm), so I sat on the floor against one of the walls and plugged it in to charge. In front of me, a heavily pregnant woman perched on one of the hard chairs and chatted with her mother while a young toddler played at her feet. As people in waiting rooms sometimes tend to do, we started making small talk. The pregnant woman told me when her baby was due, her daughter’s name and age—the usual kind of pleasant chitchat. The child’s hair had evidently only established any kind of presence recently, but her mother had grabbed what she could of it and fashioned it into a spout at the top of her head, secured in place with a glittery band. I made a polite comment about how her follicles seemed to be doing well and her mother winced.

  ‘I hate it!’ she moaned. ‘I can’t wait for it to grow longer!’

  ‘Why?’ I asked, genuinely bemused.

  ‘Because everyone always calls her a boy!’

  ‘Oh, well that’s alright. Who cares what everyone else thinks?’ I replied.

  The woman murmured something non-committal and turned her attention back to her mother. At her feet, her daughter spun in circles and stuck a finger up her nose. Clearly the conversation was over.

  Since becoming a parent myself, the paranoia some people feel about how others perceive their child’s gender has become even more obvious—and perplexing—to me. The old hair-spout trick seems a fairly common one, and although there are bound to be some children rocking the geyser because it’s the most convenient way to keep hair out of their eyes, there are surely others wrestled into it because it seems less humiliating than wearing a t-shirt that screams, I’M A GIRL, DAMN IT.

  I’ve never understood the need to make sure the world approves of how your children are dressed or what gender they appear to be ‘correctly’ inhabiting. As a child, I was inexorably drawn to what people would consider stereotypical expressions of femininity (pink is still my favourite colour), but as a stocky, gap-toothed, freckle-faced nerd, I also felt deeply isolated from the kind of girlhood I aspired to. Did ‘correctly’ dressing as a girl make childhood any easier for me? I wouldn’t say so.

  As an adult, my sensibilities are ever changing. Although I’m a cis woman, my self-expression isn’t dictated by any arbitrary rules related to what that’s ‘supposed’ to look like or be. Some days I feel like dressing androgynously. Other days I feel more explicitly masculine. I delight in femininity. Being able to freely explore my identity through aesthetic and expressive play is a joy. Why on earth would we seek to deny that to children, the very people for whom play was not only invented but who are its most ingenious architects?

  More particularly, as our awareness of trans and gender non-conforming identities grows, it seems less plausible or forgivable to adhere to such doctrinal faith about what girls and boys (and everyone in between and on the outsides of those basic definitions) ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ look like. If exploring different aesthetic expressions and behaviours is difficult for cis people, imagine how much more of a challenge it is for trans and gender-diverse people whose lives and safety are quite often on the line?

  Until such time as I discover otherwise, I have a son. I have always tried to be conscious of not restricting him to the accepted uniform of boyhood, which is to say his wardrobe features lots of different clothes and colours as well as sparkles and glitter and other things that capture the attention of babies with a fondness for shiny things. And yet I’ve found that even when he’s wearing clothes considered traditionally masculine, people are still liable to act confused over ‘what’ he is. Often they apologise if they hear me refer to him as a he, but a woman once became mildly cross with me over it. ‘But he’s wearing pink!’ she exclaimed. ‘So he is,’ I replied.

  Shortly after my son turned one, I asked a man on the street to take a photo of us together. FJ was swathed in a yellow parka and tucked into his stroller underneath a yellow blanket. Our street photographer fretted that he couldn’t see the baby’s face properly, and came closer to check if it was a ‘he or a she’.

  ‘Ah!’ he announced. ‘It’s a she!’

  I didn’t try to correct him, because what does it matter? In some ways, I think I’m even trying to make the negative gender stereotyping that might come from being read as a girl work in his and my favour. By being coded this way, I hope that he’ll be exposed to a kind of soft and gentle nurturing that might otherwise be withheld from him by people eager to bounce him on their knee or tell him to stop crying and act like a big boy. Still, I found this incident especially curious because the only thing visible was my son’s face amid a literal sea of functional yellow fabric. I can only surmise the assumption was made because he has long eyelashes and quite soft features, and our general stereotypes of femininity are so deeply ingrained that these things automatically denote ‘female’ in our minds.

  I guess this is why some people become so irate about the need to put children in clothes that make it easy to identify their gender. But this anxiety about dressing our kids ‘appropriately’ to reflect their respective genitals isn’t just totally bonkers, it’s also extremely recent in terms of historical practice. From about midway through the sixteenth century to the early 1900s, children pretty much all wore the same thing: dresses. The long gowns of infancy gave way to smocks for both sexes, with the boys only transitioning to breeches or trousers at the age of six or seven. Remarkably, the world wasn’t knocked off its axis by the sight of a boy child in a dress, because it turns out the integrity of the earth’s gravitational pull isn’t as fragile as twenty-first-century masculinity.

  Even more fascinating is the discovery that the colour themes modern society traditionally associates with masculinity and femininity are completely sideways. That is to say, when children’s fashion ditched generic white for pink and blue, it wasn’t to establish girls as the former and boys as the latter—it was the other way around. Pink, being a lighter shade of red, was associated with Mars, the god of war, so it was thought to be an appropriate colour for boys. (Guns!) Blue was more commonly associated with Venus and the Madonna (you’ll notice historic works of art always depict Our Lady’s veil as being a light blue), so it was assigned to girls. (Glitter!) The trade publication Infants’ and Children’s Wear Review even reiterated in 1916, ‘The generally accepted rule is pink for the boy and blue for the girl.’ In 1918, the Women’s Journal confirmed, ‘That pink being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.’

  The delegation of pink for boys and blue for girls began to change gradually around the mid-twentieth century. A popular (if unproven) theory holds that the reversal solidified in Nazi Germany when Adolph Hitler ordered that gay prisoners sent to concentration camps be forced to wear a pink triangle. Whether or not this caused the gender associations we have today or merely hurtled them along is unclear. Regardless, by the 1950s the new order was understood: pink for girls and blue for boys. In 1959, the New York Times reported one department store buyer for the infant wear section as saying, ‘A mother will allow her girl
to wear blue, but daddy will never permit his son to wear pink.’ Because LOL #nohomo!

  We’ve moved on a lot from the post-war period of petticoats and undershirts, but mass cultural anxiety about the clothes we dress our children in seems to persist. It’s hard to say which one makes parents more fearful—their son being confused for a girl, or their daughter being confused for a boy. Society might have its own insecurity and inherent misogyny, femmephobia and queerphobia to answer to for that, but it’s definitely an insecurity that has been happily seized on by capitalist forces.

  One of the most common observations made by parents who choose not to find out or divulge what their unborn child’s genitalia looks like is that some of their friends and family get frustrated—even angry—because it makes it difficult to know what to buy for gifts. Leaving aside for a moment the absurdity of how society’s devotion to gendering children is defended as a means of knowing how to appropriately spend money, the idea that our options become limited without proper signposting is just silly.

  At least, it should be considered silly. But to wander through the children’s clothes aisles in any high street shop or department store is to learn a swift lesson in both gender stereotyping and anger management. The most noticeable thing is the distinction of gender according to colour. The ‘girl’ section bursts with pinks, yellows, purples and glitter (tutus! ruffles! heels!), while the ‘boy’ section wades through a more muted palette of dark blues, black, red, khaki and beige beige beige. What the boys’ section lacks in vibrancy, though, it more than makes up for in affirmations and positive reinforcement. T-shirts and jumpers scream words and slogans like AWESOME, COOL, FUTURE SUPERHERO AND LITTLE BUT LOUD. Conversely, girls’ clothes are emblazoned with descriptions like CUTE, STAY HAPPY and GORGEOUS. Because never forget that boys are defined by how impressive they are while girls are defined by how impressive they look. That’s before we even get into the weirdness of onesies and rompers declaring I’M A BOOB MAN AND DADDY’S LITTLE PRINCESS.

  One of the (many) reasons my partner and I chose not to reveal whether our unborn baby had an innie or an outie was because I couldn’t stand the thought of being gifted the very rompers and t-shirts and toys from which I recoil whenever I head to the children’s department of any store. I figured it was going to be tricky enough to raise a boy in an environment that prized masculinity and whiteness above all else—it was my job to disrupt that dynamic, not facilitate it.

  It seems like such a small form of protest to make, but it’s incredible how irate it makes people. In 2017, I posted a photograph to Instagram to capture an ongoing small act of resistance in my local Kmart. Ever since my son was born, I’ve been making it my mission to swap the t-shirts that yell BRAVE & STRONG from the boys’ aisle into the girls’ one, and doing the reverse with shirts emblazoned with HAPPY and PEACE. When I shared an image of one of these disruptions on my Facebook page, some people grew angry. These things are just clothes, they yelled. They don’t mean anything! The kids don’t even know they’re wearing them, so what’s the bloody big deal?

  That’s true. Babies and children can’t read the slogans on the clothes we dress them in. But the people meeting, playing with or handling those babies can. And clothes that reinforce stereotypes of brilliance in boys and aesthetics in girls contribute insidiously to the general conditioning to which we’ve all been subjected that not only teaches us certain traits are innate to gender, but instructs us to treat people differently based on how we code them.

  Most people probably believe they don’t modify their behaviour when it comes to the specifically gendered treatment of children. (We can only guess whether they believe they modify their behaviour when it comes to the specifically gendered treatment of adults, but I’d wager they consider themselves fault-free in that area too. The wage gap would like to register its disagreement.) Despite what we may all believe about our unique perspectives and approach to child rearing, most people respond without question to the social conditioning that codifies gender as a binary expression of distinct traits. One of the first experiments to assess the treatment of gender was conducted in 1975, when three neuro-scientists, Carol A. Seavey, Phyllis A. Katz and Sue Rosenberg Zalk, tested the responses of forty-two men and women (all of them non-parents) when presented with a three-month-old baby. The paper was titled ‘Baby X: The effect of gender labels on adult responses to infants’, and it’s widely recognised as being the precursor to a series of similar studies exploring gender and socialisation.

  In Seavey et al.’s study, Baby X was dressed in yellow and accompanied by three toys: a football, a doll and a teething ring. Participants were split into three groups and were observed interacting with the baby and the toys. Those who were told the baby was a boy were more likely to offer it the football or teething ring. Those who were told it was a girl overwhelmingly interacted using the doll. Where there was no gender descriptor alongside a now-neutral baby, men favoured the teething ring while women favoured the doll.

  The responses to Girl Baby and Boy Baby are fairly expected and yield few insights that would astonish us today. But those presented with Neutral Baby (or ‘Baby X’) proved to be the most interesting. When presented with no gender label at all, the majority of participants decided the baby was a boy. Curiously, women were even more likely than men to make this judgment, which perhaps speaks to how successfully patriarchy has conditioned women to assume a narrative backseat (but is vaguely reassuring at the same time, given that they mostly reached for the doll). It’s easy for us to imagine that something important (like a science experiment) would involve a boy, because (as I look at later in ‘Girls on film’) the most important stories always involve boys. At least, that’s what we learn from a very young age. If the default version of ‘human’ is ‘white male’, a prodigal sun with peripheral planets of Other orbiting around it from now until eternity, of course we assume the default identity of characters or heroes or small humans dressed in anything other than pink would be ‘boy’.

  Not all the adults assessing Baby X identified the child as a boy, but regardless of how they assessed the baby’s gender, the participants all said they ‘could tell by the strength of the grip, by the lack of hair, or by how round and soft [the baby] was, whether it was a boy or a girl’.

  Fascinating, isn’t it? That we are so attuned to the lessons of social and gender conditioning that we could (and frequently do) assign sex based on arbitrary indicators. A fuller head of hair, a pretty smile, strong limbs, a penchant for rough and tumble playtime—all these things and more are unconsciously absorbed as messages that enable us to code gender in children, and in turn teach them to code it in themselves. Less fascinating and more worrying is how infants respond. As Jo B. Paoletti wrote in Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America, ‘Multiple studies between 1975 and the mid-80s established that children understand and can apply gender stereotypes well before they reach their third birthday.’

  As it turned out, there was only one baby used in the Baby X experiment. She had a hell of a grip, though.

  Yeah, but those are forty-year-old studies! I hear you shout. Find something recent!

  OKAY, I WILL.

  In mid-2017, the BBC Stories program replicated elements of the Baby X experiment when it invited participants to spend some time in a toy room with two babies—a girl and a boy—who had been secretly dressed in clothes typically associated with each other’s gender. Adults were invited to spend some time playing with one baby then the other while a camera recorded their responses. Overwhelmingly, subjects not only took a gender cue from the colour of the baby’s clothes, they also adapted their playing style to match. When the baby was perceived to be a girl, participants were more likely to explore gentle activities focused on nurture and care. They selected dolls and soft animals and minimised their physical movements with the baby. Where they coded the baby as a boy, they were more rambunctious and jocular. They selected ‘active’ toys that would stimulate the child’
s motor functions and coordination. Afterwards, many of the participants expressed dismay and disappointment that they had conformed so willingly, with at least one participant talking about how they pride themselves on taking a consciously non-gendered approach to children.

  I guess you could consider this nature versus nurture as well. As an animal species, we are naturally very good at doing what we’re told; it takes a lot of work to overcome a conditioning that began before we even left the uterus. But we should never grow so comfortable with our conscious brains that we start to assume our unconscious ones have ceased to exist.

  As to the consequences of the British experiment, I’m sure it comes as no surprise to learn that neither baby seemed particularly perturbed by the things they were being given to explore, primarily because babies are essentially advanced computer programs sent here from outer space to download everything they can about Earth and its people, and they haven’t yet learned to be extremely fragile and pathetic about whether or not wearing skinny jeans makes them gay.

  I’m not saying that inflicting gender stereotypes on babies is bad. I’m saying that inflicting gender stereotypes on babies is one of the worst things we can do to inhibit their natural development; it carries potentially devastating consequences that are wholly avoidable; and it is, above all, extremely fucking lazy and gross.

  But why are you being so mean and parent-shamey, you ugly feminazi? I’ll tell you why. Because a recent study showed that, from the age of six onwards, children were more likely to assume natural intelligence and superiority in men rather than in women. Meanwhile, separate studies confirm that more pre-pubescent girls than ever are developing insecurities about their bodies and the way they look. A 2009 study from the University of Central Florida found that half of American girls aged between three and six think they’re fat—and trust me, these girls haven’t yet discovered the body positivity movement. A BBC Two documentary staged an experiment with a primary school on the Isle of Wight in which a class of twenty-three seven-year-olds and their teachers were challenged to go ‘gender neutral’ for a term. Testing at the start of the experiment revealed worrying results, according to an article written by Antonia Hoyle for the Telegraph (‘What happened when a primary school went gender-neutral’, 15 August 2017):