All babies are boys until proven otherwise

(I'm traveling this week, so a fuller newsletter will have to wait. In the meantime, here's a small observation I have made about Gender and Babies, because I am a Mom. – Em)

My toddler was assigned female at birth. So far, they seem fine with this idea, but they are also 19 months and don't really have complex thoughts beyond, "I must insist food be given to me immediately." In a couple of years, they might decide their gender is not as assigned, and we'll love them all the same.

My wife and I have tried to give them as gender-neutral a public existence as we can. I tend to use "they/them" pronouns for them when I write about being a mom, and we try to dress them in gender-neutral clothing, too. Our feeling on this is that if they tell us, "Nah, not a girl" later on, we'll want to have photos of them as a baby that feel like them. Like, yes, we've bought them some cute, frilly dresses (especially around Christmastime, the season of the cutest and frilliest of dresses), but I like to think we'd do the same if we had had a child assigned male at birth. (Maybe not!)

Still, we do not go as far as people who raise their children in such a way as to try to remove gender from the equation entirely, at least until their child declares a gender. For one thing, this sounds exhausting; for another, in most situations in our lives in the non-digital world, using "she/her" instead of "they/them" makes everything just a little bit easier. Again, the second our child says anything to the contrary, we'll be the most embarrassingly supportive moms ever, but for now, it's just easier to say, "Oh, she just loves strawberries!" when a stranger comments on the child's prodigious strawberry intake.

What has been interesting to me is how often my baby is assumed to be a boy, unless dressed in the frilliest of dresses, and how often I feel the need to correct the people who say, "What a cute little boy!" or something. Once, at a party, I even found myself correcting a trans guy who said I had a beautiful son. I felt annoyed with myself for saying, "Well, actually..." but also, he tried to call my child by a male-coded name that is similar to their female-coded one but much, much worse, so who was really at fault here?

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I am fascinated by this baked-in assumption in our culture, and the older the child gets, the more I find myself confused by it. At 19 months, they are mostly just a cute little kid, but somewhere in the last six weeks, people suddenly started guessing they were a little girl out of nowhere, like some switch flipped. We haven't changed up the kid's style in any real way, beyond perhaps putting them in slightly more pastels for spring, but I don't know how much people determine based on that. No, at some point, the "this child is girl" switch flipped in people's brains.

I assume "All babies are assumed to be boys" is tied to some patriarchal nonsense or another, but I'm more intrigued by what, exactly, caused people to suddenly conclude my toddler is a girl. It reminds me of the earliest months of living my life out in open as a woman. For the first few months, I was largely read as "a trans woman," which led to a lot of aggressive responses (and I would include someone making a show of how nice they were to use she as aggressive), but at a certain point, I developed a better sense of style, and hormones had more time to work, and people suddenly started to she/her me all over the place. Could I explain why this happened? Not really. It wasn't like I made any extra conscious effort one day. It was just like a switch flipped. (If I had to pinpoint something, I would say it was my voicework that finally pulled everything together.)

Gender is a strange thing because it is almost entirely an internal process, but we also have to navigate an external world that aggressively tries to sort us into categories. I'm fortunate in that I present conventionally feminine and use she/her pronouns, so I just had to get the "gender math" right to get the world to notice me for who I was. If you exist outside gender conventionality in any way – and, let's face it, most of us do – then the world will try to force you back into it. To escape that prison is a constant struggle, and the more that all of us can escape it where we feel comfortable, the better.

I do think, however, we could probably start by ceasing to assume all babies are boys until proven otherwise. All babies are people to be declared later, who will develop thoughts and dreams and, yes, genders of their own in due time. The less of our own societal bullshit we can project on them, the better. And also, then, people will maybe stop assuming my baby has one of the worst boy names they could possibly have.

This week's reading music: "It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over" by Lenny Kravitz

The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published most Wednesdays, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes, which covers more recent stuff, is published every Friday. It's written by Emily St. James. If you have suggested topics, please comment (if you are a paid subscriber) or post in the paid-subscribers-only Discord.