Amidst news of a new prenatal test that can accurately detect the fetus's sex as early as 7 weeks, USAToday ran this article:

Couples throw "reveal parties" to divulge unborn baby's gender

First, an admission: we chose to know -- and share -- our second child's sex in 1985, when "knowing" was still fairly rare. There were a variety of reasons, ranging from fairly rational (our four-year-old daughter was fairly adamant about her preference for a baby sister) to the truly childish (it really annoyed me that our already-arrogant OB-GYN would know something we didn't). What neither my husband nor I believed was that knowing our baby's sex would tell us much about its personality or abilities. I was a tomboy who had truly expected to grow up to be a cowboy; he was a talented pianist with a degree in theater. Moreover, I had already been studying gender and sexuality for nearly a decade, and had a pretty good understanding of the complexities of gender identity. So I don't believe that everyone who throws a reveal party is essentializing their unborn child or longing for a return to the Mad Men era.

But I wonder. When all you know is your child's sex, based on a test that reports it only as either M or F, what do you actually know? Consider:

• some babies are born with ambiguous genitalia, which may or may not agree with the test results 
  
• knowing an individual's sex predicts nearly nothing about them as individuals 
  
• sex is not gender is not sexual orientation 
  

I am pretty sure I would still be inclined to "find out" if I were pregnant today. After all, I was the sneaky kid who ferreted out the hidden Christmas presents and carefully unwrapped (and re-wrapped) them. I'd probably share the news with friends and family. I might even throw a "reveal party", because I LOVE parties. But I would still let my son be a person first and foremost.

Whew! A few months ago I was interviewed by Jeanne Maglaty of Smithsonian Magazine online. It promptly fell off my radar (I'm a professor! It happens all the time.) and suddenly it was online last Friday. I posted it to me friends on Facebook and Twitter, who posted it to their friends, who posted it to their friends and suddenly it's everywhere I look. Exciting and scary.

Many of the bloggers who have picked it up have made insightful comments and rather than sprinkle the answers all over the 'net, I thought I would try to respond here. If you have additional questions, post or email them. I am in the final month of the semester -- AKA Grading Hell - but I will try to answer as many as possible.

UNC Sociologist Philip Cohen asks the $64,000 question:

"So, what would a gay 5-year-old in 1884 have done?"

That's a great question, and one that I was only able to raise -- and not to answer definitively -- in the book. My guess is:

• gay children still felt "different" as they gained awareness of cultural norms and expectations
• this sense of difference was mitigated and probably delayed because early childhood culture was less gender binary than it is today. In the baby books I examined, baby dolls were common gifts for both boys and girls at their first Christmas or birthday.
• the transition to boy clothing and the first haircut might have been more jarring for boys who were comfortable in feminized "baby"styles.

I am hoping this first serious foray into the topic will inspire others to examine this question. I am dying to see what historical clinical literature might reveal, for example.

Now that the manuscript is out of my hands, I an eagerly turning to my next project. On April 22, I'll be in San Antonio, Texas to give a paper at the Popular Culture Association conference. The title is "Pink Boys and Tomgirls: Raising Gender Variant Boys in the Twenty-first Century", and it's giving me a chance to delve more deeply into a phenomenon that is emerging so fast I couldn't cover it adequately in the book. here's the abstract, for starters (sorry, it's a tad jargon-y):



For the last twenty-five years, parents who prefer neutral or androgynous styles for their children have had very few options in the retail market. How do these gender rules effect children who do not conform to dominant gender expectations, including not only the 1 child in 100 who is born intersex, or the 2-10% (depending on your sources) who will be sexually attracted to partners of their own sex, but all the girls who dislike pink and the boys who want to play princess? My own research strongly argues that clothing does not “make the man” when it comes to babies and toddlers; there is no evidence whatsoever that homosexuality is any more or less prevalent now than it was when boys wore dresses until they were five, or that lesbianism spiked among the first generation of girls to wear pants. But that does not mean that children between one and six may not use clothing to help explore and express what their biological sex in the cultural landscape into which they were born.  In this presentation I will offer an overview of this emerging trend and discuss its connection to the current system of gender binaries in children’s clothing, in the context of contemporary psychological thought. I will place special emphasis on the appearance of blogs and organizations that provide support to parents with “gender non-conforming” or “gender variant” boys.

I have collected some resources in my Zotero library, and will be working through the presentation here. Stay tuned!

I just got a great email from commenter Andi, AKA "Feministjerk" (no, he really isn't!). He offered an expansion of his theory that the connection between pink and femininity is the result of post-World War II capitalism and branding. I think he's partially right, but one of the arguments I make in the book is that children themselves are actors in the process, and any theory that does not take children into consideration as consumers is going to be incomplete. The more adults have listened to -- and marketed to-- children, the more clothing for children under the age of six has become gendered. The typical 4-year-old is about the most ardent believer in gender stereotypes you can find, because that is where they are developmentally. Thus the princess craziness, for example. Disney knows 3-6 year-old girls.

As infants grow into toddlers, they become active participants in the gender binary fashion show, much to the amusement, chagrin or dismay of their parents. For boys and girls whose gender identity generally conforms to their biological sex, this participation appears likely to be enthusiastic embrace. These are the girls who insist on wearing nothing but pink and prefer dresses to any form of pants, and the boys who clamor for buzz-cuts and ubiquitous sports imagery. One of the most puzzling questions raised by the gendered clothing of the last generation is, “What about the others?” What about tomboys, the little girls who for decades could wear plain girls’ styles or their brother’s hand-me-downs without appearing out of the mainstream? (In a study of college age women in the early 1970s, 78% described themselves as “tomboys” as children, though the age to which they referred was unclear.) What about the one person in 100 classified as “intersex”, whose body differs from standard male or female and whose sense of identity may not conform to the gender chosen for them by their parents? What about boys who, like tomboys, feel more comfortable in the clothing of the other sex, but for whom the English language has no positive term? Certainly, one of the outcomes of a strong gender binary in children’s clothing is the lack of expressive options for children whose identities may be more fluid or contrary to stereotyped images of masculinity and femininity.