Return to Gender 101

[LadyShea]

I probably would have Rocky-Horror-Pictured-Showed you a lot...Dammit Janet! Which goes to show that if a name had no teasability at the moment, there's no guarantee that some pop culture thing or celebrity or even natural disaster (Katrina?) won't come along and make it ripe for amusing or nasty associations.

I grew up with very teasable first and last names. In fact there are multiple things about me that lend themselves to teasing or stereotyping or ostracization. But I have found the benefits of being me, with all my weirdnesses, outweigh the stupid shit people find to tease about. For example I have had multiple people tell me that they had made snap judgments about me based on my name, or appearance, or known associates, or affiliations or whatever and they were sorry for doing that because they were wrong. For someone (let alone several someones) to make an admission like that, unsolicited, indicates to me that I really shattered their stereotypes. That's good, I think

[lisarea]

Everyone probably tries to sound out names just to make sure they don't end up with some unintentional meaning or connotation. There's nothing wrong with that. (My name, had I been a boy, was slated to be something that, if my last name were pronounced as it often was, sounded like a unintentional sentence. Once they realized that, they took the name out of the running by the time my brothers were born.)

But if people are actually avoiding giving their kids names they want to give them, or conforming to other social norms based on the fear that someone will pick on them if they don't, that's bullshit.

First, it's not going to work. Your kid is still going to get picked on. Second, it places too much power with the bullies, and it perpetuates a victim blaming mindset. Look at all the comments in the stories about that kid, for example. Look at how many people are blaming the parents for some speculative future bullying and how few are accurately placing the blame on the speculative future bullies or the system that perpetuates them. (Hint: It's because they are the system that perpetuates them.)

So where do you draw the line? If you let the prospect of bullying affect your decision about what to name your child, do you also let it affect its gender presentation, like people seem to think these parents should do? What about its actual sex and gender, like what happened to this kid? Should every parenting decision be influenced by the potential for bullying? Where do you draw the line? Their clothing, their friends, their hobbies, what they eat, what subjects they are interested in in school, their tastes in books, movies, and music?

Because there's plenty of bullying surrounding all of those, and they're all intertwined with each other. And no matter how hard you try to fit in or inoculate your kids from bullying, it's going to happen, and the more afraid they are of it, and the harder they try to placate the bullies, the more the bullies will persist.

So yeah, the most effective tactic to protect your kids from the effects of bullying is to raise them to be happy and confident and to not give a shit what assholes think.

[Janet]

We don't all have boring or completely Anglo-Saxon names. My oldest brother is Thomas Salvatore but they only threatened to name my brother Barry Guiseppe Pasquale O'Keefe so he'd have a chance to be pope. Most of us have Irish names, though really only one of the girls does. My brother Kelly was named before it became a common name for girls and, oddly, it was his middle name James that he always hated.

[erimir]

I hope they wouldn't name him Guiseppe (gwee-zep-pay), I would tease him mercilessly for having misspelled Giuseppe (joo-zep-pay).

[ZEZOZE]

we should eliminate names and go for a number system, where a 1 at the end of the numbers denotes a penis and a 0 means that human has a vagina. perhaps we could have a country indicator at the beginning of the numbers?

from now on i want to be known as CND1111.

welcome to the beige new world.

[BrotherMan]

[Vivisectus]

Hahaha silly merkins - Kelly is not an irish first name. Its a family name.

[ceptimus]

Here's a sexist image for everyone to rage over.

[LadyShea]

That's actually pretty funny because my dad is just like the guy in it. To be fair he can't really distinguish color well due to some vision problem. Like he has a hard time with black vs. brown

[lisarea]

IS THAT GUY WEARING A POLO SHIRT?

It looks like a regular t-shirt, but it might be a polo shirt!

Seriously, though, what should we rage over? If you tell me, I will try.

[LadyShea]

We should be raging that men are simpletons when it comes to color.

[maddog]

Some of those color things are just wrong. No way is the one called "fern" anything like a true fern color. The last blue that they call green is really blue; not even a guy would make that mistake. Plus there isn't a decent blue in the bunch of so-called "blues."

#2638

[LadyShea]

I can't find an update yet, but this couple made the news 2 years ago
Swedish parents keep 2-year-old's gender secret - The Local

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

[lisarea]

Look at how different the comments are on the Swedish site than the comments are on the other, almost identical story on US or UK sites.

Also this is a kind of interesting link* from the comments there, and it addresses the fact that people don't realize how differently they treat little girls vs. little boys, which I suspect is one of the biggest hurdles people have to understanding why this is a valuable exercise. I see a lot of people saying they treat kids the same regardless of their sex, but I don't believe them.

*Also from a heavy metal country, so they talk funny!

[LadyShea]

Thanks for the link. I was interested that they discovered they used more words in general with girls, and thinking on it, I am pretty sure I have witnessed that but didn't really note it. I am going to look for it now!

But I do remember everyone warned me that boys talk later, boys talk less, boys talk less clearly, boys have generally smaller vocabularies etc. and that hasn't been the case with Kiddo. I am pretty sure it's because we have been talking to the kid most of his waking hours his entire life. I wonder if the consensus ideas about boys and language comes from people simply speaking less to boys typically?

[lisarea]

Baby Storm's mother speaks on gender, parenting and media

This family's biggest mistake is really overestimating people. The people who went all batshit misrepresenting what they'd said and making up a bunch of stuff aren't suddenly going to start paying attention to what they're saying now. But I understand the temptation to clarify, and I think she does a really good job of it.

[Demimonde]

Okay the color thing makes me both lol and rage. Contra has a far more extensive color vocab than I do, and so looking at paint colors yesterday for the house I was all, "I like the dark goldy yellow" and he is all smug and says like it's the most obvious thing in the world, "It's ochre."

But I have my revenge because he doesn't know architectural terms for shit.

Now it is worthy of real rage because it is one of those things that are considered feminine and as an artistic kid he was brutally teased for it, and to an extent is made him a black sheep to his stepdad. Then he grew to six and a half feet and people stfu. To him anyway. But he did have a friend of a friend tell some kinda homophobic joke were the punchline is a dad thinks his son is gay because he refers to a car as "sea foam" rather than a Chevy, and Contra tore the shit out of him. So the stereotype is there.

[livius drusus]

Is it a vintage sea foam Chevy? Because I really love that 50s palette.

[Demimonde]

Yeah, the '57 Chevy was most popular in Sea Foam and I only learned that because there was a bitchin Barbie car of that I got instead of the A Team Van that I wanted. Bro got that,

I love that palate too and am thinking of using it in my kitchen floor. I want to paint a checkerboard of sea foam and cream.

[livius drusus]

Cute! You'll have to get some of those vintage Easter egg-colored appliances to go with, something manageable like a stand mixer.

[Ymir's blood]

I am annoyed that 'Bleached Bone' and 'Rotting Flesh' aren't among the colors on that chart. Those are actual paint colors I own by the way. Even more annoying is that it doesn't list 'mauve' because I like that word so much. mauve mauve mauve

[livius drusus]

I like puce because it's named after a flea.

[Ymir's blood]

That is an interesting color. I could use it for shading magenta.

[Angakuk]

So, there are these babies in a newborn nursery and baby #1 starts talking (in baby talk, but I will translate) to baby #2.

Baby #1: Hey baby, are you a boy or a girl.

Baby #2: I don't know, let me check (baby #2 looks under the blanket). I'm a girl. What are you?

Baby #1: I don't know, let me check (baby #1 looks under the blanket). I'm a boy.

Baby #3: Hey, what are you babies talking about?

Baby #2: We are talking about whether we are boy or girl babies. What are you.

Baby #3: I don't know, let me check (baby #3 looks under the blanket, comes up with a confused expression and looks again). I still don't know. What do yellow booties mean?

[lisarea]

There is some truth, though, to women generally having better color perception because they have two X chromosomes, which is where color perception is coded. And men, only having one, are more likely to have color blindness. So if the point is that, on the aggregate, women have better color perception than men do, that's no more offensive than saying that men, on the aggregate, are larger than women. It's just a thing. It is more than a little dumb when people take broad demographic data like that and try to apply it on an individual level, because traits like that are not nearly as expressed as they usually seem to think. That is, even if there's a significant trend over a broad population, in a lot of cases, applying it to individuals still makes you wrong about half the time. That's just people not understanding statistics, though.

It also isn't necessarily offensive to say that women, on the aggregate, are more socialized to perceive slight color differences than men are, and that men are often socialized NOT to perceive or at least not to let on that they perceive subtle color variations. That is also true. Acknowledging that isn't necessarily an endorsement, so that's not offensive on its own either.

It doesn't get actually offensive until you start to drill down to turning that into an insult, as in when it's framed as being a feminine trait, and thus trivial or inferior and deserving of ridicule when men do it.