Babies are automatically boys

lol, you never know, it takes all sorts.

x-post ... I don't suppose people actually get offended if you 'it' their pet snail...

Wouldn't it be simpler if we could just use 'it' for undetermined people and other living creatures.

WTF are we supposed to do when we're talking to our kids about snails?

People are also offended if you refer to their babies as "it" though.
"What's it's name?"
"It's a he/she, not an it!".
This also applies to dogs I've found...

I assume old books did it because of the sexism that was around. And boys were seen as better.
Genetically babies are girls and diverted to boys so you could argue it should always be she.
Books need to pick one sex to make the information easy to read. And I assume it could partially be because it differentiates from the female mother as previously said.
Either way I think it's very hard to not he/she to a baby you don't know the sex of so they have to decide one or the other....

DH on the other hand even refers to MOG as as a male. Mog is not male. I may have got irrationally annoyed at him about this. He's pretty wonderful the rest of the time.

nikkinack are you me? I do exactly the same, and love doing it even more now I have DS who loves dogs.

My dp refers to all other drivers as "he". His default is male for a lot of things, but particularly this. It really bothers me because I don't drive and I don't want dd growing up to think it's a thing men do. I now point it out to him every time. I even annoy myself but he is getting better.

I always alternated he and she when reading 'Dear Zoo' to my children, because it pissed me off that all the animals were 'he'. You have to start with he because that makes the lion, who has a mane, a he, but happily, that means the dog is a she, so you can say 'She was perfect, I kept her', at the end

I have had three children in three years, with one more imminent, and every book I have read refers to the baby as SHE. I asssumed this was to counter the evil dicks that automatically think babies should be born male or not at all.

*writing not worrying

There are genres where the default person is male but the default child is female (you can sometimes find this is medical literature for example). It strikes me that this could be because those worrying about children are more likely to be female themselves, but it could also be because babies are seen as weaker.

Great post mary.
I'm from Poland even even a dew decades ago it was blue for the girl, pink for the boy for all the wrong reasons if you ask me. Red was considered a Royal colour and full of strength so pink was for boys. Virgin Mary is/ was depicted in blues so blue/ navy blue for the girl.
I'm an atheist feminist so go figure why I left

I read somewhere that the use of "they" to mean he/she predates "he " as the default pronoun. I think "he" became widely used in the 19th century.

I wish white were still non gender specific. The amount of people who looked at my newborn daughter all in white and assumed "boy"... When questioned, they all said, "But she's not wearing any pink..."

It's to create a contrast with the mother who will be "she". I remember reading this as a disclaimer in the front of several books.

Modern typical convention is to alternate gender pronouns chapter by chapter.

Boys have not always been called boys.

Until the late 15th century the word ‘girl’ simply means a child of either sex.

Boys, where they had to be differentiated, were referred to as ‘knave girls’ .

Girls in the female sense were called ‘gay girls’.

Equally a boy could be a ‘knave child’ and a girl a ‘maiden child’.

The term ‘boy’ was reserved for servants or ‘churls’, the meaning ‘young man’ probably deriving from the latter as a pejorative term but not occurring before 1440.

Also a baby in pink today and it will be almost universally identified as a girl. Yet this is actually the opposite of the system that prevailed until quite recently. Until well into the 20th century, toddlers who were not dressed in a non-gender-specific white, were put in pink for boys and blue for girls.

The Sunday Sentinel noted in March 1914: “Use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”

Four years later, in June 1918, the US magazine Ladies’ Home Journal registered that there was some confusion but added:

“… the generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

I think it's changing slowly. We've had a couple of books using 'her' for a baby. I'm so conditioned it made me look twice! And I'm a feminist

stormybird -Yup.

IME it's a very British thing to view cats as "she". Never heard it anywhere else.

It seems odd to me, because, given prevailing gender stereotypes, it is dogs who should be seen as feminine (as they are social and made of empathy) and cats as masculine (as they are ...not).

Penguins is that book Copycat? DD's father was rather thrown by it too. Because dogs are boys and cats are girls, apparently.

It is from an old grammatical rule that he is the default pronoun (and "she" isn't), but of course that's intimately connected to wider patriarchal structures. It's surprisingly hard to break, though - I have caught myself using it as a default and have already noticed DD applying male pronouns and appelations to neutral objects ("hello Mr train, hello Mr car" )

Yes. "they" is grammatically incorrect and therefore a bit jarring, but I think it's our best alternative. It's a word that already exists, and people understand what is meant by it in context ("he or she").

And using an equal mix of "he" and "she" when we're describing hypothetical situations.

It's the way everything was until relatively recently I think?

It's interesting at work that occasionally someone will refer to a person as "he" when it could be a man or a woman and it's terribly jarring, which goes to show that we have moved the language away from "man as default" quite a lot.

Personally I am quite comfortable with them / they although I understand very well why so many people don't like it. It we're going to move away from male as default we will need to evolve a generally accepted, non cumbersome (he or she is ridiculous and painful and the man comes first anyway with the woman as the added on afterthought to appease ) so it'll be interesting to see where we end up.