To get really angry about gender stereotyping?

[exBrightonBell]

I'm 15 weeks pregnant and am now in the process of letting everyone know that I am expecting. AIBU to get really cross when people ask "are you going to find out the gender" and then immediately say things like - how will you know what colour to decorate the nursery, or, how will you know what colour clothes to buy? Why does the gender of my baby affect what colour choices I make? Why should we all be forced to conform to the inane stereotype of blue for boys and pink for girls?!

YANBU. It's very annoying. As for those people who simply shrug and say well don't dress DCs just in blue or pink, its not that simple. I went online to buy DS (18mo) a coat recently and all I could find for the boys were either grey or navy. So I looked at the girls ones and while they had a greater colour scheme they were all definitely girly. There's not a lot of unisex stuff out there.

hobbit - check out Polarn O Pyret - they have a huge unisex range going up to 12. Gawd bless the Swedes.

Grey and navy are unisex - just rather boring if that's really the only options.

Gap used to do lovely prints and stripes in a lot of different items, in non-stereotypical colourways, but I looked for some stuff in the recent sale for a friend who's about to give birth, and it's gone downhill ? tons of cars, dinosaurs etc in the boys' section and flowery sparkly princess rubbish for girls. Depressing. Polarn O Pyret looks great though.

They are fabulous . If I were made of money I would buy everything there.

But I'm not so I've just bought a pink cat dress from Debenhams for £4 . There's a limit to the amount of battles I can take at 7am.

YANBU. Mindless and automatic stereotyping would annoy me too :)

Sex is biological, gender a social identity that your child won't discover entirely until later. So if you want to annoy them back, you could say that.

I'm preg with our first and am perhaps fortunate that people whose opinions we'd care about, who are likely to buy gifts, know us well enough to know we wouldn't do anything differently if we did know and would view them oddly if they felt any need to inundate us with pink or blue. We don't, it wasn't apparent at the 20-week scan.

If people you know do think this matters, I'd go for bemusment, laughter or strong expression of a preference for yellow or red. Don't take them too seriously - the practice will be valuable later when I imagine this will get all the more relentlessly annoying.

Florie - thanks for confirming what I suspected all along. Everyone really is out to get me...

:o :o

I saw a yellow toy toaster today, you'll be overjoyed to hear!

Or is that also indicative of a restrictive society? A child's only aspiration the heating up of bread!

Go for pink, the last thing you want is a boy. They grow up to be men and 95% of all men are b###ards.

Happy new year

I have a friend who has a 4mth old boy, with a gender neutral name. She gets really pissed off at people who say "aw isnt she cute"..

Well dont dress your child in a pink t-shirt then...

But I really do not get all the fuss about pink and blue. My granddaughter lives in a sea of pink, and loves it. She is also one of the most boisterous girls I have ever known, and not in the least bit delicate or girly.

Pink are blue are just colours...

Florie I wish my boys would aspire to make toast- pink toaster or blue, I'd be happy any old way....:D

Is it just me that doesn't really care what the hell my kids dress in?

I think if I had girls, however, I'd be very depressed in clothes shops. Everything is ferociously feminised. Even the jeans are 'bootcut' (ffs) and the tops are tighter cut (horrible if you think about it- female bodies must be on show more. Urk). Everything has to have some horrible 'angel' slogan on it or a sparkly butterfly, lest the wearer forget she is a LOVELY PRETTY LITTLE GIRL. Bah.

My niece just got a pink miniature keyboard for Christmas. Never saw an adult female musician playing on one of those. Come to think of it not many women dress in sparkly pink clothing either. What the hell is it that makes manufacturers (and presumably parents) so obsessed with genderising the hell out of kids?

YANBU. But its better to ignore and go your own way. There are a lot more of these annoyances to come!

I get a lot of DC's clothes from DPAM which do lovely bright clothes. La Redoute is good too (but they hound you for months with advertising) and H&M.

Pink are blue are just colours...
yes - its the way they get used differently that really bugs people. The tighter, thinner pink t-shirts. The pink 'housewares'. Too much 'princess' and 'angel' stuff (a bit is OK, too much can get bleurgh). 'Girly' shoes being much less practical than 'boy' shoes - its OK if you've got a DD like mine who doesn't care which rack or aisle we buy from if she likes it, and you don't have silly friends or relations.

I've got one of each and we are a (as I say in my best Rumpole of the Bailey voice) a "non gender stereotyped household"...... My response to "you can choose the colour of the room...." was "Do people really do that? Seems like a waste of time and money to me...."
It was non-confrontational and injected a bit of sense into an annoying assumption/tradition/whatever you choose to call it.

And Squeakytoy....our five year old boy has long blond hair and is often mistaken for a girl, we don't get annoyed, and if it's a passing person that we're not likely to see again, don't even bother to correct them. Like you say.....if ya can't hack it.....don't do it.
He knows he's a boy, even though he does look like Brigitte Bardot (stealth boast) and is more than happy to explain to other children or adults "I am a boy, I just have long hair."

And you're all right when you say that this polarisation has gotten worse in recent years. I find it creepy, which is why we're trying to get our two to tread a middle path for as long as we can. I figure if they don't get so inundated with these odious messages in their formative years, they might be OK.

Have to agree 100% with squeakytoy on this.

YANBU!

I saw some BAD parenting in Tesco relating to this subject.

There's me, having an internal laugh at the one direction calendar in the reduced calendar section, full of calendars. Cue 10 (ish) year old lad wandering over, having a nosey at some calendars. Mother comes over shouting "what are you looking at those for? Boys don't use calendars, only girls do! Sometimes I think you should have been born a girl!" then dragged the boy away.

WTF? Only women are allowed to know the date? Only women have appointments to keep? What?

Pink and blue are not just colours. Not any more. They have become a tool for marketers, a way of brain-washing, and are causing gender differences to become over-exaggerated to the detriment of all, but especially to girls. It's not JUST the colours. But they play a big part.

Don't buy pink things then.
It's not that hard.
When the manufacturers/retailers see that they are not turning over a profit they will stop making them.
As it is they must be making a profit which suggests there is a market for them.

Well, it's easy to say that. I don't buy many pink things. We can't stop other people from doing it.

Im sure it wont be too long before there is a post along the lines of, "I cant believe somebody thought my beautiful ds was a girl just because he was wearing a pretty pink dress, how ignorant."