"We can know the baby's sex but not its gender"

[Rumplestrumpet]

Hi all, I'm feeling a bit dim on this but know it's a sensitive subject so didn't want to ask IRL ....

I was chatting to a colleague about her pregnancy and asked if she knows whether it's a boy or girl. She said she didn't want to find out because it doesn't matter. I agreed - saying of course a baby is a baby and who cares what sex it is. But she explained "Well anyway we can only know its sex, but not its gender". Someone else nodded in agreement and I just kept quiet... But honestly I have no idea what this means.

I personally am critical of the idea that your sex has to define you, and hate the sexist stereotypes people fall for with small children ("boys will be boys" and all that nonsense). But it didn't sound like she meant this.

What would you understand by this?

Fwiw she's in her 20s and I'm an old fogey now so it may be a generational thing

[quote Ijustknowitstimetogo]don’t tell me all little girls like pink and dolls and all little boys like blue and cars because that’s a pile of crap and you know it.

Of course not. There are boys who like pink and play with dolls who don’t grow up to be gay. And vice versa. But there are patterns of behaviour and I’m talking about severe gender dysphoria or extreme gender non conformity. Not just ‘liking pink’; that means nothing.

But most severely gender variant children grow up to be gay or (less likely) transgender.

There’s lots of research on this
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18981931/

www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.632784/full[/quote]
But all you are saying is that some boys who like pink grow up straight, some grow up gay and some have gender dysphoria. So what? No-one is 'born in the wrong body' are they? Do you have the 'wrong toe nails'? Of course not. They are simply your toe nails. I utterly reject this bunkum.