Why is it so hard to call my daughter's soft toy monkey 'she'?

[wem]

I've become aware of the general tendency to call all non-gendered toys 'he' (i.e. anything other than dolls or babies dressed in pink), so when dd1 decided her monkey was a girl I've been trying my hardest to call it she, but 'he' slips out quite often. And I've really noticed that every single person who interacts with dd1 about her monkey (she takes it everywhere) says he. So it's fighting a losing battle as dd1 will then call it he anyway, even though she says it's a girl. Very confusing for her I would have thought.

It's a perfect example of the default being male, and female being 'other'. When I corrected one of my friends (only because dd1 was there) and said, 'it's a she', she said 'why?', as if there has to be a reason for the monkey to be female.

It's mostly pissing me of that even I can't stick to it. This stuff is really ingrained.

^^^^^^^6Wrong thing quoted, I meant whoever was saying about the lego house.

My dd calls everything 'she'. All cuddly toys, all book characters. She is 4. She gets quite upset if you try to reassign gender. I don't think it is a bad thing at this age. She will get enough male dominance in every day life when she is older. I personally think it is the first step to her seeing herself as thoroughly equal in all possible ways and I intend to build upon it.

I had a female doll. I called her Tony Hart and didn't really think about her/his gender. I'm wondering if it was because she had short hair, as the doll I had with long blonde hair was called Valerie and was very girly.

All of my teddies were female - Lucy, Snowy, Tina and Debbie. As was my fox, Charlotte-Michelle. I think most toys were female apart from Humpty and Ken.

Mumtotheboy - yes you are right Barbie does kick ass at the end of Toy Story 3. But still she her identity is as a sexy, ditzy character, defined by her gender, rather than say a dog or pig that happens to be female.

.. I always thought Mouse in Grufallo was female - when we went to see in as a play, she was played by a woman.

Re Timmy Time. That's an interesting one. I mean, are the animals all male? I expect Timmy is! Or do we just assume they are? They don't talk after all. Or do they all have gendered names? I don't recall.
I asked my girls if they thought the animals were boys or girls and they said boys - all except the cat. Hmm, cats are girls and dogs/everything else are boys?
Hmm again. Very aware of this issue in my house too.
YY - to the stupid MALE cow in Barnyard. WTF??

I've just read the Gruffalo. The mouse has no gender assigned, but everyone else is male.

In timmy time everyone is male bar the cat, I know from reading the Cbeebies magazine.

I never gave the mouse in the gruffalo a gender until we saw the film version - now when I read the book I can hear James Cordens voice, so the mouse is now a he.