The Colours Of Babies

Cassie and I don’t want to perpetuate any kind of colour-based gender bias. It’s infuriating to see so much stuff on sale that is divided by colour for boys and girls. I think it may be particularly bad here, because people seem to have embraced it (or at least haven’t become more progressive about it yet). I’ve had people ask if Arthur was a girl because of an item of clothing he was wearing – despite the clothes being as neutral as we can find. To be honest, we both prefer neutrals and more “masculine” colours, and find the pink tutus and flower headbands to be gross IOHO.

It’s hard with twins who are different sizes and have different dietary requirements. We have to keep track of whose clothes are whose, and whose bottle contains which formula. Using blue and pink bottle lids does make it easier to remember which bottle is which. In fact, we divided the lids into two groups – blue and green; and pink, red, and yellow. We could swap it around, but in this case, surrendering to the socially-reinforced stereotypes does make it easier. “Everyone knows” pink is for a girl.

Where did this colour business come from anyway? Apparently clothing colour only became a gender signifier in the early 20th century. Before that babies just all wore dresses. But it seems that as time goes on, these beliefs have become more entrenched, to the extent that some people have quite strong negative reactions to you making your boy wear pink, for example. Girls in blue seem to not be such a problem, but it’s disturbing to think that people actually believe that the clothes babies wear should reflect their assigned gender, and that using the wrong colour could even affect them – like “turning them gay” for example. PAFI.

I remember when US department store Target caused a ruckus in the ignorant-as-all-hell community by simply taking down the signs on the aisles that said ‘Toys for Boys’ and ‘Toys for Girls’. One aisle was still full of toy trucks and footballs, and the other was still full of dolls and make-up toys, but it was now up to the customer to decide who got what. Target was bombarded with comments and emails, saying it was “political correctness gone mad” (a wonderful way to identify people whose opinions you shouldn’t rate too highly), claiming Target was enforcing some kind of liberal agenda, and vowing to boycott. Again, PAFI.

We do the best we can. In terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy, Arthur and Edith have it pretty good.

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