June 22, 2016
Having a terrible two year-old is now less than two months away. Cozy has gone from a baby blob to a Munchkin who is off to join the Lollipop Gang. We finally got her birth video this week and it seems like another lifetime ago that she came flying out of mom’s hoo-haw with a look on her face that said, “What the hell is this reality you’ve pulled me into?” Now it seems like this character we lovingly call Bug has always been here.
Part of the idea of this blog was to have a place to chart the evolution of my daughter in a patriarchal world that has a very clear place for “sugar and spice” girls. As someone who used to assign Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, I know that gender is a performance that we learn to perform it differently at different times and in different places. If Cozy had been born in Chad, Africa or in Portland, Oregon in 1914, her idea of how girls act (act being the key word) would be very different. People can say, “girls are just different,” but they are different because they are taught to be different from day one. That’s the sociological party-line and I’m sticking to it.
So, here we are at 22 months and this girl, with her working mom and stay-at-home dad, is still, to me, is without gender. But it’s funny how much of her behavior could be assigned gender. For example, she loves to play with blocks, scream, knock things down, build forts in her crib, and chase the cat. If she had a penis, we’d be told, “Well Cozy is just being a boy. Boys are different.” But she’s just being Cozy. She likes to shop but goes for gender-neutral belts and hats. She hasn’t learned that “her” clothes are in a different section of the store.
Similarly, on occasion she gets into Mom’s make up and clothes and has a mean obsession with shoes that could be written as “feminine” if there weren’t endless stories of little boys who did the same thing. (I’m sure a toddler Bruno Magli was a shoe hound as well). Cozy is now starting to pick out outfits that tend toward the post-modern clash. The Minnie Mouse dress with the rubber Wellies are go-to daywear. Maybe that’s the influence of her old punk dad. But she’s not leaving her room unless she’s got her fake pearls on. That might be a bit of the Old South creeping in.
She has a baby doll that came from somewhere and she never bothers with it. Elmo, Baby Elmo, and Bunny are her constant companions. The damn baby can raise itself. She parades around the house with her blanket like Linus, looking for her red monster. “The Elmo!” she yells. Then we bounce the soccer ball and dance to Queen Latifah CDs.
So much of early gender socialization is just attribution to the popular gender norms of the time. “Oh, he’s acting like a boy! Good! Do more of that!” The converse is, “Oh, he’s acting like a girl. You better put the breaks on that shit!” Girls get a bit more freedom in the early days until they hit double digits and start to get slammed with the message that their primary objective is supposed to be attracting boys. Everybody sing, “Someday my Prince will come…” But it’s always struck me as funny that we give little girls baby dolls to start the mom training and we don’t think little boys might need one for some dad training. Cozy is more interested in art than babies. (But she will say “hi” to every baby she meets.)
It’s not hard to raise a child as a child instead of as a “boy” or a “girl.” (Those quotation marks carry a lot of sociological weight.) But at some point the outside world will have a lot more sway than Mom and Dad. She might start wondering where that baby doll is hiding.
GENDER – Nature vs. Nurture 5: Elmo is queer
GENDER – Nature vs. Nurture 4: She’s gotta be free
GENDER – Nature vs. Nurture 3: How babies queer gender
Watching the Wheels 
can’t we just say” kids will be kids” they reflect the world around .them boys or girls . not attach a girl will be girls or boys will be boys. to the sentence , no gender to it is necessary. just kids will be kids.
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I gave Parker a Black baby doll and toy stroller. He rode that thing into the ground–twice. After 2 years of pushing the baby doll around he moved on. He has not slept a night without his Sloth stuffie for a year now. I was really sad after years of wearing pink and purple on a weekly basis, after one week of being in kindergarten, he announced he was no longer those colors because ‘mom they are for girls.’ My feminist heart broke a bit that day.
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Sometimes, I’m sure it’s easier said than done to raise a child as a “boy” or as a “girl.” Growing up, my dad taught me to do boy things while my mother (a self-employed hair dresser) let me play with her brushes, combs, and even the hair drier. You’ll find this surprising, but when I was a young boy and went to the babysitters (who was practically my 2nd mother), get granddaughter and I would play with her dolls.
The point is, we can raise our children how we would ideally like to raise them, but they eventually come into their own and start to set the path for the person they want to be.
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