Guest post: If you heard a two-year-old meow like a cat
Originally a comment by tigger_the_wing on Would she be able to think critically?
If you heard a two-year-old meow like a cat (they do that, and make other animal noises; it’s fun) and told her or him that the reason s/he liked particular toys, games and clothes was because s/he was really a cat, and that there are lovely doctors who can give her/him fur and a tail when s/he’s old enough, by the time s/he were four they’d be desperate to be turned into a cat. That is what ‘affirmation’ does.
The correct response to a small girl saying “I’m really a boy” is “Wow, really? Well, I’m really an elephant! Shall we go shopping for bananas?”
Of course, if you don’t keep telling little girls that only boys get to like, do, wear, and play with certain things, then you won’t get little girls thinking that you must be mistaken about their sex. If you don’t tell little boys that they aren’t allowed to play with dolls, or experiment with makeup, or get to prance around in their mum’s high heels with one of her skirts over their shoulders as a cape because only girls do that, you won’t have little boys thinking that they must really be girls.
There was no epidemic of ‘trans kids’ in the eighties. Have you seen adverts aimed at eighties’ kids? All the children, boys and girls, wore T-shirts, dungarees and trainers. All the children played with all the toys. My sons as well as my daughter had My Little Ponies (which actually looked like ponies back then, and not weird big-eyed, muzzle-less anime characters, and came in both sexes); my daughter, as well as my sons, had action figures, toy vehicles, train set elements (they each owned enough train set stuff that, when they combined their pieces, they could fill the ground floor. It was fun), bicycles, footballs, skipping ropes, jigsaw puzzles, books, etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum.
I never told any of them that they couldn’t do something because they weren’t members of the opposite sex, and no-one else was telling them that, either. And they’re raising their kids the same way.
This is also why I don’t believe in the labelling of generations. My parents (born early thirties) were comparatively progressive, so my generation was (born mid to late fifties) and so are my eighties children; but the ‘in-between’ generations? The parents who were about ten years older than mine (born in the early 1920s) were often very strict about gender roles, and so, in their turn, were their forties’ children (the ones about ten years older than me). Their children, about ten years older than mine, are the ones transing their teens for being gender non-conforming, and the parents in their twenties are the ones transing their toddlers.
Of course, there isn’t anything definitive about the above. But I sometimes think that the resentment against Baby Boomers is fed by the behaviour of those in the first half of my generation who spent their early childhood in austerity in the form of rationing (which ended in 1954) and surrounded by bomb sites (which had mostly been cleared and re-built with shiny new housing, shopping centres and offices by the time I was old enough to take notice), and with fathers who were either dead from the war, or traumatised (my grandparents were too old to be sent to fight). These early Baby Boomers often responded to the comparative misery of their childhoods by becoming greedy and selfish, in case it was all taken away again. My parents, who were old enough to live through the horrors of WWII but not old enough to fight, were relieved by the end of the war so the fact of continued rationing and the existence of devastated cities was nothing compared to hiding in bomb shelters and listening to the bombardment. They grew up with a sense of hope that things could always be better (because they had been so much worse) and that the best way to accomplish that was to fight for equality for all.
When my son was 2, he thought he was an elephant. I did not have a trunk surgically installed on his face, and I did not change his name to Jumbo.
I’m often struck by the contradictions of modern parenting. On the one hand, parents seem very aware of, and often stressed out about, the effects that their parenting decisions can have on children. On the other hand, parents like to act as if their child’s likes and dislikes and interests arose purely independently of the parents and are never positively or negatively reinforced by parental reactions. “Oh come here, honey, and show Uncle Screechy that adorable thing you like to do! Oh, wait until I’m ready to record it on my phone! [tedious child “cuteness” ensues] I don’t know why he likes doing this so much?” Oh, yeah, gee, it’s a real mystery.
My current working theory is that parents know that it’s bad to be a “stage mother” or an sports-obsessed father, and so they bend over backwards to insist that Junior’s love of (e.g.) performing on stage just sprang from the heavens and is unrelated to the parents’ obvious delight and pride.
I’m not suggesting that parents “make” their kids trans. But the messages that parents send their kids about gender obviously have an influence on their lives.
As a child of the eighties, this chimes with me so well. It wasn’t perfect but there had been some change in terms of advertising toys or clothes as for a particular sex. I was staggered when I shopped for my 2-year old nephew recently.
I was in a huge Walmart (sorry, but my options here are limited) and if you’ve been to one you’ll know how chaotic and incomprehensible the layout is. I asked a member of staff where I could find toys suitable for a young toddler and she asked me if it for a girl or a boy. I was irritated but wasn’t going to take it out on some underpaid shelf stacker. But I did have a peek at the girls’ side even though I knew it would make me mad.
It was sad. “Girls” toys are boring as shit. Dolls, mostly dressed as princesses or other disempowering roles, pretend kitchen and cleaning items (play vacuum cleaners, really?) Princess dress-up clothes. Pink lego but not the cool technic stuff. And everything is pink. Or maybe pink with another color as long as it’s pastel and not bold or challenging. The amount of pink is almost vertigo-inducing. How have we come to a point where these things have regressed so far?
Where was the chemistry set I stained the living room carpet with? Or the wooden dinosaur kit I made that was a bit wonky. No ant farm where the ants escaped and made a new home in the walls. No electronics set that I used to make a working transistor radio with and picked up Radio Sweden – possibly one of the most awesome moments of my childhood.
All of that stuff is in the boys’ aisle. Because there is a boys’ aisle.
While gender-coding of toys has always been a thing, the more formalized “Pink Aisles”, I think, were born in the wake of the Great Video Game Crash of 1983, and the subsequent rise of Nintendo in the 90s. They were the ones who decided to go all-in on the existing gender dichotomy (ie, boys were more interested in video games than girls, on average–so they went hard-core, marketing video games as a boys-only club). Other toy manufacturers discovered the raw power of gendered marketing by watching the Nintendo rise, and followed suit.
Pretty sure I’ve linked to this article, before, but it lays out the entire sequence brilliantly: https://www.polygon.com/features/2013/12/2/5143856/no-girls-allowed
I very much liked tigger’s guest post, but is it really true to say that ‘These early Baby Boomers often responded to the comparative misery of their childhoods by becoming greedy and selfish, in case it was all taken away again’? I was born in 1946, admittedly to a middle-class family, and remember rationing well, and how careful my parents were with money, and remember, too, bomb-sites, though the part of London where we lived was pretty unscathed. But I certainly do not recall that people of my generation were particularly greedy and selfish. And friends I have made (or made, for some are dead) since those early days who belong to that same generation have certainly not been greedy and selfish. My closest friend, who is dead, was raised among the bomb-sites of the East End, in an extremely poor family; he was neither selfish nor greedy, and went on to become, I think, the finest writer about Japan of his generation. His name was Alan Booth. Perhaps I made the wrong friends! Of course there were, and are, people of that generation who were or are greedy and selfish, but it is surely an exaggeration to tar a whole generation, or parts of it, in this way. There are always people who are greedy and selfish in any generation, and a number of them now sit on the Tory front bench in the House of Commons.
Tim Harris, I’m inclined to agree with you. As I noted on the early post where this appeared as a comment, I think that’s too simplified. Many of my Boomer friends who are in the earlier part of the generation are actually the exact opposite of selfish; they are active and involved in many ways, and they care.
But like any generation, Boomers are not monolithic. There was always an asshole contingent; there were always Young Republicans. There were always those who didn’t care one wit about stopping the war, saving the whales, installing civil rights for all, or passing ERA. In fact, there were many who were actively opposed.
Like with all the other generations, those who were invested in maintaining the status quo were the ones who rose to the top and became the politicians, the talking heads, etc. Those who were interested in making money got promoted, got profiled by Times and Forbes and Wall Street Journal, and became the faces of the generation.
Those of us who care are still working in the trenches, and often when I go to environmental events or first amendment events or any other event that purports to assist the world, the bulk of the attendees are Boomers. That’s partially because they’ve reached the stage in their lives where they have disposable time and income, but it’s also more than that.
When I review student scholarship applications, I no longer see essays about “how I would like to make the world better through my [fill in name of program/degree here]”. Now I see “how I would like to make more money for my family” essays. Why the change? Because there has been a change in the zeitgeist, I suppose. Because we are all so isolated in our tweeting, texting, instagramming worlds that we don’t really grasp the reality of other people. Oh, yes, we are connected, so connected, all the time. But…we are connected in the most disconnected way possible. We get on and check our likes….how many people are looking at us? How many people are thinking about us? And we think everything can be solved with a crowd-sourced video.
That may not be entirely fair, and probably isn’t, but the reality is the world has changed. We don’t know our neighbors, we barely know our friends, and we are losing the empathy that can help us actually care or understand about others. So a narcissistic culture of “you must affirm my identity” arises as a natural offshoot of that, and we put on our public empathy to support people who state they are oppressed, and, well, they must be oppressed because they are different, and we haven’t taken the time to learn the nuances of these things. If we can google it, it’s real.
The ones who win the battle are the ones who master Twitter…just look at the rise of Donald Trump.