Magic underpants
This does indeed seem like a very odd, not to say stupid, thing to tell children.
“They looked at you and made a guess.” No they didn’t! Any more than they looked at your mother and “made a guess.” They knew your mother was pregnant and giving birth; they had to, in order to help her with the giving birth part. They knew that and thus necessarily knew she was a woman.
Also, you weren’t born with a sweet frilly pair of underpants on (nor were you born spotlessly clean and dry). It’s a funny thing about those underpants – newborns aren’t normally dressed in frilly knickers, so we are forced to conclude that the illustrator of this fatuous book drew them on this sex-unkown baby for a reason. What reason? So that it won’t be blindingly obvious which sex the baby is.
Page two ought to say “But that was because you had a very silly doctor. The nurse put frilly pants on your bottom, and the doctor didn’t know how to take them off. They don’t let him work as a doctor anymore.”
Babies also don’t usually have that much hair at birth.
If people continue writing (and buying) these books, we’re gonna have a generation that has no idea why they are girl or boy. Or they may think they are neither – or both – or Victoria Station.
Not only do they usually not have that much hair at birth, they also tend not to have fade haircuts.
And so the baby says to the other baby, “I’m a boy.”
“How do you know?” says the second baby.
The first baby whips off his little blanket and says
“Look –
blue booties!”
I actually did have that much hair at birth but not that level of style.
In isolation that page would be great followed with “your white father ordered a paternity test, because he was a racist”.
Well, I mean, frilly knickers? Obviously a girl.*
I know I shouldn’t expect people who think every kind of word is a pronoun to understand how language works, but this conflating of “who” and “what” is really grating on my nerves at the moment. No, people don’t know “who you are” when you’re born. But they can easily see “what” you are.
* Even auto-correct knows this – it changed “frilly” to “girly”.
The only benefit that I can see from this is an end to the forest fires caused by the stupid gender reveal parties. And by stupid, I mean realllllllly stupid, both in the concept of the reason for the party and the execution of pink or blue smoke bombs.
But the stupidity of the “Genderwang” guessing game is particularly a bit of propaganda that downplays to the lowest intelligence possible. If a radiologist can identify the sex of a fetus through a sonogram, who’s going to think that an obstetrician is making a “guess?” This is worse than telling kids that Jesus died for their nasty sinnning asses.
A while back I finally unsubscribed from the mailing list of a captured former LGB charity after they asked me to raise a stink about the fact that artificial face recognition software was systematically misgendering TIMs. What a remarkable coincidence that the software – in the complete absence of any reliable criteria what so ever for separating “transwomen” from biological females – just happens to systematically identify the former as men…
Bjarte, no matter how you program them, those computers just can’t get over the binary.