My nephew Daunte the day after he was born–all dressed in yellow

OK, so maybe this isn’t a post about fashion, but I think one develops a sense of style early on from how they are dressed by their parents. I also can’t stand the disgusting gender division when it comes to children’s clothes and toys. Queercents just made a post voicing the same complaints I have regarding young ‘uns and gender-biased clothing:

Babies usually look rather androgynous, and because of our homophobic, sexist culture’s discomfort with androgyny (or any other disruption of the gender binary, such as queerness itself), parents race to mark their babies as unequivocally male or female. What amazes me is the number of parents who buy their daughters nothing but pink, frilly, constricting clothing from day one, and then can’t stop telling everyone how their daughter just ‘naturally’ was always a girly girl, who would NEVER wear pants. Gee, I wonder why?

When my sister had her baby boy last year, it was BLUE BLUE BLUE. He was dressed up in every masculine outfit you can think of, even as a mobster for Halloween (’cause violence can be cute, right?)

This article also brings to mind the time I saw someone very dear to me unraveling an entire blanket she crocheted because “yellow isn’t a boy’s color.” Since when?

In Japan, the gender norms seem to be even more socially ingrained, where in school teachers hand out Hello Kitty pencils for girls and Shinkansen (bullet train) pencils for the boys, and even the way you talk defines your gender. (There is one awesome exception with one of the girls I teach, who uses the super-masculine form for “I” !)

It’s kind of disheartening to see that even nowadays one only has to look as far as the children’s clothing store to see future gender constraints.

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