I’ve seen a couple of blogs now post on Baby Bangs — a new company that creates wigs/toupee’s for bald or short-haired baby girls so that people will not commit the heinous act of mis-gendering them. An example below, via Hoyden About Town:
As Gwen at Sociological Images says about a different but similar image:
The fact that we’re supposed to see the second photo as clearly cuter than the first makes me sad, actually.
Indeed.
Gwen then goes on to ask questions about why people are so concerned that someone might mistake their infant daughter for a boy, as this product is explicitly designed to avoid. I’ll say that the question befuddles me, as well, though I was once the object of such concerns.
You see, I was not only born bald — I was born with male pattern baldness. Hair around the back of my head, almost entirely bald on top. In fact, it’s a joke in the family that as an infant, I looked remarkably like Phil Collins. The pictures bear this out, actually — I totally did. But my mom would then dress me in pink, in frilly things, dresses, and though she thankfully wouldn’t put those horrible lacy headbands on my head, she would carefully clip an itty bitty little baby barrette to the very short, small shock of hair in the center of my head. And still, people would always assume that I was a boy. And instead of finding this amusing, her telling the story indicates that it did a better job of driving her absolutely nuts. When inquiring about why exactly it mattered, I never did get much of an answer.
In the end, though, as I question why it so bothers parents when their infants are mis-gendered, and why it is that social anxieties so regularly get played out via children, I also ask why people who are not the child’s parent are so keen on instantly gendering infants at all. I further ask why they’d do it so nonsensically based on something like hair, which babies of both genders regularly lack. I assume that it’s because people insist on applying already highly imperfect adult gender cues to people of all ages; but the ridiculousness of such a move completely confuses me, too.
Then again, I can’t really imagine a scenario where you’d have to guess the gender of an infant unless you didn’t know the baby’s parents. As someone who doesn’t have even the slightest inclination towards reproduction or much of a soft spot towards babies at all, I really don’t understand the concept of strangers stopping to say how incredibly cute a baby is in the first place. So maybe I’m not the best person to be asking these questions at all, but I still think they’re really interesting questions.