It was my twin boys’ birthday recently, and beforehand I was struck with a by-now-familiar anxiety. No, not the one about how the sands of time pass through the hourglass a thousand times quicker once you have kids due to a combination of daily monotony and mind-melting busyness, and how all my ambitions and dreams will soon be sucked down the plughole of life, and next time I look in the mirror, my own grandmother will be looking back at me. But thanks for asking. Rather, I had to ask how macho, exactly, are my two-year-olds?
This started when I went shopping for presents and all the toys on the “recommended for boys” shelf were so macho, they verged on camp. Toolkits, fireman hats, plastic weapons: was I shopping for my toddlers or the Village People? But I’d been in this situation before. One day, when the babies were three months old, I managed somehow to leave the house and go to a shop to stock up on onesies. There, I had the firmly binary choice of either pink playsuits covered in butterfly patterns or blue ones bedecked with images of cars. This made me wonder two things: first, why are cars masculine, given that they all have bonnets? Second, would my boys really object to wearing onesies with butterflies? They didn’t seem to mind wearing ones covered in their own bodily waste. Or was that in itself an expression of their machoness?
Discussions about gender stereotyping are, as you’ve probably noticed, very much the hot topic at the moment. Only the most tediously reactionary conservative would splutter outraged spittle at the suggestion that boys might be interested in a broader spectrum of toys than trucks and toolkits, just as girls shouldn’t be marshalled towards princesses and Barbies. But it won’t surprise anyone who follows the news that there are quite a few tediously reactionary conservatives around these days.
When John Lewis announced earlier this month that it is now making its children’s clothes gender-neutral, the backlash was as idiotic as it was inevitable. Some commentators raged that stores must let “boys be boys and girls be girls”, without explaining why being a boy has to involve wearing a T-shirt with a car on it. Some quailed at the apparently terrifying prospect of little boys – their darkest desires no longer kept in check by segregated clothing – asking to wear frilly dresses, and that may well happen and the world will continue to spin.
But this is not, really, what the John Lewis move is about. Rather, the store is encouraging girls to think of sweaters with spaceships on them as being suitable for them, and letting boys know that they won’t be arrested if they pick out a pink sweatshirt. This, the expansion of choice, is what gender neutrality should be about.
So it’s frustrating that too often the effect is the opposite. The Priory School in East Sussex made the doubtless well-intended decision this year to opt for gender-neutral uniforms from year 7, decreeing that boys and girls will wear the same uniform, which means trousers. This is partly for purposes of what the school calls “decency”, as some girls have presumably been rolling their skirts up to belt height, but it’s also to help transgender students feel included. Anything that reaches out to transgender teenagers is to be applauded. But the sensible thing, surely, is not to ban skirts; it’s to let everyone wear them (and set a regulation length, for heaven’s sake).
Too often, discussions of gender today, rather than expanding boundaries, only contract them. When people say they’re “non-binary”, it sounds to me more like they swallowed the lie of the pink and blue onesies. Because the point is everyone, really, is non-binary – no one’s a wholly pink butterfly or blue car onesie. We are all, to varying degrees, purple spaceship onesies – and, yes, that is the scientific term.
Gender stereotypes are too often confused with biology, and you hear this mistake being made as much on the left as you do on the right. After all, it’s not that big a leap from saying boys wear car prints to Eddie Izzard saying he likes having manicures “because I’m trans”. Suggesting a man can’t possibly like having his nails done is a disappointingly reductive take on gender from Izzard, who was once so determined to tear down stereotypes about masculinity.
Anyway, my toddlers and I are not to be confined by such retrograde ideas of what it means to be male, so I gave them the gender-neutral gift of a keyboard. Other people gave them trucks and buses and puzzles.
And guess what? They liked them all. Because as even a two-year-old could tell you, cars do not make the man.