When I was pregnant I had a stock joke. Whenever anyone asked me my baby?s gender, which was approximately 287 times a day, I?d stroke my enormous belly and say, ?I?m having exactly what the world needs?another privileged white male.?
The joke was funny, I think, because nobody expects pregnant women to think about their babies in terms of labels, but in terms of love. In truth, I couldn?t have cared less about the gender of my unborn babies for the simple reason that I don?t really care much about their gender now that they exist. It?s not just that I don?t think it?s important?it?s that I don?t really believe it exists.
I minored in gender studies in the late 1990s, you see, and if there was a single takeaway from my otherwise sublimely impractical liberal arts degree, it was this: Gender is a cultural construct that bears little or no relation to the biologically sexed body. But how can this be, you might ask" It?s actually pretty simple once you get your head around it. Most babies are born with a penis or a vagina, but those genitals don?t always match up to a person?s gender identity, which is something far more complex, psychological, deeply personal and even potentially fluid. Now obviously we live in a world which has separate social mores for children born with one set of genitals or another, but when you think about it, how much of their girl- or boy-type behaviour has anything to do with what genitals they have" Like any nature-versus-nurture question,...