How Baby

One of the many, many things I wanted when I was pregnant was for people to stop talking about the presumed gender of my child. Girls were easier, one person would say. Boys are easier, another would say.

It became exhausting, carrying all these strangers’ gender essentialist bullshit, considering it’s a pretty well-known that the socialization of boys into rough-housing demons and girls into mild-mannered little ladies starts in infancy by how we, the adults, play with them differently, not any intrinsic differences. In other words, if they have wild boys and manipulative girls, it’s because they made them that way.

And, like, what a strange thing to say to a stranger. Not the worst I heard, of course, but like? ‘I hope you have a girl’? Okay, man, sure, I’ll just The Secret that, like it’s not already far out of anyone’s hands.

(The only definitive headcanon I’ll accept about raising a girl vs. raising a boy is that the girls clothing section is WAY more fun, and that’s the stone cold truth.)