Of course, as the male of the species, I never played with dollies as a kid. I played with Action Man TM, which came with a selection of outfits in desert camouflage, arctic white (with snow goggles!), traditional camouflage, SAS black, scuba diver, or just the basic blue plastic underpants for winding down by the pool after a hard day's warring. So, clearly, nothing at all like a dolly. Dollies are for girls.
These thoughts come to me when clothes shopping because at times it's hard to wade through all the pink, sparkly, "Daddy's little frilly fairy princess" outfits for girls. There is very little unisex clothing, or even clothes in neutral colours like orange or green, and we have to work pretty hard if we don't want Anya to be dressed as a sort of toddler Barbara Cartland.
I'm particularly reminded of it at the moment, because Anya is of an age where she's getting very interested in Things of all sorts, and some of those Things are strongly coded in terms of gender. So, this morning, she found Kate's earrings you can see in the picture and was holding them up to her own ears. Likewise, she's been pretty obsessed with draping herself in Kate's purple pashmina and parading around looking magnificent. Other parents have told us that, once she starts to assert herself, it will be next to impossible to avert the tsunami of pink. Does all this mean that she's turning into, horror of horrors, a girlie girl?
Well. I think liberal, feminist parents like ourselves can probably get too het up about this stuff. I haven't read the recent book "Cindarella Ate My Daughter" by Peggy Orenstein, but I like what I understand to be her main thrust: that kids of a certain age get quite obsessed with playing up to gender stereotypes because they don't really understand what gender is, and playing with the idea is a harmless part of working out their own identities.
That doesn't mean that parents shouldn't be teaching their kids that gender is something you use and enjoy, rather than something that restricts and defines you. I'd hate Anya to grow up thinking she was fated to be some helpless, airheaded princess, just because she's a girl. But I don't think that's actually what happens to kids, especially not if their parents don't see gender in that way. And I think adults might over-interpret these gender signals being sent out by their children.
After all, when I think of the adult women I most respect there just isn't any direct link between their feistiness and independence and their level of interest in things that are coded "feminine". And many of the Things that Anya is obsessed with don't fit into neat categories. She's utterly fascinated by cars and ants, and talks about them all the time; her favourite dance at the moment is a rather blokish stomp.
If she were a boy perhaps we'd see this as evidence that her personal interests are being written by her chromosomes, but I think it's no more indicative than her interest in earrings and dressing up. She's just into stuff that interests her: it's the adults who are so obsessed with coding various objects and activities as "masculine" and "feminine".
I suspect that these toddler obsessions have almost nothing to do with what she's into as an adult. But just supposing they are, it suggests she'll grow up to be a stylishly-dressed entomologist who loves driving and dances badly. I don't think that sounds like a case of gender confusion. I think that sounds like a personality.
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