I can never remember what I've said to whom, and I'm not going to go back and read every post I've written since Ramona was born, so maybe this will be the second time I've mused on the phenomenon of the gendering of babies.  I do think I mentioned here that I've been interrupted while on my cell phone by strangers asking if Ramona is a boy or a girl.  These days, mostly people just refer to her as though she's a boy.  Sometimes I correct them, and they act horrified at the error...I don't really care, except I don't want Ramona to get confused about what sex she is.  If we cared, we could get her ears peirced (which someone in our building told us we HAD to do while she was a newborn), or dress her in pink.  But we don't, so people think she's a boy.  This is because boy babies and girl babies don't look especially different.  Our culture seems to be pretty uncomfortable with this fact, however, which is why all the frilly pink crap in the girl-baby section.  The sad truth is that, just as many white people don't think they have any culture, when a child isn't obviously gendered, the assumption is made:  male.  Male is still seen as neutral, the norm.  Just ask the illustrations in anatomy books, or the people who use "he" as a universal pronoun.  I know that I'm living in the 1970's in my refusal to act like I live in a "post-feminsit" world, but I HAVE GOOD REASON.  Rather than being comfortable with the ambiguity of my daughter's gender, she must be labled correctly by people who will never see her again, because, apparently, it makes a huge difference whether she's a boy or a girl.  These strangers want frilly pink markers.  They want me to put her in scratchy, uncomfortable clothes that make it hard for her to mover around so they know that she's a girl.  I refuse.  For Halloween, we dressed her up as a U of O football player, an outfit Grandma and Grandpa McCurdy got on clearance before there was even a grandbaby to give it to. She was a cute little football player.  When I corrected someone about her sex on Halloween, they seemed preplexed: "But, she's dressed...like a football player."  Yeah, it's a Halloween costume.  But after a day of "Oh, what a big man!" and "Hey, little tough guy!" the next day I put her in pink pants and a onesie with little ruffles on the sleeves.  She was the same kid both days, but you wouldn't know it from how people responded to her:  "Oh, what a pretty girl" and "Aren't you a litle sweetheart?"  Sigh.