Pink as a Girl

In a recent article on Fox News online, Dr. Ablow claims J. Crew is defining gender identity, and confusing children along the way, by featuring a 5 year old boy with neon pink nails. Because I guess in his world, pink is exclusively a female color or nail polish is only for girls.

He says this advert is a dramatic example of our culture’s “psychological sterilization” by which he means gender neutralization. So dresses and pink for girls, blue and pants for boys.

Yes, let’s not get confuse about our differences, let’s clearly identify our sharp edges and lines. After all what can be more important than defining their children’s gender for parents, and as early as possible? Let’s box them so neatly and tuck them into little categories of social acceptance and identification so that they don’t ever feel different or confused.

If you have ever traveled outside of USA, you will experience a wonderful feeling of strangeness and discovery; men wearing vivid colors and jewelry, keeping long hair and even sporting long dresses. Women will look different too. Most will not have surgically enhanced breasts; they will have different skin colors and textures, some even will be walking around naked.

How wild is that and how incredibly beautiful! An assortment of bodies, colors, smells and sexes, like an assortment of a box of candy; all taste different but surprisingly delicious. Of course you do not have to like all the candies but among the 6 billion of us there will be many many would like and prefer the ones you left out in the box. And this is what makes our world so incredibly, divinely, unequivocally precious.

At a first glance, all these differences can be overwhelming and threatening. I can understand that. But that does not give us the right to impose our traditions or customs on them. That does not give us the right to demand absolute conformity, and preach them what we think is proper mode of social living.

And why can’t we extend this courtesy to our own children? Why do we want them to be perfectly fitting robots; all of them acting, thinking, feeling same way? Is that what makes a society? A group of people who can not be identified one from the other, Barbies and Kens of 21st Century?

Gender and sexuality are much more complex than we like them to be. There are men like to wear women clothes but are straight. There are women who are very “girly” by our culture’s standards, but are lesbians. There are people born with male genitalia and ovaries. There are people born with female genitalia but have male chromosomes. So which one of these people will we categorize as men or women? It is much more complicated than we think and never black and white, or in Mr. Ablow’s case, pink.

A neon pink nail polish will not make your boy child gay any more than putting pants on your girl child. How about dropping our idea of what our children should be and embracing the fact that they should have the right to who they want to be, and allowing them to be joyful, happy and free in their choices; loving them unconditionally. Let’s see how peaceful, inclusive and tolerant our societies will be after that.

*This article has been published in The New Agenda on 04.18.2011