It’s barely begun yet but already the gender conditioning of parenthood is unfurling its tentacles, partly towards Babby but initially towards me. Of course the first question EVERYBODY asks (even, surprisingly, very gender-aware and feminist friends) is “Do you know what you’re having yet?”, to which the correct answer is not, apparently, “good news, the tests seem to show it’s human” but the baby’s sex, apparently accompanied by monologue about How This Makes Me Feel. If you chose not to find out, the assumption is that you’re saving is for a “surprise” at birth. Considering almost nobody I’ve ever met seems to consider the possibility of a visibly intersex baby, I do wonder what the “surprise” would be? Horns? A tail? Or, as another parent mentioned to me, the impact of hormones on baby boys giving them unexpectedly gigantic testicles!? I suppose that may surprise a few people. Now, I don’t blame people for asking this question, it’s a pure social nicety like “how was your holiday?” or “doing anything at the weekend?”. We ask these questions to block out embarrassing telepathic thoughts! (RIP Douglas Adams) But the fact that this is the first and superlative social nicety question about every new human should, I think, afford a moment’s pause. What is between a person’s legs tells you incredibly little about them, but in the case of babies it seems sometimes to be all people need or want to know. To me, that is very sad.
While I’ve been relieved that, as yet, nobody’s made any truly crass remarks about my woman-ness, I can sense the potential energy of cissexism waiting to thrust its way into my psyche like a particularly annoying penis. I don’t hate penises or anything, they’re perfectly fine features (one in particular was quite useful in helping form Babby, after all), but since all thrusting metaphors are inevitably phallic, one might as well be blunt, no?
Penises aside – and many excellent pregnancies indeed arise in exactly that kind of scenario – my possession of a womb might deem me a woman in the world’s eyes, but it’s not that which bothers me so much as the world’s puzzling obsession with telling me that I am one every second of the day. I have glumly predicted that clear visible evidence of womb-ownership will make this many times worse. This has very little to do with my personal identity, since I have very little personal investment in Being A Woman. I’m kind of there by default, because there isn’t an option which suits me better. I did identify as genderqueer for some time but it felt like a poor fit, and oddly appropriative, an identity I didn’t do enough to earn. So while I don’t much mind that I count as a cis woman for general social & political purposes, or as female for purely biological ones, I really don’t like the constant feeling of being measured up for a box I never wanted to be in in the first place.
Oh well, you may say, isn’t this just more of the same micro-aggression that every woman or female-presenting person gets? And to that I have to say no, because I have, oddly and with extreme good fortune, never really had to put up with much of this. I know very well that street harassment and snide remarks happen all the time, because I see them happening to other women (friends or strangers) right in front of my eyes! But I can count on the fingers of one slightly polydactylous hand the number of times in my life that I’ve ever had any such aggression directed towards me that I was aware of. Now, I’m quite aware that I could just not be noticing it, because I am fairly obtuse as a rule, but I do think I’m relatively good at people-watching in public and I do notice things my companions often don’t, which suggests it isn’t just that. If I were less brazenly arrogant, I might take it as a universal comment on my attractiveness (because we know for a fact that women deemed ugly are never harassed, hassled, groped, flirted with or anything like that, right? Right?), but I don’t believe it’s anything of the sort, not least because I think I’m of perfectly average attractiveness by most measures (I would totally do my clone/parallel universe self, although that may be more to do with my personal combo of laziness & sluttiness than any sort of objective hotness. But I digress). Others have suggested that I radiate a fierceness which scares people, and I freely admit that’s a very appealing idea, but I must sadly conclude that that’s probably not it either, as people often tend to be pretty aggressive with those they find intimidating, especially if they don’t know why. If anything, my assumption about my situation is that I am usually in the company of others when out & about in public spaces, most often with a man, so I make a poor target, yet even this is an incomplete answer as I often go out on my own for work. But however I’ve managed to create this invisibility cloak for myself, I like living inside it, dammit! I don’t want to be more noticeable, not least because being clocked as a pregnant woman strikes me as a different sort of attention from bog-standard woman-issue attention. I’m not too worried about swearing loudly at arsehole strangers (that’s the most appealing bit!), but it might be difficult not to grab & twist the wrists of intrusively bump-fondling work colleagues, and I don’t want to be mean to the well-meaning people who won’t let me politely refuse to sit in their seats.
This might be a worry over nothing of course, and I might turn out to have been a moderately invisible pregnant person as well, but I’m a great believer in expecting the worst so anything else is a pleasant surprise.
And in one sense, it is already happening: every time I see or hear something directed towards me-as-a-pregnant-person generally, it is so often “as a mother”, “being a mother”, or, most vomit-inducing, “a mummy”. I firmly believe that addressing any pregnant person as “Mummy” is – like addressing a waiter as “garçon” – an offence which should be punishable by death. If you do this, then no matter how kind your intentions, you are a cunt and I hate you with the burning rage of 1000 suns. So yeah, I’m a little to the left on that one. And not just because I don’t want to turn into Manny’s parents (“Moo-ma” & “Moo-pa”) from ‘Black Books’, although that seems like a fine reason to me. Even the pukey-pink & deterministic NHS breastfeeding posters are getting a little unbearable, and I’m sure worse is to come on that score. So that’s why “nature gave [me] boobs”, is it? Really? I HADN’T NOTICED. If it were a claim that “God” had been handing out boobs for child-feeding, people would complain and rightly so, but “Nature” (as much of a quasi-religious concept as any, since it’s an appeal to a higher power here) is just fine because it’s not faith-specific? As a religious (FSVO) person, my primary response to this is to want it all to fuck right off with the post-Catholic natural law arguments1. If you’re going to co-opt my body into your speculative deterministic philosophy, at least be honest about it. Sex & gender determinism is a striking example of the naturalistic fallacy, yet I remain surprised by the number of people who oppose naturalistic fallacies, yet appear to let those ones pass without remark.
So I don’t really know where to start with resisting this stuff. There’s so much of it all and I don’t even hate all of it. For example, it’s really nice when people spot my ‘Baby On Board’ badge & offer me a seat on the bus and I am certainly grateful for the consideration. But as a point in a hierarchy of needs, pregnancy is complicated. I’d like to know how often men carrying or otherwise minding small children get offered seats on transport, compared to women doing the same. I don’t know how much of this is gendered and how much is medicalised. And then I realise that in a world where both are so intrinsically linked, trying to tease them apart is probably a fool’s errand.
In short, being the Vessel Parent is an interesting social experiment, but I don’t actually want to be treated like a vessel. I understand that’s enough of a problem for many women already.
1: The appeal to Nature goes back at least to Thomas Aquinas’ teleological approach to the world; but more recent philosophers including David Hume and Steven Pinker have argued strongly that the sort of naturalistic deductions favoured by Aquinas are invalid.
Pinker talks about the naturalistic fallacy here: http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/books/tbs/media_articles/2002_10_30_upi.html
Hunter Not The Hunted 
The embryo gender thing is downright weird to observe, but given the rigidity of gendered stuff for kids these days, it’s understandable. Thank consumerism and the most important question being “what shall I get for the baby shower” rather than “is pregnancy/baby progressing healthily”.
Having not been through it (yet! hopefully!) I’ve not given much thought to the vessel experience, but it’s really interesting to wonder about how men with small children are treated in relation to women. Case in point: my partner and I (pretty right-on gender-wise, being variously trans, bi, pan, cis etc.) were recently having lunch and two men with small children were at the next table. We speculated on whether they were a single family with two male parents for a while before realising we’d never have assumed that about two women with kids having lunch. Society has a long way to go…
As an aside, the appropriation of genderqueer thing totally struck with me – I have had the same thing about being out as bisexual for my whole adult life. Somehow I assumed I needed to have major relationships with more than one gender to be able to wear the badge.
Oh man, I have whole separate conversations about how cultural non-acceptance of bi identities leads us to internalise self-loathing about our failure to meet a mythic ideal of perfect 50/50 attraction & activity. It’s SUCH a thing. I don’t know if you go to any bi events or local groups, but the topic certainly omes up quite a bit. (OT, but I noticed that Evan Rachel Wood marrying a man has meant she, like Anna Paquin, has been asked if she’s no longer bi…)
I think you do have a v good point there about our own internalised assumptions – we aren’t separate from the prevailing culture – and I definitely agree about the importance of consumption in child-gendering. This is a defining feature of things like the children’s toys debates, and shop’s stocking policies generally. And they do matter, but it’s important not to phrase the struggle for rights & choices entirely in term of our choice of what to buy! Otherwise we’re simply being distracted, IMO.
how cultural non-acceptance of bi identities leads us to internalise self-loathing about our failure to meet a mythic ideal of perfect 50/50 attraction & activity
OMG, you just put this into words perfectly. Thank you.
Aww, thank you :-)
That said, another aspect occurs to me about your assumptions re: the 2 dining men: as queers, we love to see other queers! So we may especially engage in wishful thinking when we try to decode the sexuality markers others display. That’s not unproblematic, but the motivation (as a marginalised group) is understandable.
One thing I noticed both when my OH was pregnant and from conversations in the office is that people just *love* talking about babies/pregnancy. I think often the question “do you know what you’re having” is just social shorthand for “let’s talk about babies” rather than an a genuine interest in the gender of the child. It’s pretty safe because there’s no right or wrong answer, and the pool of probable replies is limited to i) boy, ii) girl, or iii) I’m not finding out, which makes it predictable.
It’s like meeting someone at a party and asking what they do for a living. You don’t really care, but they’ve got a pat answer prepared, so do you, and hopefully whilst you recite that spiel you’ll find some shared interest that the conversation can then feed off.
So I dunno, I wouldn’t read too much into the question. IME it’s basically a set up for the asker to nod and then segue into “let me tell you how awful my pregnancy/childbirth etc was”.
The bigger question to me was why so many women seem to take pleasure in telling lurid horrid stories to deliberately scare the shit out of members of their own sex about what lies ahead :(
Yeah, I think you have a point about the “what do you do?” element of the question, I definitely think it’s a segue question to start conversations. It’s just frustrating that the question which has become fixed for that is “is it a boy or a girl?” rather than, oh, I don’t know, “have you a chosen a name yet?” or something.
But the reason that this question has become the go-to question, IMO, is because our culture is so highly gendered, and so obsessed with gender. Particularly with regard to children, who I regard as being progressively more (forcibly) gendered all the time. So I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this question has become so fixed!
Re: the phenomenon of people who’ve given birth terrifying others, have you ever come across the concept of “femme-cho”? It’s a sort of female machismo, particularly as it relates to lady-things. It is often manifest as a bravado in relation to things like childbirth, like some of the vehement No Drugs, No Intervention stuff people occasionally get het up about. Sadly this can also manifest as a criticism of those who do use those techniques. But I think people who have been through these things want to feel their efforts were useful!
I don’t think that saying “that’s why nature gave you boobs” is deterministic. At least, it’s no more deterministic than saying “that’s why nature gave you tonsils” or “that’s why nature gave you kidneys”. I don’t think that’s a naturalistic fallacy, it’s just how evolution has worked. (Perhaps “that’s why breasts evolved” would be more accurate!) Saying that breasts are there for lactation sounds obvious, but it isn’t the message that most women have internalised by the time they are adults. Breasts are for sex, and more specifically, they are for men. When you live in a culture where bottle feeding is the norm, and breasts are objectified and over-sexualised, then you really *do* need to remind people that the primary function of a mammary gland is to lactate.
I don’t think of it as determinism, but as reclaiming my body from capitalism. (I recommend “The Politics of Breastfeeding” for an excellent account of all this!)
But the visibility thing is very marked as a pregnant woman, or as a person with a small baby. You will not be ignored. But on the upside, the attention is, I think, less likely to be sexual harassment. Going out for the first time without a bump OR a baby I felt totally invisible. People weren’t smiling at me any more! I realised that strangers had been smiling and generally being pleasant to me so much, I’d stopped noticing it.
Ta for the comment. I think you may have misunderstood my position on the naturalistic fallacy. I agree entirely that “that’s why x evolved” is NOT one, and that it would be just as great a fallacy if kidneys were referenced rather than breasts.
I have no problem with saying “breasts evolved to give sustenance to offspring” (although I think suggesting that’s their *only* function would also be problematically deterministic, and obviously untrue). But when an appeal is made to “Nature”, and implies that “Nature” somehow engaged in a reasoning process to create a body part (!), that ceases to become an evolutionary statement at all, IMO. It is both crypto-religious and scientifically daft. Now, as a pagan, I have zero problem with someone believing in a deterministic universe for themselves, but I really do have a problem with seeing that in a medical setting. I want evidence from my medicine, not myths.
I definitely agree with the aim of reclaiming one’s body from capitalism, though for me reclamation from gender determinism is of equal importance, and a far older problem. For me, the two are quite interconnected. But as I’ve always regarded my body as utterly “mine”, the feeling of being expected to present it for others is not one I recognise personally, though I get the concept intellectually. That, I also agree, is a problem, but I’d hope it could be resolved without falling into a different trap. I’ve never, for example, seen a poster telling me that I should change my diet because “that’s why nature gave us kidneys”, but I defer to the possibility that they may exist. However, IME, biological determinism in humans (but not animals: see link to Pinker quote below) is most strongly manifested on gendered matters. No shock there.
I must be honest, I haven’t noticed much difference so far in my treatment from strangers, but I’m not sure (being already fat) how obviously pregnant I am to the casual observer, except when I’m wearing a badge. I shall have to wait & see! I’m sure you’re right about being out + baby though, a lot of people really do like babies. I think the most child-obsessed person in my workplace is one of my (male) supervisors, he has started many a child-orientated conversation with me of late. Including some quite gory ones about his wife’s labour experiences! He has 2 kids and LOVES to talk about them at any opportunity :-)
wow, I could have written this! (only not so well.) I’m glad I’m not the only person to be annoyed by insistent offers of a seat… when I was pregnant I used to stand on the train, quite happily, wearing noise cancelling headphones and no “baby on board” badge, reading a book, and basically giving off “leave me alone” vibes in every way possible. And still people would get annoyed at me for refusing the offer of a seat. Sorry, but “pregnant=weak” is just not a social convention I want to take part in! It’s so ridiculous too, because once the baby is there, you’re expected to just get on with it – looking after a small baby is MILES harder than being pregnant if you don’t have any complications – but just as the automatic label for a pregnant woman is “weak, in need of assistance” the label for mother is “busy”.