I’m still intrigued by the couple who won’t tell anyone, including their own parents, the gender of their baby. They want it to be ‘neutral’. Which is really nice and thoughtful. If you’re a vegan tree-hugger who likes seriously fucked up children who’ll need a lifetime’s therapy. Otherwise it is basically, using their child as an experiment. Testing some pseudo-socio-scientific hypotheses that if you DON’T gender stereotype your child then it will… errrrr… then as it grows… hmmmm… then by the time ‘it’ is 10…

It will be fucked up. Possibly not quite as much as its parents because they have a choice. And it will NEVER wear blue or pink. Only yellow. Like Ali-G.

The implication is that all gender characteristics are learned. That there is nothing innate, genetic, hereditary or ‘natural’. Therefore, deprived of the usual biased input (soldiers for boys, dollies for gels, etc), the child will ‘grow into its own person!’ It will ‘choose the gender it prefers from the 17 now available to it!’ Because it won’t be taught how to be a boy or a girl. Just a… a what? A person? A weirdo? A dog?

It’s true that a lot of child behaviour, producing the adult it will eventually become, is programmed. Learned. But you can’t learn a nob. It’s just kind’a there. Or not. You can’t learn a pair of tits.

And with sexual characteristics comes responsibility. Or lack of it, if its the nob option.

So whilst we’re using children as case studies, I’ll mention my little Joey. Who is (dare I say?) a boy!! And he IS a boy. He’s more physical than Lila was. Perhaps that’s due more to being a second child and hence being loved to the point of bruising by the first child. By being dragged around the floor. Or maybe, even though I haven’t bought him his first gun yet (only a matter of time) he is just ‘a boy’. Possibly the genes that have evolved since homo erectus had his first erection predispose boys to be proto-hunter/gatherer/protectors and girls to be nurturing/maternalistic to better mother the children they might one day have. Who knows?

Bulgarians have a different way of learning. They learn to be hateful, spiteful, nasty, nazi and racist. So for the England match last night in Sofia FIFA had decided that in punishment for their previous obnoxious behaviour, they’d leave half the stadium empty. And I think what happened was that they shut the wrong half. So all the nice, decent, pleasant, liberal-minded and tolerant Bulgarians (an assumption that is proving a ‘big ask’) were the ones they shut out by mistake. Leaving just all the horrible, vile thugs who shouted racist abuse at the England players from the first minute. And without wishing to be seen as too reactionary, the answer is simple. Any country in which racist abuse, or any other, is heard, endured, exhibited, is just banned from the tournament with immediate effect. That would either shut the muthafuckas up or ensure that there is no Eastern European representation in any major sporting event.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx