As a baby, I guess I looked kind of androgynous... big round head, not a lot of hair. And my parents, not being into the "girly girl" stuff, rarely dressed me in anything pink or frilly. So apparently, people would always come up to my parents and say "Oh he's so cute," "what's his name," etc... my parents didn't really mind, but when they'd tell people I was actually a girl, people would get all awkward and apologize as if they'd insulted my parents.
We're so invested in categorizing people (even tiny people) instantly into gender categories as soon as we see them that people don't know how to cope with ambiguity. As Rachel points out, babies are generally going to look pretty ambiguous unless you mark them in a gendered way with clothes or toys.

my parents dressed me in frilly frilly pink pink pink and bows, and people would still come up to the stroller and comment on what a cute boy i was.

"If you put them only in a diaper, it's often hard to tell what sex the baby is."

It's not "often hard to tell" a baby's gender when the bits are covered, it's always hard to tell. Naked babies have no secondary sex characteristics.

I get so tired of shopping for baby gifts for friends, and finding only pink and blue stuff - and I swear it's gotten worse over the last 15 years. So, all my friends' babies get tie-dyed onesies -- Gender neutral, and babies are basically tiny deadheads anyway: barefoot, don't wear deodorant, no job, always looking at their hands like they're tripping. ; )

I want kids, sometime in the still-distant future, but even now I dread the inevitable flood of obnoxiously gendered -- and heterosexist and, apparently, racist -- clothes and toys and games and crap that I know the women in my family will, with the best intentions in the world, cram into every possible corner of their lives from the first murmur of a baby shower until their eighteenth birthdays. Or high school graduations. Or twenty-first birthdays. Or college graduations. You're never too old for a subscription to a magazine that makes you feel like shit about yourself!

Ah well. I survived largely unscathed. Then again, my subscription was to Reader's Digest, and I'd have to be a suburban stalker or a carton of whole milk for that magazine to put any extra dents in my self-esteem.

My brother and his wife are expecting their first child in a few months, a baby girl. I've been pretty frustrated with the amount of pink on everything. This is nothing against the color pink; it's a fine color in moderation. But on everything?

I never thought about the opposite. The little boy's cloths are just as gender specific. It's an interesting thought.

One thing that has struck me is that we always need to find an opposite gender equivalent for popular toys. He-Man and She-Ra. My Buddy and Kid Sister. Dora the Explorer and Go Go Diego. Heck, I've even seen Lego sets marketed specifically for girls - instead of the bright primary colored blocks, the set contained pink, purple, and white blocks.

Raising a completely "genderless" child is impossible. While parents and loved ones can carefully choose what toys and products to give to a baby, eventually, that baby is going to be exposed to other kids and their gendered stuff. At some point, they'll likely ask for the latest "pink" or "blue" thing.

I'm a full-on advocate of playing down the pink vs. blue thing for babies (and those heels for babies? Sweet jebus!), and de-emphasizing the importance of the "is it a girl, or is it a boy?" question (I never ask anymore).

But I think we need to remember that this issue goes WAY beyond what you buy (or don't buy) for a baby. I also think it's super important to raise kids to see that in real life, there's more possibilities than female = girl and male = boy.

Why don't we have gender awareness stuff in elementary school and gender studies in high school? Oh dear, I could go on for hours...

Don't even get me started on this - it's so ridiculous. You can barely even get diapers that aren't gendered anymore.

But what's really disturbing to me (because I have girls) is the way that clothing encourages girls (and the adults they come in contact with) to view their bodies. It's hard to find little girls clothes that aren't designed to make them look like little teenagers, and to emphasize the "femininity" or sexiness of their bodies. As if. And what's with plastering provocative words on their butts? They seriously sell underwear, shorts, sweatpants, and tights that say things like "hottie," "princess," and "sweet thing." Because it's totally appropriate for adults to be looking at little girls' butts and thinking "hottie."

The complete lack of functionality also irks me. My 10-month old is an accomplished crawler and cruiser, but most of the girls in her room at daycare aren't. They often wear little dresses and tights that prevent them from being able to move freely and pull themselves up on furniture, and I just think it's a shame. Of course they won't develop at the same rate as the boys, who are wearing sensible clothes they can move in. Then in my stepdaughter's preschool class the girls often wear high-heeled shoes and tight skirts, so they can't climb well or run as fast as the boys. I just want to grab their parents by the shoulders and shake some sense into them, but unfortunately I don't think they would see it as a problem that their girls are not developing the same physical self-confidence as the boys. Since they're all going to marry some fabulously wealthy prince and live a carefree, pampered life they don't need it, right?

Regarding the racist socks, I find it quite odd that there doesn't seem to be an overtly racist image on them; rather the racism is in the way Old Navy has defined and described them. (And what, can't women fly helicopters?).

But then I don't understand the whole concept of Old Navy. Why do people walk around wearing a shirt with the name of the store where they bought it in big letters? You never see people wearing Wal-Mart shirts.

And just a little side note, where I am from, they do have women's and gender studies classes in high schools (Saskatchewan, Canada).

I remember being at work in a store and seeing a bib for boys that said, "I play sports with Daddy." I pointed it out to my coworker, asking "what's the point of this?" It's for a baby, so I am pretty sure, the statement isn't accurate, and furthermore, why do we feel the need to put words into our kids' mouths?
I feel like any parent who put that on their son was trying to drive home a message like, "look, my baby's a hetero male!"
My coworker told me about receiving the curious gift of an item that read "I'm a big boy, I play football" for her baby that was born premature, and thus not a big boy, and not yet tossing a football.

I taught preschool for a year and this KILLED me. I could not believe the stuff little girls (2-3 years old) showed up in: platform flip-flops, glittery shirts that say "brat," two-piece bathing suits that barely covered their diapers. It's ridiculous. Though it works the other way, as well. Camouflage for the boys, football t-shirts, skulls and crossbones, sneakers with laces not meant to tie (looks "tougher" apparently) that inevitably cause them to trip. It's pretty disgusting, and it makes me think it's a miracle that anyone turns out to be a level-headed, self-respecting adult in our culture...

What makes me laugh about the pink-and-blue standard is that a hundred and twenty years ago or so, it was completely reversed: pink was like a baby-er red, so that was for boys, and blue was delicate and quiet, so obviously for girls. And yet I still hear, "Well, girls just PREFER pink naturally," as if a chromosome can make you attracted to any color that has nothing to do with survival. Or anything really. Pink has nothing to do. With anything.

Today I saw a mom walking down the street with her 5 or 6 year old daughter, dressed all in pink, pushing a miniature pink baby carriage like her life depended on it.

Why must it be this way.

I noticed this today when I was in a department store and walking past the little kids' section. The girl's section was almost all pink and purple with a little bit of yellow and the occasional green accent, while the boy's section was all dark colors: blue, brown, black, red, and grey.

Why can't we all claim all colors?

I honestly do not think it matters what we dress babies in because all they do is spit up all over their clothes and get dirty so you just end up changing them a bunch of times any way. The important thing to realize is that it is not so much when the children are babies, but it is when they are older how they dress. All babies wear the general clothing that is in the stores based on gender. But as they get older and are able to pick out what they want to wear they will develop their own style and that is all that is important. That when these babies get older they are raised with the ideas that they do not have to dress a certain way because they are male or female.
When I was growing up I hated pink and even wanted my cake for my communion to be blue instead of pink, so my parents put the colors I wanted since I was old enough to tell them what I wanted to wear.

@ Dayna, it's true that a baby isn't gonna care what color its clothes are, and if they're only dressed gendered when they're too young to realize, it's not gonna scar them. The problem is, gendered dressing does not end at infancy. It continues well into toddlerhood, when a child starts becoming aware of what he or she is wearing, and then past toddlerhood into childhood, and then into adulthood. Children who are certainly old enough to choose their own clothes wear gendered outfits. For one thing, although young kids might have a choice in what they put ON, they still don't have a choice in what is BOUGHT for them until much later. Kids like you and me, whose parens listened when we didn't want to wear something, are simply lucky.

Furthermore, the people I'm most afraid get affected by the gendered baby clothes are't the babies, of course, but the parents. The message that it matters at ALL what colors your baby wears clearly has an impact on somebody. It worries me that new moms are being told so early in the process, "Obviously since your child is a ___, this is the appropriate color!" that when it's time for them to buy clothes for their five-year-old, and they're confronted again with the pink and the blue, it's become so natural that, well, pink it is. And this is clearly what happens, because there are little pink girls running around everywhere.

And finally (I should wrap this up, huh), something that bugs the LIVING HELL out of me is Victoria's Secret's Pink line. As if women didn't have enough social cues that we're only children. I had the following conversation the other day in a late-night diner, where I was eating alone:

Man (to waitress): Why do your pants say "pink" on 'em? They're blue.
Waitress: Oh yeah, I dunno, it's the name of the brand or something.
Man (to me): You have pink hair, you should know.
Me: It's 'cause Victoria's Secret thinks women love pink so goddamn much they'll even buy stuff that just has the word on it.

Then they laughed, which could have been good, or could have meant they thought I was calling women vapid, and thought that was okay.

(And he's right, my hair is pink, I've actually loved the color pink for about six months now.)

Yeah, this stuff irritates the hell out of me too. I always ask "Why is pink the only color with a gender?" And as someone else mentioned, that wasn't always the case. Why are some colors assigned to which sex parts you have? It makes no sense. Remember in Juno when she wants to paint the baby's room yellow because it's "gender neutral"? And Jason Bateman says "Why does everyone say that? I don't know one man with a yellow bedroom!"

It's silly and arbitrary. I do understand when people go nuts for baby clothes that are essentially non-functioning (running shoes, tiny bomber jackets, etc.) because I have an obsession with miniatures and some things are just too cute. But I would like to think that my sense of practicality would prevent me from actually dressing my (future) kid in it. Even overalls freak me out, because I know that all kids do is stick gross stuff in all the pockets for you to find later. Giving them all of those hiding spots is like a dare!

And I had barely any hair until I was 2 and my mom always got comments on her adorable "son". So she put me in frilly pink dresses and put my hair in one of those palm-tree pony tails and it really didn't help. And then when I grew up I lobbed it all off anyway and people still think I'm a cute little boy. HA!

But Dayna, when the babies get to the point where they're crawling and cruising, it does matter what you dress them in, even if they don't notice or care. So many of the girls babies in my daughter's room at daycare are behind on the crawling/cruising because their parents put them in clothes that limit their movements and get all tangled up. One of the girls is dressed in a long dress every day, and her knees get all stuck in them so she can't really move. She eventually starts fussing, so the daycare workers used to just take off her dress and let her play in her onesie. Her mom ojected to this, even though they told her why they did it, so now, even if she's frustrated and crying, they have to leave her in her little dress. Because for a girl, being cute is more important than being physically competent.