vox--2020-02-19--The Assimilationist, or: On the unexpected cost of passing as a trans woman

Part of the Gender Issue of The Highlight , our home for ambitious stories that explain our world .
In March 2018 , a handful of days after I came out to my therapist as a trans woman , I decided to buy a razor to shave my legs .
For the first time in my life , I was aware that my legs had hair on them , and I was at once irritated by that hair and a little anxious about it .
I didn ’ t know why , but I wanted it gone .
Even though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ used to shave my facial hair , I felt strongly that I needed something pink or purple to tackle the thicket on my legs .
So , standing there in a Target razor aisle looking for something functional but also cute , my anxiety growing as I was sure people were looking at me and seeing my secret true self and judging me accordingly , I found myself torn .
The pink razor marked as explicitly “ for women ” was so lovely and sleek — but it was also functionally the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dudes right next to it .
And the pink razor was $ 1 more expensive .
Intellectually , I knew the “ pink tax ” existed because I had spent most of my adult life reading up on women ’ s issues .
( I wonder why ? )
But this was my first encounter with it in the wild , with the fact that you could want so badly to feel a sense of belonging that you would let capitalism gouge you over and over again .
I wanted so desperately to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ willing to pay extra for it .
Screwing up my courage , I grabbed the razor , keeping my head down at the cash register , ready to say that it was for my wife , should anybody ask .
( Newly out trans people are terrified of the gender police , who generally don ’ t exist except in our heads . )
That pink razor was a piece of crap , and within six months , I had to replace it .
My old men ’ s razor — which I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I have left — is going strong after years of use .
It was as if I was experiencing the market pressures of being a teen girl in the space of about three months In the months thereafter , money seemingly poured out of me .
It was so , so expensive to be a woman .
I found myself having to buy an entirely new wardrobe , one I ’ m still struggling to fill out here and there .
I needed new shoes .
I needed makeup .
Buying all this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ course , but each individual item was expensive in and of itself .
Can a man spend a lot of money on clothing ?
Of course .
But he also has many affordable options .
Finding such options in the women ’ s section was its own challenge .
It was as if I was experiencing the market pressures of being a teen girl in the space of about three months instead of over several years .
Even beyond that , there ’ s the cost of laser hair removal and electrolysis to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There are regular sessions with a therapist who specializes in gender dysphoria .
There was a crash course in voice training , in an attempt to coax my old rumble into a reasonable alto .
Changing my name cost almost $ 500 , and a printout of the paperwork proving my name was changed was another $ 50 .
There are so many expenses to come , including surgeries and more documentation of my identity , and so on and so forth .
It ’ s expensive and exhausting , and it will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ask myself why I ’ m doing all this .
I just am .
I need to .
There ’ s a word that comes up in trans circles often , and I think it probably describes me ( or , at least , people have used it to refer to me at times , when they think I don ’ t know they ’ re doing it ) : assimilationist .
The best way to describe an assimilationist is to describe myself , so here ’ s what I ’ m wearing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ day at the start of the year : My hair ( on which I use somewhat expensive lightening shampoo to coax it toward a dirty blonde ) hangs just past my chin .
On my nose sit round-framed blue glasses ( $ 500 ) .
I ’ m wearing a full face of makeup ( my first visit to Sephora ran me $ 250 , good fucking God ) , and I have on a pink sweater , a gray undershirt , black tights , and a ruffled black skirt ( around $ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Target ) .
Cap this off with some dark purple running shoes ( $ 75 ) and you ’ ve got the whole look .
This outfit would not seem out of place on just about any woman in her 30s who works in the media .
It ’ s a solid everyday look when I don ’ t have to make any on-camera appearances .
( I have a more expensive wardrobe for when I do . )
That ’ s precisely the point of the assimilationist claim : As trans people @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the gender binary , not uphold it .
By trying my damnedest not to stand out but to blend in — to tilt whatever little equation you run in your head when you see me away from “ man ” and toward “ woman ” — I ’ m propagating a system that hurts both trans people and women disproportionately , via everything from broad , systemic violence to the relatively minor sin of the pink tax .
Here ’ s the thing that gives me a thrill but probably shouldn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can count the number of times I ’ ve been misgendered in the past six months on two hands , and it now happens so infrequently that I can chalk it up to somebody misspeaking far more often than to a deliberate attempt to make me feel like shit .
I ’ ve even had a few encounters where someone was shocked to learn I was trans , not cis .
I ’ ve developed camouflage .
My justification for my style , from the first , has always been that if you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ page of results is filled with stories about how I ’ m trans .
Even as I increasingly “ pass ” for a cis woman , I can ’ t escape the fact that I became a vaguely public figure and spent more than a decade publishing journalism ( and a book ! )
under a man ’ s name .
Even if I am invisibly trans in a crowd of people on the street , I am visibly trans once you know who I am , because unlike so many trans women @ @ @ @ @ @ @ transitioned .
Still , my transition has gone much , much better than I expected it to .
I had certain advantages in this regard , from economics ( I have much more money than the majority of trans women ) to race ( white trans people have the same built-in societal advantages as white people in general ) to geography ( California presents few structural barriers when an adult wants to transition ) .
I also had advantages when it came to my genetic code .
My testosterone level has been low @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was already fairly androgynous .
It didn ’ t take that much estrogen to shift androgyny toward traditional femininity .
See also : Many trans women have few or even none of my advantages .
They can not escape the fact that when they go out into society as themselves , they are constantly , visibly trans , with all the horrors that can bring .
They can ’ t pay to eliminate their beard shadow .
They can ’ t buy feminine clothes that fit their frames .
They can ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sound just so .
And not all trans women are traditionally feminine .
Many prefer looks that might skew toward androgyny or butchness .
And this is just trans women — I haven ’ t touched on trans men , on nonbinary people , on gender fluidity , on those who are agender .
Our goal as trans people should be to normalize all of these identities and in so doing push back against an unfairly limiting gender binary that hurts cis men and women , too .
That binary imprisons all of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of who we can be and what we are capable of , and many of the rules that govern it are arbitrary and invented by a society built by cis men for the benefit of cis men .
Okay .
I agree with all of the above .
But I also love to be a traditionally feminine woman .
Womanhood and women in general just make more sense to me than anything else I ’ ve ever tried .
( My attempts at male bonding over the years glistened with flop sweat .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ more like me .
I want to eliminate it .
I also want to hang on to some of it .
It feels like I just got here .
The thing about self-acceptance is that when you ’ re just getting used to it , you become an easy mark .
The first time I went to Sephora , I spent way more on makeup than I ever thought possible , because the salesperson who helped me made me feel so good about myself .
From the second she learned my name , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I was in full guy mode .
She used she/her pronouns .
She told me I was pretty .
I plunked down $ 250 , and I would have spent well over $ 300 if she had managed to talk me into a $ 70 foundation .
( My wife saved me on that one . )
To be clear : None of this is the salesperson ’ s fault .
None of it is my fault , either .
This is just how society is designed to function , and to come @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to suddenly start careening downhill into a newer , truer gender , without some of the guardrails that snap into place when you grow up cis and figure out the ways society tries to exploit you on the grounds of gender .
It ’ s not like any of us are immune to these capitalist pressures .
There are distinct economic expressions of “ womanhood ” and “ manhood ” that are meant to help us all find a sense of belonging and centeredness in our own genders by spending money on products @ @ @ @ @ @ @ aware of this manipulation , can even roll our eyes at it , and still be susceptible to it .
The problem , I suppose , is that I like being an assimilationist .
I like it when people just assume I ’ m a woman without a second glance .
I like it when I don ’ t have to explain myself .
I like that if I go to buy a pink razor that ’ s more expensive than a men ’ s razor now , I never feel I have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ why I might be buying it .
This makes me feel more affirmed as an individual , but it also makes me feel like a shitty member of the trans community .
The larger political project of dismantling the terrible structures of the capitalist patriarchy continues apace , and here I am cooing over my friend giving me a bracelet that spells out my name in Morse code .
( Want to win a trans girl ’ s heart ?
Give her jewelry that involves her name somehow .
You ’ ll have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can not ignore that in my attempts to slide headfirst into womanhood , I am more or less appeasing a society that is set up to favor cis people .
I am especially doing a disservice to my nonbinary siblings , whose very existences challenge the idea that there are “ men ” and “ women ” and that ’ s it .
I am a safe version of transness , corporatized and commodified , fit for mass-market consumption .
I do not challenge you to rethink the gender binary in any real @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thing that can be given to us .
It is something we nurture and grow from within , and it comes in as many shapes and sizes as there are people .
Gender is a social construct , except for all the ways in which it sure seems like it ’ s deeply ingrained within my very self , and if you tell me I look pretty today , I will smile and thank you for the compliment .
This is not all that different from how a cis woman might navigate the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ told .
We ’ re all constantly making our own compromises with some feminine ideal that was created for us at some point , an amalgam of a million different ideas of what it means to be a woman that is internally inconsistent and makes no sense , yet holds this unattainable appeal for way too many of us .
( Men do this , too , of course . )
Maybe I run so hard toward becoming that idealized girl because I know I can never be her , due to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I run hard enough , I ’ ll get there and suddenly wake up a suburban mother of two in Omaha , Nebraska .
Maybe I wear so many dresses because I really love wearing dresses .
Maybe I ’ m just overthinking it .
There are reasons to blend in beyond self-acceptance .
Namely , the world is already cruel , and being trans only ramps up that cruelty .
If you can find a way to escape that cruelty , shouldn ’ t you ?
Let me give you an example @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Los Angeles to Santa Monica recently , I became dimly aware that a man standing right in front of me was shouting a homophobic slur at someone sitting behind me , over and over .
This other person , whom I could not see , begged him to stop , in a voice deep enough for me to assume masculinity .
I was wrong .
When the target of the man ’ s slurs launched herself at him , I saw she was wearing a woman ’ s top and skirt .
She @ @ @ @ @ @ @ down the aisle of the train and tried to land a punch or slap or something on the man .
She failed , while he dropped her to the floor , flailing at her with his fists and feet , mostly failing to connect .
Eventually , they were separated by others on the train .
The world is already cruel , and being trans only ramps up that cruelty .
If you can find a way to escape that cruelty , shouldn ’ t you ?
As the woman pulled away , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fellow trans woman , albeit one who does not pass for cis , whether she wants to or not .
I can not know her situation , but I have seen variations on her in every support group I ’ ve been to , in every young , scared woman DMing me on Twitter to ask if she , too , might be trans , as though I had the power to lift a terrible curse .
While she retreated , other passengers laughed that exhausted , relieved laugh that arises in any @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been through a tense situation are simply glad to have gotten out unscathed .
But I felt something else in the laughter , something beyond “ What the fuck was that ?
” I figured it out as I exited the train at the next stop , in front of some teenage boys who were still laughing about the altercation .
“ You see that dude ?
” one of them said .
“ He was in a skirt.
” They howled at the thought , while I was two steps ahead of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were oblivious to my presence and to my transness .
I passed , because I assimilated .
Here ’ s the part where I tell you that I turned around and told them to shut up , risking the freedom of passing to do the right thing .
Or here ’ s the part where I tell you I found the woman in the crowd of people exiting the train and walked her to wherever she was headed .
Or here ’ s the part where I tell you that I resolved to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the strictures of the binary .
But I did none of these things .
I simply quickened my pace and walked on to my appointment .
Assimilation affords me the privilege of not getting involved , of doing the easy thing instead of the right thing .
It also afforded the teens walking behind me the privilege of laughing at a cruel joke , rather than trying to push back against it .
And it afforded all of my fellow passengers the privilege of rolling our eyes when the man started yelling slurs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to get him to stop .
Assimilation lets me be seen but also not seen .
I can disappear .
And in disappearing , some part of me evaporates .
Could I have said something ?
Certainly .
Should I have said something ?
I don ’ t know .
I keep wanting to call myself a coward , but I am also right to feel scared .
What if everybody had found me out ?
What might have happened then ?
The border between my safety and something horrible is so tenuous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ am the one who ’ s asked to enforce it , not anybody who might dare to cross it .
This is insufficient as an apology to the woman on the train .
I ’ m sorry about what happened to you , and I ’ m sorry I didn ’ t stop it .
I ’ m sorry literally anybody else who could have didn ’ t shout down that man .
I hope you are okay .
I have no excuses .
I blend in because I love to wear dresses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to go out with my women friends and have no one bat an eye when they see us together .
And I blend in because I feel a power in living as my true self .
Assimilation is powerful and affirming , but it is also a bind that traps me , tempting me into closing the door behind me to all of the trans people who can not assimilate or do not want to .
It ’ s a false choice between the allure of belonging and the power of speaking out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a trans guy friend told me that sometimes trans people are so aware of their individual privileges that they become all they can see .
I didn ’ t understand what he was saying at the time .
I do now .
But my friend said something else , too , which is that one ’ s own happiness is not a sin .
Assimilating , blending in , is not a choice I made for safety reasons or even aesthetic ones .
It ’ s an expression of who I really @ @ @ @ @ @ @ holding that door open , to not close it behind me , to take a sledgehammer to its edges until it ’ s wide enough for everyone .
Womanhood is too expansive a category to be defined by limited parameters , no matter how it ’ s marketed .
Capitalism feeds off this ideal woman , but it didn ’ t strictly create her .
She ’ s an outgrowth of all of us , a golem created over millennia by an ever-shifting set of thoughts on what it means to be a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is perhaps to be more aware of this odd set of expectations , of the way you probably don ’ t need that pink razor but want it anyway .
But it ’ s not to be uniquely aware of those expectations .
I am an assimilationist not because I have failed to examine my choices or the options afforded me under capitalism , but because when I find myself affirmed by family , by friends , by random strangers , I realize how deeply intoxicating it can be to love your life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ To fight and fight and fight and discover the simple beauty of actually living the life you merely occupied before .
Emily Todd VanDerWerff is Vox ’ s critic at large , and the former TV editor for the A.V .
Club .
She previously weighed in on the 25 all-time best episodes of television for The Highlight .

Part of the Gender Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
In March 2018, a handful of days after I came out to my therapist as a trans woman, I decided to buy a razor to shave my legs.
For the first time in my life, I was aware that my legs had hair on them, and I was at once irritated by that hair and a little anxious about it. I didn’t know why, but I wanted it gone. Even though I had a perfectly good razor I used to shave my facial hair, I felt strongly that I needed something pink or purple to tackle the thicket on my legs.
So, standing there in a Target razor aisle looking for something functional but also cute, my anxiety growing as I was sure people were looking at me and seeing my secret true self and judging me accordingly, I found myself torn. The pink razor marked as explicitly “for women” was so lovely and sleek — but it was also functionally the same product as the black-and-neon-green razor for manly dudes right next to it. And the pink razor was $1 more expensive.
Intellectually, I knew the “pink tax” existed because I had spent most of my adult life reading up on women’s issues. (I wonder why?) But this was my first encounter with it in the wild, with the fact that you could want so badly to feel a sense of belonging that you would let capitalism gouge you over and over again. I wanted so desperately to indicate my essential woman-ness that I was willing to pay extra for it.
Screwing up my courage, I grabbed the razor, keeping my head down at the cash register, ready to say that it was for my wife, should anybody ask. (Newly out trans people are terrified of the gender police, who generally don’t exist except in our heads.)
That pink razor was a piece of crap, and within six months, I had to replace it. My old men’s razor — which I still use to shave what facial hair I have left — is going strong after years of use.
It was as if I was experiencing the market pressures of being a teen girl in the space of about three months
In the months thereafter, money seemingly poured out of me. It was so, so expensive to be a woman. I found myself having to buy an entirely new wardrobe, one I’m still struggling to fill out here and there. I needed new shoes. I needed makeup. Buying all this stuff in aggregate was expensive, of course, but each individual item was expensive in and of itself.
Can a man spend a lot of money on clothing? Of course. But he also has many affordable options. Finding such options in the women’s section was its own challenge. It was as if I was experiencing the market pressures of being a teen girl in the space of about three months instead of over several years.
Even beyond that, there’s the cost of laser hair removal and electrolysis to get rid of my facial hair. There are regular sessions with a therapist who specializes in gender dysphoria. There was a crash course in voice training, in an attempt to coax my old rumble into a reasonable alto. Changing my name cost almost $500, and a printout of the paperwork proving my name was changed was another $50. There are so many expenses to come, including surgeries and more documentation of my identity, and so on and so forth. It’s expensive and exhausting, and it will never end.
And yet I never ask myself why I’m doing all this. I just am. I need to.
There’s a word that comes up in trans circles often, and I think it probably describes me (or, at least, people have used it to refer to me at times, when they think I don’t know they’re doing it): assimilationist.
The best way to describe an assimilationist is to describe myself, so here’s what I’m wearing right now, on a chilly California day at the start of the year: My hair (on which I use somewhat expensive lightening shampoo to coax it toward a dirty blonde) hangs just past my chin. On my nose sit round-framed blue glasses ($500). I’m wearing a full face of makeup (my first visit to Sephora ran me $250, good fucking God), and I have on a pink sweater, a gray undershirt, black tights, and a ruffled black skirt (around $120, all told, mostly from Target). Cap this off with some dark purple running shoes ($75) and you’ve got the whole look.
This outfit would not seem out of place on just about any woman in her 30s who works in the media. It’s a solid everyday look when I don’t have to make any on-camera appearances. (I have a more expensive wardrobe for when I do.)
That’s precisely the point of the assimilationist claim: As trans people, we’re supposed to complicate the gender binary, not uphold it. By trying my damnedest not to stand out but to blend in — to tilt whatever little equation you run in your head when you see me away from “man” and toward “woman” — I’m propagating a system that hurts both trans people and women disproportionately, via everything from broad, systemic violence to the relatively minor sin of the pink tax.
Here’s the thing that gives me a thrill but probably shouldn’t: It’s working. I can count the number of times I’ve been misgendered in the past six months on two hands, and it now happens so infrequently that I can chalk it up to somebody misspeaking far more often than to a deliberate attempt to make me feel like shit. I’ve even had a few encounters where someone was shocked to learn I was trans, not cis. I’ve developed camouflage.
My justification for my style, from the first, has always been that if you Google my name, the very first page of results is filled with stories about how I’m trans. Even as I increasingly “pass” for a cis woman, I can’t escape the fact that I became a vaguely public figure and spent more than a decade publishing journalism (and a book!) under a man’s name. Even if I am invisibly trans in a crowd of people on the street, I am visibly trans once you know who I am, because unlike so many trans women, I was already visible when I transitioned.
Still, my transition has gone much, much better than I expected it to. I had certain advantages in this regard, from economics (I have much more money than the majority of trans women) to race (white trans people have the same built-in societal advantages as white people in general) to geography (California presents few structural barriers when an adult wants to transition).
I also had advantages when it came to my genetic code. My testosterone level has been low my whole life, so my body was already fairly androgynous. It didn’t take that much estrogen to shift androgyny toward traditional femininity. See also:
Same dress, same mirror, 7 months apart. pic.twitter.com/49hKYgynTN — Emily VanDerWerff (@tvoti) January 15, 2020
Many trans women have few or even none of my advantages. They cannot escape the fact that when they go out into society as themselves, they are constantly, visibly trans, with all the horrors that can bring. They can’t pay to eliminate their beard shadow. They can’t buy feminine clothes that fit their frames. They can’t spend countless hours training their voice to sound just so.
And not all trans women are traditionally feminine. Many prefer looks that might skew toward androgyny or butchness. And this is just trans women — I haven’t touched on trans men, on nonbinary people, on gender fluidity, on those who are agender.
Our goal as trans people should be to normalize all of these identities and in so doing push back against an unfairly limiting gender binary that hurts cis men and women, too. That binary imprisons all of us within a limited set of ideas of who we can be and what we are capable of, and many of the rules that govern it are arbitrary and invented by a society built by cis men for the benefit of cis men.
Okay. I agree with all of the above. But I also love to be a traditionally feminine woman. Womanhood and women in general just make more sense to me than anything else I’ve ever tried. (My attempts at male bonding over the years glistened with flop sweat.) The gender binary makes me feel more like me. I want to eliminate it. I also want to hang on to some of it. It feels like I just got here.
The thing about self-acceptance is that when you’re just getting used to it, you become an easy mark. The first time I went to Sephora, I spent way more on makeup than I ever thought possible, because the salesperson who helped me made me feel so good about myself. From the second she learned my name, she called me Emily, even though I was in full guy mode. She used she/her pronouns. She told me I was pretty. I plunked down $250, and I would have spent well over $300 if she had managed to talk me into a $70 foundation. (My wife saved me on that one.)
To be clear: None of this is the salesperson’s fault. None of it is my fault, either. This is just how society is designed to function, and to come out as trans later in life is to suddenly start careening downhill into a newer, truer gender, without some of the guardrails that snap into place when you grow up cis and figure out the ways society tries to exploit you on the grounds of gender.
It’s not like any of us are immune to these capitalist pressures. There are distinct economic expressions of “womanhood” and “manhood” that are meant to help us all find a sense of belonging and centeredness in our own genders by spending money on products to affirm them. We can be aware of this manipulation, can even roll our eyes at it, and still be susceptible to it.
The problem, I suppose, is that I like being an assimilationist. I like it when people just assume I’m a woman without a second glance. I like it when I don’t have to explain myself. I like that if I go to buy a pink razor that’s more expensive than a men’s razor now, I never feel I have to come up with an excuse for why I might be buying it.
This makes me feel more affirmed as an individual, but it also makes me feel like a shitty member of the trans community. The larger political project of dismantling the terrible structures of the capitalist patriarchy continues apace, and here I am cooing over my friend giving me a bracelet that spells out my name in Morse code. (Want to win a trans girl’s heart? Give her jewelry that involves her name somehow. You’ll have a friend for life.)
I cannot ignore that in my attempts to slide headfirst into womanhood, I am more or less appeasing a society that is set up to favor cis people. I am especially doing a disservice to my nonbinary siblings, whose very existences challenge the idea that there are “men” and “women” and that’s it. I am a safe version of transness, corporatized and commodified, fit for mass-market consumption. I do not challenge you to rethink the gender binary in any real way.
But affirmation is not a thing that can be given to us. It is something we nurture and grow from within, and it comes in as many shapes and sizes as there are people. Gender is a social construct, except for all the ways in which it sure seems like it’s deeply ingrained within my very self, and if you tell me I look pretty today, I will smile and thank you for the compliment.
This is not all that different from how a cis woman might navigate the world, or so I’m told. We’re all constantly making our own compromises with some feminine ideal that was created for us at some point, an amalgam of a million different ideas of what it means to be a woman that is internally inconsistent and makes no sense, yet holds this unattainable appeal for way too many of us. (Men do this, too, of course.)
Maybe I run so hard toward becoming that idealized girl because I know I can never be her, due to the circumstances of my birth. Maybe if I run hard enough, I’ll get there and suddenly wake up a suburban mother of two in Omaha, Nebraska. Maybe I wear so many dresses because I really love wearing dresses. Maybe I’m just overthinking it.
There are reasons to blend in beyond self-acceptance. Namely, the world is already cruel, and being trans only ramps up that cruelty. If you can find a way to escape that cruelty, shouldn’t you?
Let me give you an example. While riding the train from downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica recently, I became dimly aware that a man standing right in front of me was shouting a homophobic slur at someone sitting behind me, over and over. This other person, whom I could not see, begged him to stop, in a voice deep enough for me to assume masculinity.
I was wrong. When the target of the man’s slurs launched herself at him, I saw she was wearing a woman’s top and skirt. She had long messy hair. She windmilled down the aisle of the train and tried to land a punch or slap or something on the man. She failed, while he dropped her to the floor, flailing at her with his fists and feet, mostly failing to connect. Eventually, they were separated by others on the train.
The world is already cruel, and being trans only ramps up that cruelty. If you can find a way to escape that cruelty, shouldn’t you?
As the woman pulled away, I felt the lurch of recognizing a fellow trans woman, albeit one who does not pass for cis, whether she wants to or not. I cannot know her situation, but I have seen variations on her in every support group I’ve been to, in every young, scared woman DMing me on Twitter to ask if she, too, might be trans, as though I had the power to lift a terrible curse.
While she retreated, other passengers laughed that exhausted, relieved laugh that arises in any situation where people who’ve just been through a tense situation are simply glad to have gotten out unscathed. But I felt something else in the laughter, something beyond “What the fuck was that?” I figured it out as I exited the train at the next stop, in front of some teenage boys who were still laughing about the altercation.
“You see that dude?” one of them said. “He was in a skirt.” They howled at the thought, while I was two steps ahead of them, wearing a dress. They were oblivious to my presence and to my transness. I passed, because I assimilated.
Here’s the part where I tell you that I turned around and told them to shut up, risking the freedom of passing to do the right thing. Or here’s the part where I tell you I found the woman in the crowd of people exiting the train and walked her to wherever she was headed. Or here’s the part where I tell you that I resolved to do better, to push more against the strictures of the binary.
But I did none of these things. I simply quickened my pace and walked on to my appointment. Assimilation affords me the privilege of not getting involved, of doing the easy thing instead of the right thing. It also afforded the teens walking behind me the privilege of laughing at a cruel joke, rather than trying to push back against it. And it afforded all of my fellow passengers the privilege of rolling our eyes when the man started yelling slurs at the woman, rather than trying to get him to stop. Assimilation lets me be seen but also not seen. I can disappear. And in disappearing, some part of me evaporates.
Could I have said something? Certainly. Should I have said something? I don’t know. I keep wanting to call myself a coward, but I am also right to feel scared. What if everybody had found me out? What might have happened then? The border between my safety and something horrible is so tenuous, and societal norms dictate that I am the one who’s asked to enforce it, not anybody who might dare to cross it.
This is insufficient as an apology to the woman on the train. I’m sorry about what happened to you, and I’m sorry I didn’t stop it. I’m sorry literally anybody else who could have didn’t shout down that man. I hope you are okay. I have no excuses. I blend in because I love to wear dresses. I blend in because I love to go out with my women friends and have no one bat an eye when they see us together. And I blend in because I feel a power in living as my true self.
Assimilation is powerful and affirming, but it is also a bind that traps me, tempting me into closing the door behind me to all of the trans people who cannot assimilate or do not want to. It’s a false choice between the allure of belonging and the power of speaking out against injustice. Early in my transition, a trans guy friend told me that sometimes trans people are so aware of their individual privileges that they become all they can see. I didn’t understand what he was saying at the time. I do now.
But my friend said something else, too, which is that one’s own happiness is not a sin. Assimilating, blending in, is not a choice I made for safety reasons or even aesthetic ones. It’s an expression of who I really am. The challenge is to keep holding that door open, to not close it behind me, to take a sledgehammer to its edges until it’s wide enough for everyone. Womanhood is too expansive a category to be defined by limited parameters, no matter how it’s marketed.
Capitalism feeds off this ideal woman, but it didn’t strictly create her. She’s an outgrowth of all of us, a golem created over millennia by an ever-shifting set of thoughts on what it means to be a woman. To be a trans woman is perhaps to be more aware of this odd set of expectations, of the way you probably don’t need that pink razor but want it anyway. But it’s not to be uniquely aware of those expectations. I am an assimilationist not because I have failed to examine my choices or the options afforded me under capitalism, but because when I find myself affirmed by family, by friends, by random strangers, I realize how deeply intoxicating it can be to love your life.
What a novelty this is! To fight and fight and fight and discover the simple beauty of actually living the life you merely occupied before.
Emily Todd VanDerWerff is Vox’s critic at large, and the former TV editor for the A.V. Club. She previously weighed in on the 25 all-time best episodes of television for The Highlight.


vox--2020-02-19--How baby clothes became a pink and blue battleground

Part of the Gender Issue of The Highlight , our home for ambitious stories that explain our world .
When Laura Hunter wanted to buy a gift for a coworker ’ s baby shower , she did what a lot of people who need baby gifts in a hurry do : She drove to a big-box retailer , in this case Buy Buy Baby .
Looking for a particular swaddle — a long strip of fabric that is wrapped around a newborn to comfort them to sleep — she flagged down a sales associate .
As they twisted and turned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ short to ask Hunter an important question : Was this swaddle for a girl baby or a boy baby ?
“ It took me aback , ” says Hunter , an attorney living in Washington , DC .
“ It ’ s a swaddle for a baby .
It ’ s just a baby .
It ’ s a blanket !
” Jennifer Marmor , a podcast producer in Los Angeles , told her family and friends she didn ’ t know the sex of her child when she was pregnant because she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confrontational way to make sure she got gender-neutral clothes ( in fact , she knew she was having a boy ) .
Shopping on her own , she was constantly surprised by how aggressively gendered everything was .
Browsing in Target , she says , she ’ d find a cute onesie , notice she was in the girls ’ section , and think , “ Well , this doesn ’ t scream girl , ” before noticing an overt and ( to her ) pointless feminine detail , like “ ruffles on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the sex of their newborns .
Expectant parents are so seized with gender-reveal mania that they ’ re accidentally setting wildfires , crashing planes , and even killing people in ever-wilder stunts .
Visit Amazon for baby clothes and you ’ re asked to pick a sex before you can see any merchandise .
Retailers such as the Gap , Gerber , and Walmart all sort newborn clothing into boy and girl categories by default — indeed , this is the most common way to encounter baby clothes .
This isn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ match your gender identity is fraught , even when an adult is making a decision about their own clothes for their own body .
But how do you navigate sartorial choices for someone else , especially when that person hasn ’ t made any determination about their identity , or hasn ’ t even been born yet ?
Marmor would freeze , not knowing what to do .
On the one hand , who cares ?
But on the other , she says , buying an explicitly , pointedly gendered piece of clothing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ feels like a statement that I don ’ t necessarily want to make , either : ‘ I ’ m going to put my boy in clothes clearly for a girl !
’ ” Hunter had similar problems .
“ I brought home a cute pair of overalls with a striped yellow tee underneath them , ” for her infant son , she says .
“ Someone told me , ‘ Oh , no , that ’ s for girls .
See the frilled collar and ruffled bottom ?
’ Like , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Why can ’ t it just be a cute pair of overalls with a onesie ?
” Hunter and Marmor are among a group of new parents fueling a backlash to the hypergendered world of newborns .
Parents give lots of reasons for rejecting the options currently on the market : wanting to reuse infant clothes for future children who could be of either sex ; not wanting to advertise a love of trucks their infant almost certainly doesn ’ t have ; being surprised at the tastelessness of so many infant clothes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enforcing gender norms .
While there are some gender-neutral items on the market , they can require a huge amount of expert online shopping to find .
An expectant or new parent casually visiting the site of a big retailer could easily miss them .
Yet every well-meaning parent is terrified of unintentionally doing damage to their child , whether that means feeding them food that turns out to be unsafe , buying a crib that ’ s later recalled for some ghastly hazard , or a million other accidental disasters .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ transgender people ( a 2019 study from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute found that 62 percent of Americans said they have become more supportive toward transgender rights over the past five years ) , some parents are worried about forcing a gender identity on a child .
But above all , many new parents like Hunter and Marmor are asking themselves , isn ’ t a baby … just a baby ?
Wind back the clock just over 100 years and you ’ d be hard-pressed to tell an infant boy from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and the author of several books on the history of the gendering of children ’ s clothing , including 2012 ’ s Pink and Blue : Telling the Boys From the Girls in America .
How we ended up in a culture so obsessed with the gender identity of infants turns out to be a complicated , century-long tale involving everything from Sigmund Freud to 1980s advances in medical technology .
For most of the history of the Western world , Paoletti says , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of human being , sexless and dressed more or less the same regardless of gender .
In Europe — and , later , the United States — all babies typically wore swaddles , then dresses until they were as old as 7 ( though , to be fair , there were boys ’ and girls ’ dresses of slightly different cuts ) .
Just look at a painting from mid-1700s Connecticut , Boys in a Garden , which shows two young boys , the older one in breeches and a frock coat ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ younger one in an elaborate gown not uncommon for his age .
Throughout the past two millennia , babies in art were depicted nude , in gowns , or in swaddles of various types .
Consider Jesus .
He is perhaps the most famous baby of all time , but good luck finding a sculpture of him in a tiny pair of pants .
There are many reasons for this .
In some parts of Europe , wealthy parents preferred long gowns that prevented their children from crawling , which they considered base @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a loose gown is also easy to change , and in later times , white gowns were easy to bleach .
But there were philosophical reasons for the gender-neutral treatment of young children , as well .
Victorians , especially , were concerned with thinking of children as pure , pre-sexed beings for as much of their lives as possible .
Parenting convention at the time held that “ draw [ ing ] attention to children ’ s sex prematurely is to risk all kinds of deviation , ” explains Paoletti .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The boys will be homosexual .
They ’ ll masturbate too much.
” Any gender attribution to a young child was frowned upon , she says ; even something as relatively benign as calling a male child “ such a little man ” had “ a kind of creepiness to it from the 19th-century point of view.
” Giving babies gendered qualities was , simply , gross .
The way we dress babies began to change with Sigmund Freud ’ s 1905 publication of “ Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sexual characteristics were innate , but also that our experiences as children could influence us for the rest of our lives .
Freud ’ s theory of identification was particularly influential in the early 20th century .
It held that at a certain point , children must identify with one or the other parent and adopt their characteristics ; a boy identifying with his mother was supposedly the root of a whole host of mental disorders .
This belief merged with several others , notably those of psychologist G. Stanley Hall , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ create a period in the 1910s and ’ 20s focused on establishing ever-younger children as proper men .
( This focus was almost entirely on men ) .
“ How do we toughen up our boys and make them more manly ?
” was a common concern throughout that period , which was addressed in various ways , says Paoletti , including the 1910 founding of the Boy Scouts of America .
Dresses for boys older than infants went out of fashion , along with the idea that early gendering would somehow harm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ development .
Dresses for infants , however , existed at least into the 1950s .
The next major touchpoint — in many ways the one that began our modern gendered world — is the rise of amniocentesis in the 1980s .
This test , originally given to pregnant women to check for birth abnormalities ( principally the chromosomal markers for Down syndrome ) , had the side effect of being the first reliable assessment to accurately determine sex before birth .
Hunger for both of these results helped amnio explode in popularity .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s a boy or a girl , ’ a very modern query to someone still obviously expectant , ” Patricia A. Nelson of Albuquerque , New Mexico , wrote to the New York Times in response to a column on amnio in summer 1988 .
According to the Times , about 3,000 women each year were having the procedure in 1975 ; by 1990 , it was 250,000 .
Parents now knew the sex of their baby before birth , which helped spark a kind of mania for gendered dolls , frilly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and blue things of basically every size and shape , according to Paoletti .
New parents were almost irresistibly compelled to buy as many gender-specific things as they could .
“ Now what we have is that the children are just like mini adults from almost the point they appear in the world and are dressed accordingly , ” said Hazel Clark , a professor of design studies and fashion studies at the Parsons School of Design .
Retailers have been engaged in an escalating gendered arms race in children ’ s clothing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the wave of hypergendered clothing may be cresting , at least among older children and teens .
According to a 2016 study from trend forecasting agency J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group , a full 56 percent of Americans ages 13 to 20 shopped outside of their chosen gender , the same percentage said they knew someone who went by gender-neutral pronouns , and 81 percent said a person shouldn ’ t be defined by their gender .
The same year , a UCLA study estimated that 1.4 million transgender people live in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t want to feel restricted ... to what ’ s historically been male or female ?
That ’ s not going anywhere .
That ’ s only going to expand , ” said Christina Zervanos , the head of public relations at Phluid , a Manhattan boutique that exclusively sells nongendered clothing .
She sees a general softening of strict gender norms across society and believes it will continue to have ripple effects beyond those who identify as trans — maybe even to new parents .
And gender-neutral doesn ’ t have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boring tan sack that we pour our infants into , like a bundle of potatoes .
Indeed , every parent interviewed for this story talked about being frustrated that retailers seem to think “ unisex ” means “ gray.
” They want vibrant colors — yellows , greens , reds , patterns , drawings — just not things that are restrictively gendered .
“ People assume that if you ’ re going to have something that ’ s gender-neutral , then it ’ s going to be oversized ... or drapery , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
If you walk into the store , there ’ s a lot of color and a lot of print.
” If retailers were quick to catch on to and promote the rise of gendered baby clothes , says Clark , they should also reflect this change in society .
“ The convention of having the boys ’ and the girls ’ section , [ and ] the way of sort of directing the consumer , and making assumptions about where the consumer will be going to find the clothes has got to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she says .
Some have already made strides .
COS and its parent brand , H & M , for example , exclusively offer unisex or gender-free infant clothes .
The Gap recently launched a hub for gender-neutral baby clothes , the Neutral Shop , which has been steadily growing in popularity , though it isn ’ t particularly easy to find when poking around the Gap ’ s website ( it ’ s effectively hidden under the heading “ Newborn 0 to 24m ” ) .
But making moves is easier than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Amazon , Walmart , Target , Buy Buy Baby , Carter ’ s , the Gap , H & M , COS , Old Navy , and the boutique infant brand Mac & Moon for this story ; Target was the only brand to offer a comment on the record , via email .
This is that comment in its entirety : For most of my life , the sartorial choices of infants weren ’ t , shall we say , top of mind .
But this past fall , my wife gave @ @ @ @ @ @ @ girl .
When shopping , I was surprised at how early and how often I was required to make choices about my daughter ’ s likes and dislikes and her presentation to the world .
Of course , all those choices aren ’ t really about my daughter ; they ’ re about me .
Parents use our children to signal things about ourselves to other people .
For parents , there ’ s lots we want to say : We like the Ramones , we shop responsibly , and we care about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decades , the sex of our babies — and all the gendered characteristics that supposedly go with it — was high on that list .
From birth , we wanted people to know about our sweet girls and our tough boys so much that when all else fails , we strapped pink bows on their heads so it ’ s utterly impossible for anyone to mistake a girl for a boy .
Now , we wonder , are some tasteful , colorful , attractive gender-neutral options too much to ask ?
My wife @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and polka-dots , and an adorable sweater with cartoon bears that the retailer told us was for boys .
The gender fixation is a historical anomaly , a perfect storm of technology , psychology , and anxiety about a changing world .
But the world is changing , inexorably .
And many new parents agree with the Victorians : There is something creepy in waxing lyrical about the gender characteristics of your infant .
There ’ s something sensible in this 19th-century way of treating an infant as something of a blank slate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or mommy ’ s little hellraiser , but , you know , just potential — a beautiful , lovable human that could become almost anything .
Chris Chafin covers the business of culture for publications including Rolling Stone , Vulture , and the BBC .
He also hosts a movie podcast .

Part of the Gender Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
When Laura Hunter wanted to buy a gift for a coworker’s baby shower, she did what a lot of people who need baby gifts in a hurry do: She drove to a big-box retailer, in this case Buy Buy Baby. Looking for a particular swaddle — a long strip of fabric that is wrapped around a newborn to comfort them to sleep — she flagged down a sales associate.
As they twisted and turned through the aisles, the associate stopped short to ask Hunter an important question: Was this swaddle for a girl baby or a boy baby?
“It took me aback,” says Hunter, an attorney living in Washington, DC. “It’s a swaddle for a baby. It’s just a baby. It’s a blanket!”
Jennifer Marmor, a podcast producer in Los Angeles, told her family and friends she didn’t know the sex of her child when she was pregnant because she thought it was the simplest and least confrontational way to make sure she got gender-neutral clothes (in fact, she knew she was having a boy).
Shopping on her own, she was constantly surprised by how aggressively gendered everything was. Browsing in Target, she says, she’d find a cute onesie, notice she was in the girls’ section, and think, “Well, this doesn’t scream girl,” before noticing an overt and (to her) pointless feminine detail, like “ruffles on the butt.”
Americans are obsessed with the sex of their newborns. Expectant parents are so seized with gender-reveal mania that they’re accidentally setting wildfires, crashing planes, and even killing people in ever-wilder stunts. Visit Amazon for baby clothes and you’re asked to pick a sex before you can see any merchandise. Retailers such as the Gap, Gerber, and Walmart all sort newborn clothing into boy and girl categories by default — indeed, this is the most common way to encounter baby clothes.
This isn’t limited to children. Finding clothes that match your gender identity is fraught, even when an adult is making a decision about their own clothes for their own body. But how do you navigate sartorial choices for someone else, especially when that person hasn’t made any determination about their identity, or hasn’t even been born yet?
Marmor would freeze, not knowing what to do. On the one hand, who cares? But on the other, she says, buying an explicitly, pointedly gendered piece of clothing for a baby of the opposite sex “feels like a statement that I don’t necessarily want to make, either: ‘I’m going to put my boy in clothes clearly for a girl!’”
Hunter had similar problems. “I brought home a cute pair of overalls with a striped yellow tee underneath them,” for her infant son, she says. “Someone told me, ‘Oh, no, that’s for girls. See the frilled collar and ruffled bottom?’ Like, he’s 5 months old. Why can’t it just be a cute pair of overalls with a onesie?”
Hunter and Marmor are among a group of new parents fueling a backlash to the hypergendered world of newborns. Parents give lots of reasons for rejecting the options currently on the market: wanting to reuse infant clothes for future children who could be of either sex; not wanting to advertise a love of trucks their infant almost certainly doesn’t have; being surprised at the tastelessness of so many infant clothes; or, yes, feeling uncomfortable enforcing gender norms. While there are some gender-neutral items on the market, they can require a huge amount of expert online shopping to find. An expectant or new parent casually visiting the site of a big retailer could easily miss them.
Yet every well-meaning parent is terrified of unintentionally doing damage to their child, whether that means feeding them food that turns out to be unsafe, buying a crib that’s later recalled for some ghastly hazard, or a million other accidental disasters. And with the recent increase in support for transgender people (a 2019 study from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute found that 62 percent of Americans said they have become more supportive toward transgender rights over the past five years), some parents are worried about forcing a gender identity on a child.
But above all, many new parents like Hunter and Marmor are asking themselves, isn’t a baby … just a baby?
Wind back the clock just over 100 years and you’d be hard-pressed to tell an infant boy from an infant girl, says Jo Paoletti, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and the author of several books on the history of the gendering of children’s clothing, including 2012’s Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys From the Girls in America.
How we ended up in a culture so obsessed with the gender identity of infants turns out to be a complicated, century-long tale involving everything from Sigmund Freud to 1980s advances in medical technology.
For most of the history of the Western world, Paoletti says, infants were considered almost a different class of human being, sexless and dressed more or less the same regardless of gender. In Europe — and, later, the United States — all babies typically wore swaddles, then dresses until they were as old as 7 (though, to be fair, there were boys’ and girls’ dresses of slightly different cuts). Just look at a painting from mid-1700s Connecticut, Boys in a Garden, which shows two young boys, the older one in breeches and a frock coat (“boy clothes”), the younger one in an elaborate gown not uncommon for his age.
Throughout the past two millennia, babies in art were depicted nude, in gowns, or in swaddles of various types. Consider Jesus. He is perhaps the most famous baby of all time, but good luck finding a sculpture of him in a tiny pair of pants.
There are many reasons for this. In some parts of Europe, wealthy parents preferred long gowns that prevented their children from crawling, which they considered base and animalistic. Practically, of course, a loose gown is also easy to change, and in later times, white gowns were easy to bleach.
But there were philosophical reasons for the gender-neutral treatment of young children, as well. Victorians, especially, were concerned with thinking of children as pure, pre-sexed beings for as much of their lives as possible. Parenting convention at the time held that “draw[ing] attention to children’s sex prematurely is to risk all kinds of deviation,” explains Paoletti. “They’ll become sexually precocious. The boys will be homosexual. They’ll masturbate too much.” Any gender attribution to a young child was frowned upon, she says; even something as relatively benign as calling a male child “such a little man” had “a kind of creepiness to it from the 19th-century point of view.” Giving babies gendered qualities was, simply, gross.
The way we dress babies began to change with Sigmund Freud’s 1905 publication of “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” which held not only that sexual characteristics were innate, but also that our experiences as children could influence us for the rest of our lives.
Freud’s theory of identification was particularly influential in the early 20th century. It held that at a certain point, children must identify with one or the other parent and adopt their characteristics; a boy identifying with his mother was supposedly the root of a whole host of mental disorders.
This belief merged with several others, notably those of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who studied the sexuality of adolescents, to create a period in the 1910s and ’20s focused on establishing ever-younger children as proper men. (This focus was almost entirely on men).
“How do we toughen up our boys and make them more manly?” was a common concern throughout that period, which was addressed in various ways, says Paoletti, including the 1910 founding of the Boy Scouts of America. Dresses for boys older than infants went out of fashion, along with the idea that early gendering would somehow harm a child’s psychological and sexual development. Dresses for infants, however, existed at least into the 1950s.
The next major touchpoint — in many ways the one that began our modern gendered world — is the rise of amniocentesis in the 1980s. This test, originally given to pregnant women to check for birth abnormalities (principally the chromosomal markers for Down syndrome), had the side effect of being the first reliable assessment to accurately determine sex before birth. Hunger for both of these results helped amnio explode in popularity.
“‘Do you know if it’s a boy or a girl,’ a very modern query to someone still obviously expectant,” Patricia A. Nelson of Albuquerque, New Mexico, wrote to the New York Times in response to a column on amnio in summer 1988. According to the Times, about 3,000 women each year were having the procedure in 1975; by 1990, it was 250,000.
Parents now knew the sex of their baby before birth, which helped spark a kind of mania for gendered dolls, frilly onesies, tiny cars, and pink and blue things of basically every size and shape, according to Paoletti. New parents were almost irresistibly compelled to buy as many gender-specific things as they could.
“Now what we have is that the children are just like mini adults from almost the point they appear in the world and are dressed accordingly,” said Hazel Clark, a professor of design studies and fashion studies at the Parsons School of Design. Retailers have been engaged in an escalating gendered arms race in children’s clothing ever since.
There is evidence that the wave of hypergendered clothing may be cresting, at least among older children and teens. According to a 2016 study from trend forecasting agency J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group, a full 56 percent of Americans ages 13 to 20 shopped outside of their chosen gender, the same percentage said they knew someone who went by gender-neutral pronouns, and 81 percent said a person shouldn’t be defined by their gender. The same year, a UCLA study estimated that 1.4 million transgender people live in the United States.
“People who don’t want to feel restricted ... to what’s historically been male or female? That’s not going anywhere. That’s only going to expand,” said Christina Zervanos, the head of public relations at Phluid, a Manhattan boutique that exclusively sells nongendered clothing. She sees a general softening of strict gender norms across society and believes it will continue to have ripple effects beyond those who identify as trans — maybe even to new parents.
And gender-neutral doesn’t have to mean some kind of massive, boring tan sack that we pour our infants into, like a bundle of potatoes. Indeed, every parent interviewed for this story talked about being frustrated that retailers seem to think “unisex” means “gray.” They want vibrant colors — yellows, greens, reds, patterns, drawings — just not things that are restrictively gendered.
“People assume that if you’re going to have something that’s gender-neutral, then it’s going to be oversized ... or drapery,” says Zervanos. “We celebrate color. If you walk into the store, there’s a lot of color and a lot of print.”
If retailers were quick to catch on to and promote the rise of gendered baby clothes, says Clark, they should also reflect this change in society.
“The convention of having the boys’ and the girls’ section, [and] the way of sort of directing the consumer, and making assumptions about where the consumer will be going to find the clothes has got to be rethought by the retailer,” she says.
Some have already made strides. COS and its parent brand, H&M, for example, exclusively offer unisex or gender-free infant clothes. The Gap recently launched a hub for gender-neutral baby clothes, the Neutral Shop, which has been steadily growing in popularity, though it isn’t particularly easy to find when poking around the Gap’s website (it’s effectively hidden under the heading “Newborn 0 to 24m”).
But making moves is easier than staking out a position. Vox contacted Amazon, Walmart, Target, Buy Buy Baby, Carter’s, the Gap, H&M, COS, Old Navy, and the boutique infant brand Mac & Moon for this story; Target was the only brand to offer a comment on the record, via email. This is that comment in its entirety:
We organize clothing by gender in stores and on Target.com. We understand parents don’t always know whether they are having a boy or a girl, so we intentionally create products that span a variety of colors, prints, and patterns, including offering a number of more neutral aesthetics. We also organize baby clothing on Target.com in a unisex baby clothing category to make it easy for our guests to find.
For most of my life, the sartorial choices of infants weren’t, shall we say, top of mind. But this past fall, my wife gave birth to our first child, a girl. When shopping, I was surprised at how early and how often I was required to make choices about my daughter’s likes and dislikes and her presentation to the world.
Of course, all those choices aren’t really about my daughter; they’re about me. Parents use our children to signal things about ourselves to other people. For parents, there’s lots we want to say: We like the Ramones, we shop responsibly, and we care about the environment. For the past few decades, the sex of our babies — and all the gendered characteristics that supposedly go with it — was high on that list. From birth, we wanted people to know about our sweet girls and our tough boys so much that when all else fails, we strapped pink bows on their heads so it’s utterly impossible for anyone to mistake a girl for a boy.
Now, we wonder, are some tasteful, colorful, attractive gender-neutral options too much to ask? My wife and I bought a lot of stripes and polka-dots, and an adorable sweater with cartoon bears that the retailer told us was for boys.
The gender fixation is a historical anomaly, a perfect storm of technology, psychology, and anxiety about a changing world. But the world is changing, inexorably. And many new parents agree with the Victorians: There is something creepy in waxing lyrical about the gender characteristics of your infant. There’s something sensible in this 19th-century way of treating an infant as something of a blank slate, not daddy’s little girl or mommy’s little hellraiser, but, you know, just potential — a beautiful, lovable human that could become almost anything.
Chris Chafin covers the business of culture for publications including Rolling Stone, Vulture, and the BBC. He also hosts a movie podcast.


vox--2020-02-19--The pungent legacy of Axe Body Spray

The pungent legacy of Axe Body Spray

Part of the Gender Issue of The Highlight , our home for ambitious stories that explain our world .
Was there ever a time more suited to the whims of a male American teen than the early aughts ?
The video game Grand Theft Auto III had just shipped .
LimeWire made Shaggy ’ s entire discography free and accessible .
Hollywood was bullish on Seann William Scott .
And then , in 2002 , Axe arrived .
A body spray meant to split the difference between deodorant and cologne , Axe bulldozed the senses with a fragrance so strong @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clung to — like Febreze , or a bad reputation .
Almost 20 years later , it hasn ’ t managed to shake its association with the scent of middle school .
Its introduction to drugstore aisles was attended by a series of notorious ad campaigns built on naughty jokes and blunt promises , the crux of them involving a parade of women lusting after some schmo .
Over the next decade , Axe evolved to include deodorant sticks , shower gels , and hair care .
But even as its product line @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and shifting sensibilities of the modern metrosexual man , its branding stuck to old-school attitudes about romance .
In ads suggesting that its scents would overpower all resistance , Axe pitched itself as artillery for a perpetual battle of the sexes — the howitzer of attraction .
It was a winning formula : Axe sold $ 71 million worth of bottled machismo in 2006 , just four years after entering the US market .
Today , the iconic ad campaign feels fossilized , obsessed with a bygone vision of masculinity .
( Axe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still enjoys annual global revenues of more than $ 1 billion — comparable to a decade ago — it has posted year-over-year declines in the cultural cachet department . )
Nevertheless , those 2000s-era commercials continue to notch thousands of views on YouTube .
There ’ s the one in which an attractive spokeswoman spanks herself with the arm of a mannequin she just demo-sprayed .
There ’ s the one with the guy made of chocolate who gets licked in a darkened movie theater .
Part of these ads ’ charisma rests @ @ @ @ @ @ @ believe that its target audience was 20-something men for whom quick-draw sexual episodes were a semi-regular occurrence ; in fact , the brand ’ s power user was a 13-year-old boy with a mom who humored him .
Glimpsed from the vantage point of the # MeToo era , Axe looks like a spasm of late patriarchy , but its legacy is complicated by the women who helped develop and champion it and the environment that teen boys fostered with it .
To America ’ s horniest pubescents , it didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ real.
” It only mattered that the body spray was .
The scents smelled like what they had been told men should smell like : patchouli and sandalwood and musk ; like Burt Reynolds in that famous Cosmo centerfold .
That was the feeling of dousing your barren chest in two ounces of uncut manstank .
If the sprays imparted that tiny bit of confidence , if they helped gangly tweens lurch their way toward adulthood , what was the harm ?
As it turns out , we ’ re still asking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in France , under personal care behemoth Unilever , which launched the line with three original scents : Amber , Musk , and Spice .
But the brand as we know it today was born 12 years later when the company handed advertising duties to hip London agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in 1995 .
( For trademark reasons , Axe is called Lynx in the UK and a few other countries . )
At the time , Axe had flattening sales and stale marketing that leaned on the kind of self-serious fragrance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ jawlines — “ that you see in 101 different ads , ” says Sir John Hegarty , BBH ’ s co-founder .
The brand needed a facelift .
Hegarty and his team reasoned that Axe ’ s missing ingredient wasn ’ t sex , per se .
It was irony .
The brand was already gesturing , clumsily , toward seduction , but that only got you so far .
Among a younger , savvier audience , the implication of sex wasn ’ t subversive ; it was hackneyed .
Nobody believed a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for its wearer .
Leaning into the absurdity of that proposition let BBH deliver its message with a fat wink .
“ So we came up with this whole strategy about the Axe Effect , as though it was this amazing effect that once you spray it on , any woman would fall for you , ” Hegarty said .
“ Which of course is nonsense.
” The Axe Effect anchored ads for the next 20 years .
For the message to land , the guys had to be geeky , a bit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bond doesn ’ t need the Axe Effect .
The women would be stunners .
That was the joke : The starker the hotness differential , the more it beggared belief , the more clearly the ads would present as self-aware .
“ Really , you were talking to 15- to 18-year-olds , ” Hegarty said .
“ And you were talking to a group of kids who were emerging into adulthood who needed confidence .
I mean , the background to all this is they were very insecure.
” Suddenly a worldview @ @ @ @ @ @ @ commercial to use the strategy , which depicts an awkward young man at a cocktail party who turns suave as soon as he applies the spray , conjures a dystopian vision of adulthood .
There are elaborate cocktails , freestanding pieces of art , finger foods .
Axe promises not just to help boys get the girl , but to help them navigate a world that punishes inexperience .
Take as a given that teenage boys are deathly afraid of their perceived immaturity .
Imagine or remember a world in which the opinions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ everything , and girls belonged to a mysterious order that you thought about constantly — and occasionally consulted — but whose value-add was theoretical .
To be able to go to the drug store and spend a few bucks on a spray can that cleanly telegraphed a worldview that assured peers you wanted the same things they did : How could you not prize that kind of commodity ?
“ It ’ s the easiest possible way to try and become a man , ” said Frank Karioris , a sociologist at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ It doesn ’ t take labor , it doesn ’ t take work , it doesn ’ t take money ... it just takes you using Axe.
” He suggested that although the brand offered no real utility when it came to actually picking up women , its grammar of seduction helped affirm a sense of manliness — “ particularly for teenage boys , who are told that having sex somehow is the thing that defines you being a man , ” he said .
The ads changed a lot as Axe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ around to remind viewers who the product was really for , like the floppy haircuts and unripped torsos .
The application ritual always involved an extended crop-dusting over the chest .
Of course , Axe took liberties with its suggested volume .
( “ Spray more , get more , ” read one straightforward tagline . )
If your olfactory nerves were irreparably frayed , if you can still picture the fog of your junior high gym , blame the ritual , and the unstoppable appeal of a reusable prop for teenage boys @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Axe was also targeting their mothers , who often did the grocery shopping , and who were among the most important stakeholders in their sons ’ hygiene habits .
The explicit nature of Axe ’ s branding , not to mention its infamous pungency , made an alliance between moms and Axe counterintuitive — until you were in the company of a sweaty 15-year-old .
“ I ’ ve got two sons , ” said Rosie Arnold , a former BBH employee and the creative director on some of Axe ’ s most @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ‘ Oh my God , doesn ’ t Axe or Lynx smell awful ?
’ I ’ m like , ‘ Not as awful as teenage boys.
’ ” The brand counted girlfriends as another constituency and regularly tested its campaigns with young women , many of whom liked the ads .
“ I adored the Axe advertising , ” said Cindy Gallop , the president of BBH New York during Axe ’ s stateside launch .
“ I thought it was fantastic , because it was absolutely on the right side @ @ @ @ @ @ @ profane .
And yet , in some ways , women were beside the point .
One mid-aughts commercial featured Ben Affleck playing himself over the course of a regular day .
As he walks around and does his errands , he tallies the number of women who check him out .
At the end of the spot , Affleck enters a hotel elevator with a geeky blue-collar guy ( played by a young Scoot McNairy ) and the two compare their numbers .
The joke is that McNairy , an impecunious nobody covered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attention as an A-list Hollywood star — but the metajoke is that after 12 hours of female come-ons , both men are more concerned with homosocial posturing than actually getting lucky .
The ad lays bare Axe ’ s sometimes contradictory , sometimes complementary messages .
McNairy ’ s cartoonish success with women proves that when you have Axe , “ You don ’ t need to be a good talker , you don ’ t need to be the most attractive , you don ’ t need to be wealthy , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ perfect job , ” as Karioris put it .
But his levered sexual capital isn ’ t spent on sex ; instead , it ’ s used to extract respect from Affleck .
The same insecurity that powered the Axe Effect ultimately ate it from the inside .
An existential threat was brewing — not within the FCC or bronchially besieged gym teachers , but something far more vital : sales .
By 2013 , the rate of global growth “ had declined a little bit , ” said Fernando Desouches , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ development director .
Unilever was forced to confront the possibility that the Axe Effect no longer resonated with adolescent dudes .
That year , the company conducted a study of more than 3,500 hundred men in 10 countries , poking at conceptions of masculinity and self-esteem .
“ When we talked to people , we realized that men were in a different place , ” Desouches said .
He had worked on Dove ’ s groundbreaking “ Real Beauty ” campaign and saw parallels in the socialscape .
In describing them to me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ If the Axe Effect was saying “ that you ’ re not good enough — not attractive enough — until you wear a product that will make you attractive , this is not empowering.
” Other tectonic forces were at work , aptly summarized on Unilever ’ s website : “ We know that the rules of attraction are changing and that it is about connection , not conquest.
” Management had come around to the idea that women were not prizes to be won .
Teens had , too , in their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ relentlessly polished its image as a tool for the needy that it had started to become associated with them .
“ [ T ] o most high school and college-aged males , Axe had essentially become the brand for pathetic losers , ” writes Martin Lindstrom in his book Brandwashed .
In 2016 , Unilever introduced a new platform animated by the tagline “ Find Your Magic.
” This campaign treats empowerment as teleological : Young men are told to find what makes them special ( there ’ s got ta be something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( whatever it is ) .
The anthem commercial is strategic and sensible and well-made and doomed to fade from our collective memory like 99 percent of all marketing efforts .
It might yet save Axe from stigma , but at the cost of the brand ’ s iconoclasm .
The architects of the Axe Effect , for their part , aren ’ t sure it needed saving at all — at least not the strategy that informed the original messaging .
Like everything else related to sex and gender , the wake @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a frank discussion of Axe ’ s faults .
“ When it comes to the Me Too generation , of course you ’ ve got to be sensitive to that , ” Hegarty said .
“ You can ’ t ignore it .
You can ’ t be on the wrong side of the debate.
” But he argued that seduction still ought to be respected .
“ Since the beginning of time , the guy who ’ s been able to seduce the girl is the one that wins out .
And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Gallop maintains that Axe ’ s early advertising exploded taboos surrounding women ’ s libidos and should be viewed as a net positive .
But didn ’ t the Axe Effect imply that men needn ’ t worry about impressing a woman on their own merits because Axe would hotwire a sexual outcome no matter what ?
She laughed .
“ Good God , man , you are really overthinking this , ” she said .
“ It ’ s only fucking advertising.
” Mac Schwerin is an advertising copywriter and freelance @ @ @ @ @ @ @

Part of the Gender Issue of The Highlight, our home for ambitious stories that explain our world.
Was there ever a time more suited to the whims of a male American teen than the early aughts? The video game Grand Theft Auto III had just shipped. LimeWire made Shaggy’s entire discography free and accessible. Hollywood was bullish on Seann William Scott.
And then, in 2002, Axe arrived. A body spray meant to split the difference between deodorant and cologne, Axe bulldozed the senses with a fragrance so strong it seemed to precede the bodies it clung to — like Febreze, or a bad reputation. Almost 20 years later, it hasn’t managed to shake its association with the scent of middle school.
Its introduction to drugstore aisles was attended by a series of notorious ad campaigns built on naughty jokes and blunt promises, the crux of them involving a parade of women lusting after some schmo. Over the next decade, Axe evolved to include deodorant sticks, shower gels, and hair care. But even as its product line began to reflect the refined grooming habits and shifting sensibilities of the modern metrosexual man, its branding stuck to old-school attitudes about romance. In ads suggesting that its scents would overpower all resistance, Axe pitched itself as artillery for a perpetual battle of the sexes — the howitzer of attraction. It was a winning formula: Axe sold $71 million worth of bottled machismo in 2006, just four years after entering the US market.
Today, the iconic ad campaign feels fossilized, obsessed with a bygone vision of masculinity. (Axe rebranded in 2016, and although it still enjoys annual global revenues of more than $1 billion — comparable to a decade ago — it has posted year-over-year declines in the cultural cachet department.) Nevertheless, those 2000s-era commercials continue to notch thousands of views on YouTube. There’s the one in which an attractive spokeswoman spanks herself with the arm of a mannequin she just demo-sprayed. There’s the one with the guy made of chocolate who gets licked in a darkened movie theater.
Part of these ads’ charisma rests on misdirection. Axe would have anthropologists believe that its target audience was 20-something men for whom quick-draw sexual episodes were a semi-regular occurrence; in fact, the brand’s power user was a 13-year-old boy with a mom who humored him.
Glimpsed from the vantage point of the #MeToo era, Axe looks like a spasm of late patriarchy, but its legacy is complicated by the women who helped develop and champion it and the environment that teen boys fostered with it. To America’s horniest pubescents, it didn’t matter that the ads weren’t “real.” It only mattered that the body spray was. The scents smelled like what they had been told men should smell like: patchouli and sandalwood and musk; like Burt Reynolds in that famous Cosmo centerfold. That was the feeling of dousing your barren chest in two ounces of uncut manstank. If the sprays imparted that tiny bit of confidence, if they helped gangly tweens lurch their way toward adulthood, what was the harm? As it turns out, we’re still asking.
Axe was officially born in 1983, in France, under personal care behemoth Unilever, which launched the line with three original scents: Amber, Musk, and Spice. But the brand as we know it today was born 12 years later when the company handed advertising duties to hip London agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty in 1995. (For trademark reasons, Axe is called Lynx in the UK and a few other countries.) At the time, Axe had flattening sales and stale marketing that leaned on the kind of self-serious fragrance tropes — stock jazz tracks, square jawlines — “that you see in 101 different ads,” says Sir John Hegarty, BBH’s co-founder. The brand needed a facelift.
Hegarty and his team reasoned that Axe’s missing ingredient wasn’t sex, per se. It was irony. The brand was already gesturing, clumsily, toward seduction, but that only got you so far. Among a younger, savvier audience, the implication of sex wasn’t subversive; it was hackneyed. Nobody believed a body spray could single-handedly seal the deal for its wearer. Leaning into the absurdity of that proposition let BBH deliver its message with a fat wink.
“So we came up with this whole strategy about the Axe Effect, as though it was this amazing effect that once you spray it on, any woman would fall for you,” Hegarty said. “Which of course is nonsense.” The Axe Effect anchored ads for the next 20 years.
For the message to land, the guys had to be geeky, a bit socially deficient, and relatable — James Bond doesn’t need the Axe Effect. The women would be stunners. That was the joke: The starker the hotness differential, the more it beggared belief, the more clearly the ads would present as self-aware.
“Really, you were talking to 15- to 18-year-olds,” Hegarty said. “And you were talking to a group of kids who were emerging into adulthood who needed confidence. I mean, the background to all this is they were very insecure.” Suddenly a worldview coheres. The brand’s first commercial to use the strategy, which depicts an awkward young man at a cocktail party who turns suave as soon as he applies the spray, conjures a dystopian vision of adulthood. There are elaborate cocktails, freestanding pieces of art, finger foods. Axe promises not just to help boys get the girl, but to help them navigate a world that punishes inexperience.
Take as a given that teenage boys are deathly afraid of their perceived immaturity. Imagine or remember a world in which the opinions of your male friends and classmates were everything, and girls belonged to a mysterious order that you thought about constantly — and occasionally consulted — but whose value-add was theoretical. To be able to go to the drug store and spend a few bucks on a spray can that cleanly telegraphed a worldview that assured peers you wanted the same things they did: How could you not prize that kind of commodity?
“It’s the easiest possible way to try and become a man,” said Frank Karioris, a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh who studies masculinity. “It doesn’t take labor, it doesn’t take work, it doesn’t take money ... it just takes you using Axe.” He suggested that although the brand offered no real utility when it came to actually picking up women, its grammar of seduction helped affirm a sense of manliness — “particularly for teenage boys, who are told that having sex somehow is the thing that defines you being a man,” he said.
The ads changed a lot as Axe grew up, but certain elements stuck around to remind viewers who the product was really for, like the floppy haircuts and unripped torsos. The application ritual always involved an extended crop-dusting over the chest. Of course, Axe took liberties with its suggested volume. (“Spray more, get more,” read one straightforward tagline.) If your olfactory nerves were irreparably frayed, if you can still picture the fog of your junior high gym, blame the ritual, and the unstoppable appeal of a reusable prop for teenage boys to play-act manhood.
Targeting teens meant Axe was also targeting their mothers, who often did the grocery shopping, and who were among the most important stakeholders in their sons’ hygiene habits. The explicit nature of Axe’s branding, not to mention its infamous pungency, made an alliance between moms and Axe counterintuitive — until you were in the company of a sweaty 15-year-old. “I’ve got two sons,” said Rosie Arnold, a former BBH employee and the creative director on some of Axe’s most celebrated ads. “When people say, ‘Oh my God, doesn’t Axe or Lynx smell awful?’ I’m like, ‘Not as awful as teenage boys.’”
The brand counted girlfriends as another constituency and regularly tested its campaigns with young women, many of whom liked the ads. “I adored the Axe advertising,” said Cindy Gallop, the president of BBH New York during Axe’s stateside launch. “I thought it was fantastic, because it was absolutely on the right side of that line” between cheeky and profane.
And yet, in some ways, women were beside the point. One mid-aughts commercial featured Ben Affleck playing himself over the course of a regular day. As he walks around and does his errands, he tallies the number of women who check him out. At the end of the spot, Affleck enters a hotel elevator with a geeky blue-collar guy (played by a young Scoot McNairy) and the two compare their numbers. The joke is that McNairy, an impecunious nobody covered in Axe, gets 20 times the attention as an A-list Hollywood star — but the metajoke is that after 12 hours of female come-ons, both men are more concerned with homosocial posturing than actually getting lucky.
The ad lays bare Axe’s sometimes contradictory, sometimes complementary messages. McNairy’s cartoonish success with women proves that when you have Axe, “You don’t need to be a good talker, you don’t need to be the most attractive, you don’t need to be wealthy, you don’t need to have the perfect job,” as Karioris put it. But his levered sexual capital isn’t spent on sex; instead, it’s used to extract respect from Affleck.
The same insecurity that powered the Axe Effect ultimately ate it from the inside. An existential threat was brewing — not within the FCC or bronchially besieged gym teachers, but something far more vital: sales. By 2013, the rate of global growth “had declined a little bit,” said Fernando Desouches, who was then Axe’s global brand development director. Unilever was forced to confront the possibility that the Axe Effect no longer resonated with adolescent dudes.
That year, the company conducted a study of more than 3,500 hundred men in 10 countries, poking at conceptions of masculinity and self-esteem. “When we talked to people, we realized that men were in a different place,” Desouches said. He had worked on Dove’s groundbreaking “Real Beauty” campaign and saw parallels in the socialscape. In describing them to me, he deployed a familiar word. If the Axe Effect was saying “that you’re not good enough — not attractive enough — until you wear a product that will make you attractive, this is not empowering.”
Other tectonic forces were at work, aptly summarized on Unilever’s website: “We know that the rules of attraction are changing and that it is about connection, not conquest.” Management had come around to the idea that women were not prizes to be won. Teens had, too, in their way. Plus, Axe had so relentlessly polished its image as a tool for the needy that it had started to become associated with them. “[T]o most high school and college-aged males, Axe had essentially become the brand for pathetic losers,” writes Martin Lindstrom in his book Brandwashed.
In 2016, Unilever introduced a new platform animated by the tagline “Find Your Magic.” This campaign treats empowerment as teleological: Young men are told to find what makes them special (there’s gotta be something) and learn how to flaunt it (whatever it is). The anthem commercial is strategic and sensible and well-made and doomed to fade from our collective memory like 99 percent of all marketing efforts. It might yet save Axe from stigma, but at the cost of the brand’s iconoclasm.
The architects of the Axe Effect, for their part, aren’t sure it needed saving at all — at least not the strategy that informed the original messaging. Like everything else related to sex and gender, the wake of Me Too brings new gravity to a frank discussion of Axe’s faults. “When it comes to the Me Too generation, of course you’ve got to be sensitive to that,” Hegarty said. “You can’t ignore it. You can’t be on the wrong side of the debate.” But he argued that seduction still ought to be respected. “Since the beginning of time, the guy who’s been able to seduce the girl is the one that wins out. And that isn’t going to change.”
Gallop maintains that Axe’s early advertising exploded taboos surrounding women’s libidos and should be viewed as a net positive. But didn’t the Axe Effect imply that men needn’t worry about impressing a woman on their own merits because Axe would hotwire a sexual outcome no matter what? She laughed.
“Good God, man, you are really overthinking this,” she said. “It’s only fucking advertising.”
Mac Schwerin is an advertising copywriter and freelance journalist. He lives in Singapore.