Yellow: the "gender neutral" color

Pink and blue are the most common baby colors to paint a baby’s room. Pink is for girls and blue is for boys. But what about those moms, dads, or families that choose to paint the room yellow? Or some other “gender neutral” color like green? Does it mean that by painting the baby’s room that way that the baby won’t have to be male or female? Does a color really have to represent a sex or gender? There are plenty of girls who prefer blue to pink, and recently I’ve seen guys wearing pink. So why do we have to place a color or other characteristics with gender?

“Our lives are proof that sex and gender are much more complex than a delivery room doctor’s glance at genitals can determine, more variegated than pink or blue birth caps” (Feinberg 5). Just because a person is born with a certain body, doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to act that gender. The link I’m posting below is about transgender children and a specific story about a young boy who believes he is a girl. It’s a really interesting story to read about what the child thinks and will have to go through. In the article the mother reads about the DSM-IV about the Gender Identity Disorder. “There must be evidence of a strong and persistent gross-gender identification, which is the desire to be, or the insistence that one is of the other sex” (DSM GID Hate Crimes document). In the article, the little boy has a strong desire to be a girl and actually believes that he is a girl.

But transgendered people flip the notion of gendered baby colors on its head. This little boy should be connecting with blue things and boy toys in order to be “normal”. However, he likes pink and purple and is wearing dresses and playing with dolls. So how do you classify this child? Not in pink or blue, but in yellow? Since we don’t have a “gender color” for these children, people would wonder how to place them. It comes back to the whole idea of placing people in categories. When people cannot place someone in the category “female or male” they get thrown in a tizzy. They feel the need to place everyone in some category in order to relate with them. Transgenders are blending the lines between sex and gender, so is there a need to make a whole new category (or color) to describe them? It’s an idea that we seem to be facing today.


Article on the transgender child is here.