So the other day I'm in a public bathroom with a few strangers, concentrating on nothing else but the all too painful need to urinate. during this time a social interaction between strangers went down, and it took awhile but gradually I came to the conclusion that I feel bad for babies. This woman was in the bathroom with a kid in a stroller and an older woman made a comment about the baby;
"Oh look at his eyes...such a handsome face. He'll break all the girls' hearts when he gets older." The woman with the kid kind of smiled and left the crowded room.
The older woman then turned to me, and said with great alarm that maybe the baby wasn't a boy. She was horrified and really embarrassed at this prospect, and I could tell she felt incredibly guilty for possibly mistaking the gender of this kid. I told her not to worry about it, because frankly I didn't care.
But then I started to feel bad for the baby, because of all the assumptions that were being made in a 20 second interaction. The older woman had pegged the child as male, masculine and heterosexual all within a couple of sentences. When she realized the baby could have been female, the older woman displayed such concern that it seems mistaking someone's gender would be the ultimate insult.
The kid doesn't know all this yet, and that's why it makes me sad; babies can't yet tell people who suck to fuck off.
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