Do you have any children?

I've got an eight-month old boy. I can't claim to be the world's expert and I won't pretend this isn't an anecdote, but still, it's a data point. I'm also 30.

If you are 16 and you think you know what raising a baby is about, you're probably wrong, but if you make it to 30 without having some sort of good idea, you're... well, I won't call you an idiot but you've not been paying attention. So I had a good idea about how helpless babies are and a pretty good idea of how they got their needs met. I've not been surprised by the midnight feedings or anything else like that.

But I will admit to some surprise at just how mind-bogglingly stupid babies are. My son is toying with the idea of beginning "separation anxiety", which psychologists think is not merely "a phase", but the point at which the baby begins to distinguish between himself and his parents.

Think about what that means for a moment. We're talking about an entity too stupid to realize that other people are not himself. This is a level of stupidity we can only comprehend symbolically; we can not really grasp this degree of stupidity.

My son is too stupid to realize that he is not me. He is way to stupid to pick up on subtle social messages about what it means to "be a man", were I even trying to give any. There is simply no way that Nature is not the dominant force here; there's simply nowhere for Nuture to be living!

And yet... he is a boy. He likes to be loud, and I don't mean "cry", I mean be loud when he's happy. He likes to move and squirm. He likes cars and construction equipment, spurns the dolls of other babies (when he loves their other new things), and really loves my laptop, which means there's a lot of fun to be had keeping him away from that in my future. (As in, "I don't want him to destroy it"; we're years away from any actual use of a computer.) He likes to move around, and he likes to smack his toys to make them do things.

I've also seen several other girls of this age cohort now, and even the ones that are high-strung and nervous when it comes to crying play radically more calmly, have clearly different preferences for toys, and so on.

What social signals can we possibly be sending a four-month old baby to tell them how their gender behaves? Screw "not understanding gender", a four-month old doesn't understand that things persist when they move out of their vision! How is a being that was only recently introduced to "color" (not that they can articulate it) picking up on these social cues? How can something so stupid that he doesn't respond to his own name suddenly get so socially smart that he realizes that the doll I just placed in his hand is a parent-being-funny trap, and he's supposed to drop it and pick the truck up again? (Which is what he did.)

Maybe a five-year old has picked up on it by then, but what accounts for the gender differences between 5-month-olds? Until you have a baby, you can not comprehend the astonishing levels of stupid we all start out with. Actually, scratch that, nobody can truly comprehend it; it's like trying to imagine being a fish or something, you can't really do it. The idea that all the parents I know have managed to educate our babies about their place in the social order despite them not responding to their name or indeed much of anything else is just absurd.

I have every intention of letting my boy, and any future children I may have, grow up to be whoever they are most suited to be, regardless of gender roles in society. But whether or not I bring gender roles to the party, it is pretty clear to me that the child will anyhow.