Lost: Boys hat in Park Slope

[yesthattom]

http://www.gawker.com/news/park-slope/ the-park-slope-hat-spat-read-all-the-emails-166214.php

New York mag has a cute front-of-book item today on an only-in-Park-Slope battle that recently raged on an email list for earnest and progressive parents in that earnestly progressive Brooklyn neighborhood.

A few weeks ago, a member of the Park Slope Parents e-mail forum who’d encountered a stray piece of winterwear in the neighborhood posted a notice to the group titled “Found: boy’s hat.” … [S]ubscriber “Lisa” went public with her problems regarding the gender-specifying description of the hat.

Comments

[rainbear.livejournal.com]

wow... I'm not sure how I feel about the whole exchange. I mean, yeah, the woman was trying to do a good deed, and the first reply was someone trying to point out that exclusive language isn't the best way of describing things.. but.. damn.

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

Wow, I can't believe all that devolved from a subject line.

Since my nephew was born and I started paying attention, I've developed a big problem with little kids' clothes. It seems the little boys are all stuck with lumberjack and/or jock drag and the little girls get stuck with princess/babydoll fluffy poodle drag. It's even signaled in their *clothes* that boys are active, girls are pretty objects...which is just crazy to me when all of them are going to be equally grubby, drooling little messes. On the bright side, any of the little boys who'll grow up to be bears and/or actual lumberjacks have the opportunity to be well-versed in appropriate fashion from a young age.

In any case, so a hat like this? It wouldn't even register for me that it may have been manufactured with one gender or the other in mind. It doesn't have a real or imagined sports team *or* gaggy pink maribu on it.

[naughty-halo.livejournal.com]

OH MY GOD< people really have nothing better to do. So sad.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

So I'm the only one who thinks that the original comment was not an unreasonable one? I still don't know what a "boy's hat" is.

[ayse.livejournal.com]

It's not the "what is a boy's hat" issue -- which is valid, because that's a stupid way of describing any hat -- but the fact that somebody got so upset and felt the need to bring it up as a topic of debate when the original post was just a lost and found posting.

Tolerance has to go both ways, and this was one of those harmless moments as far as gender identification goes.