Are Babies Straight?

One of my coworkers* brought her baby boy** in right before Valentine's Day with a themed t-shirt: "All the Ladies <3 Me" it said.

When I saw it, I laughed. The surprise of it made it funny, and then once I'd started the laugh, I realized it was the appropriate thing to do. Afterall, this is a baby; a pre-verbal, pre-walking, pre-anything baby. So clearly anything he's wearing is something his parents want him to wear (and in this case, his mother said: "I'm having him wear this shirt on Valentine's Day"). So it was only socially polite to laugh at a t-shirt she thought was cute.

But I sort of wish I wouldn't have laughed.

Just think of what "All the Lads <3 Me" would have evoked in viewers. Or "All the Men <3 Me," even worse! I mean, crud, if you put your kid in a shirt like that, you'd have people flipping a shit about pedophilia.

But a baby boy in a shirt implying heterosexuality and "ladies' man" status. Totally Ok. 'Cause babies totally have a sexual orientation, yo! (And that orientation is "straight").

It just really speaks to how heterosexist and sexist our society is that my first reaction to a t-shirt implying an under 1-year old's straightness was laughter at how "cute" it was.


*I'm going to start just writing "job" and "coworker" in all my posts about this, because my placement-internship feels like that.
**Whenever I hear about little children's genders I always sort of wonder, but you know, whatever I'll trust that the kid will grow up cis*.