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so when we find out that someone is having a baby what is the very first question we ask boy or girl and it's this knowledge of the sex of a baby pre-birth that will set a child on a specific gender path a gender path that will determine so much of how their lives unfold we're all conditioned to seeing the world through this lens pink blue girl boy often it takes something unusual for us to change our perception in 2005 I had my one and only child and at 16 weeks I did my husband and I found out the sex and we were thrilled to learn that we were having a girl of course we would have been absolutely fine either way weight or girl but somehow being a woman myself I felt more comfortable with the idea that I was having a girl I thought I'll be able to relate to her she'll be able to relate to me well from the time that my daughter Gabby could walk and talk she did not subscribe to any preconceived ideas of girliness in fact she didn't want to be anything like me she wanted to be more like my husband and my husband is a carpenter and so when Gabby was really little she asked for a real tool belt she had to have had to be a real one it couldn't have been a toy one when she would wake up in the morning to go to pre-k she would say what's daddy wearing because she wanted to dress exactly like him so invariably when we would go shopping there was nothing she liked in girls departments and so instead we would wander through the boy aisles looking for everything from clothing to toys so girls t-shirts typically consisted of pastel colors with images of things like butterflies and cupcakes while boys got the primary colors with images of things like sports graphics for dinosaurs or rock bands well Gabby liked superheroes not Barbies she preferred pirates to princesses often we would get funny looks as we wandered through the boy islands looking for things like Star Wars merchandise and sometimes I would hear a mother saying to her daughter oh no honey you can't go over there and that's that's just for boys or a parent telling their son he wasn't allowed to look at the dolls because dolls are just for girls and my heart would just break Gabby loved superheroes when she was three she was spider-man for Halloween when she was four she was Batman and when she was five she was Indiana Jones she was fiercely strong-willed at the ripe old age of three as her mother I could see that her personal identity was tremendously important to her but it was equally important that my husband and I allow her to be whoever she wanted to be but I'll be honest that's not always as easy as it sounds right we all say to our kids you can be anything you want to be but do we really mean it do we really allow them to make their own choices about who they want to be or do we limit those choices based on whether they are a girl or a boy so when Gabby was seven she asked for a buzz cut and she already had short hair and one day she said to me mom if boys can have a buzz cut why can't girls and there was nothing I could say to that she was absolutely right it was her hair it was her choice I did say to her Gabby if you buzz your hair I just want you to know people might look at you funny kids can be mean they might say things to you are you okay with that she told me she was fine with it so off we went to the hairdresser buzzed her hair off she looked adorable she was all smiles she could not have been happier and I knew right at that moment that allowing her to walk out into the world how she wanted to walk out into the world was what mattered not instilling my vision or society's vision of who she should be but by allowing her to be true to her truest self shortly after she got her buzz cut we were at a local community pool that we belong to and a woman I had been introduced to had a couple kids running around came up to me and said is that your daughter running around with the buzzcut and the board shorts and I told her it was and she said III think it's great that you let her cut her hair like that and then she proceeded to tell me a story about when she was a little girl she had two brothers and she dressed just like them she played with them and she loved being like them she said the first day of school came around and her mother she dressed like her brothers and her mother made her change into what she said was a stiff lacy dress and she looked at me really sadly and she said I can still feel that lace scratching on my skin it just made me realize the tremendous impact we have as parents on our kids so the idea that all girls want to be princess or are somehow hardwired to all things pink was a myth it was being proven wrong right in front of my eyes I started to do some research and I discovered lo and behold that pink was not always a girl's color according to a great article in Smithsonian magazine called when did girls start wearing pink and actually in the late 19th century blue was seen as a more feminine color and more girls wore it and pink was seen as a variation of red which was more masculine it actually wasn't until the 1940s when companies began to get a hold of color and use it in that way by gender and it actually exploded in the late 90s early 2000s when pink and princess became even bigger for girls and now companies like Disney inundate girls especially with all things pink and princess from birth it's a five billion dollar industry for them so we did take a beat to Disney World when she was little and she she had her short hair and her shorts and we walked up to the hotel counter at Disney World and the woman behind the counter was lovely and she looked over at Gabby and she looked at me and she said oh and is this your little prince and I said no and she's not a princess either and the woman looked really confused she didn't know what to do with that shouldn't there be a lot more options between Prince and Princess John F Kennedy said conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth conformity leads to stereotypes stereotypes lead to limitations and yet we as a society punish those who are different and who don't conform right it seems we've lost that in-between this to allow children the space to explore their own unique identities we see this intolerance in the media incessant ly right a girl who cuts her hair short or wears boy clothing or likes things like Star Wars or a little boy who paints his nails wants to wear the color pink or grows his hair long are all victims of intense media scrutiny right socially these kids can experience bullying or sometimes it's actually the opposite sometimes kids who step outside gender lines are viewed as courageous but I don't believe that kids should have to be brave to be who they are but as parents we have to be because kids are bombarded every single day with images product and advertising and language that look to trap them and put them in boxes take a look at these two magazine covers of girls life and boys life magazines these were this picture of these two magazines side-by-side were taken in a library last year and while they're not published by the same company they highlight some very real and disturbing differences and how we view girls and boys and what each is exposed to so for girls it's all about fashion and how we look how to wake up pretty or your dream hair for boys it's all about action and doing explore your future astronaut artist firefighter chef here's how to be what you want to be when I saw these two magazine covers my head just about exploded and though I was really angry I wasn't shocked I'd already seen books that taught girls how to be more gorgeous and fabulous and boys how to be clever and smarter years ago I wrote a blog post about these two rattles one is for girls and one is for boys I'm sure you can tell the difference the one for girls said says for a sweet baby girl it's pink and purple it's in the shape of a diamond ring and the one for boy says for a busy baby boy it's blue and yellow it's in the shape of a hammer because eventually boys will learn that they have to do the hard work so they can afford to put that diamond ring on a girl's finger it's the truth but I ask you why do rattles need to be gendered right it may seem innocuous right you may be sitting there thinking they're just babies you buy them they don't know what they're looking at but these the reality is that these stereotypes set in and attach themselves like a second skin that will follow a child all the way through adulthood rattles are just the beginning of an endless stream of images they will be exposed to dr. Lisa Elliot is author of a wonderful book called pink brain blue brain she says quote gender is the first most obvious and most significant attribute each of us shows the world and infants understand much more about gender than we ever used to give them credit for end quote we put bows on female babies heads don't have no hair so they'll immediately be identified as girls and little baby boys might wear but onesie that says little man I grew up in the 70s and 80s when product and advertising especially for kids reflected a kind of freedom for there for them to be able to explore if you see these ads these are Lego ads actually from the early 80s you can see there's not a lot of pink kids aren't separated boy and girl in the same ad playing with the same toy a little girl in blue jeans with a blue shirt the text addresses them as children not as boy and girl you'd be hard-pressed to find ads like this today now Lego makes what's called LEGO Friends it's a separate line of building toys just for girls and I can tell you that separate is not equal here there's quite a difference so I grew up with two brothers right here in North Utica we all had one big wheel it was red yellow and blue I think probably many of you will remember it but now they make one for girls as well so basically companies convince parents and kids right that girls need to have a pink version of everything while boys are not allowed to like the color pink and wall out they have twice the profit we all buy into this notion even as adults I don't know if you saw that bik makes pens for women they're pink and they have some kind of special grip because we have special hands I guess truth be told though things are beginning to shift and and I noticed this all the time it's not enough but things are beginning to shift for instance in 2015 the huge retail giant target actually announced they were going to be removing their gender identify errs from their toy aisles and and believe it or not this was seen as huge news so basically it wasn't gonna say girls building toys anymore and boys building toys it was just going to say building toys and the move was met with some hearty approval but also some very heavy disapproval as some wondered why was target making it harder for them to find stuff for their kids and why couldn't target just let girls be girls and boys be boys but more and more we do see the idea of gender nonconformity being rewarded and appreciated indeed time takes time takes persistence hard work so my daughter is now 12 and she is in seventh grade and she plays baseball she does not play softball and she doesn't want to play softball she's been playing since she was 4 she is a really good player she puts in the hard work she's on a middle-school team and she's on her local travel team as the only girl do I know how far she's going to go no am I gonna tell her that she can't keep playing no I see her and children like her as a natural-born leader someone who is breaking down barriers without even knowing that she's doing it just by going out into the world as she is don't we need and more kids like this so I asked you what would happen if we didn't place limits on children based on their gender wouldn't it be amazing to say to our kids you can be anything you want to be and mean it this is what we can teach our kids not to let arbitraries arbitrary boundaries limit them we have the capability as parents to open up their worlds so that they truly have endless opportunities from which to choose and isn't that what we all want for our kids thank you [Applause]