Irritating conversation

[Judy Anderson <yduj CS Stanford EDU>]

A coworker asked how the kids were doing, and I started relating how
Perry was totally blooming with language and it was really cool.  I
mentioned it was nice that he was getting to be ahead in something,
since Jocelyn had crawled/walked/said first word first.  Another
coworker came up and said that of course girls were ahead in language
(wait, wasn't I talking about Perry?  The boy?) and I got kind of
irritated and said I wasn't taking into account statistics, I was
treating my children as the individuals they were.  He said of course
I had to treat my children as individuals, they wouldn't put up with
anything else, but that I couldn't ignore statistics, that people had
studied these things with MRI's of the brains and stuff and it was
just plain true.  That the people who had done the studies were
careful, not just prejudiced.

Well, be that as it may, I'm tired of people trying to get me to treat
my children differently because of their sex.  Apparently I made the
mistake of saying that "the great unwashed" don't let their children
realize their full potentials because they put them into boxes based
on sex, and he took offense at this because he grew up in a poor
family and thought I was putting him in that box.  The first coworker
understood what I was getting at, and related a story about a family
in his neighborhood where the girl wanted to play soccer and the
father wouldn't let her.  I tried to capitalize on that story saying
that's what I meant by great unwashed, people who were hindering their
children, but by then I had already lost.  

I started to feel like I was being forced to say things that even I
didn't think were true, or to have my opinions misrepresented, and I
said so, and I said "despite being a girl, I'm not all that good at
language".  

But I'm really TIRED of it that EVERY TIME I say something about one
of my children someone says "that's because he/she is a boy/girl"!
The coworker said that he never runs into that.  Probably he does, but
he doesn't notice, because he agrees with the statement.  He does have
3 children, no twins, 2 boys, one girl.

And I wish I WERE better at language.  I always feel incompetent to
defend my opinions.  SIGH.  I do OK in writing, but I just get backed
into a corner in conversation and end up saying things that even I
don't agree with.

   Judy Anderson yclept yduJ                'yduJ' rhymes with 'fudge'
   yduJ cs stanford edu      http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~yduj
   Jocelyn & Perry 7/21/02  http://cosmos.phy.tufts.edu/~kdo/children/