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.” Typically, discussions of parenting issues on the 3,500-member list are characterized by the kind of earnest decorum one would expect from people who give their children names like “Atticus,” with threads following the ins and outs of “lactation consultants” and other features of contemporary child-rearing. In this case, though, subscriber “Lisa” went public with her problems regarding the gender-specifying description of the hat. Wondering how such a categorization would feel to a spiky-hat-wearing girl, Lisa wrote, “It’s innocent little comments like this that I find the most hurtful.”

Read more: Tot’s Hat Triggers Park Slope Spat On Gender Politics — New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/16665/#ixzz0iGX7VU1f