I was at a child’s birthday party. It must have been around 1978, because it feels like I was about three or four. I remember almost nothing about the context — who the party was for, how I knew them (not well, I feel), what age they were: all those details are unavailable to me.

But I do remember this

As the party wound up, all the guests were herded into a queue — maybe this happened, or maybe it was just that several grown-ups arrived to retrieve their progeny at the same time. Either way, I queued with at least a handful of other small children, while a group of parents looked on.

At the head of the queue stood the hosting mother. As each child reached her she bent at the hip to loom over them, locked her eyebrows into high double arches, and said creamily, “Blue or pink?” And when the child answered, she gave them a small, bulging, bluish or pinkish plastic bag.

Reactions on receiving this bag made it very clear that it was an exciting and desirable item.

Ergo, I was excited; I desired the bag.

At last, it was my turn

I approached the looming mother and stood looking up at her.

“Blue or pink?”

“Blue,” I said, with my customary confidence. I quite liked blue.

There was a pause. A look of consternation flitted across her face. She turned away, maybe gesturing to her mate for assistance — there was a swift rummage, something covertly removed from one bag and dropped into another, possibly — and then she turned back to me with a bright smile and handed me the bluish bag I had asked for.

I took it and stepped aside to let the next supplicant approach. This was a younger, smaller, and ineluctably tidier child than me, with shining blonde hair neatly clipped back at the temples, an adorable little nose, and huge blue eyes.

Young though I was, I already understood that this kid was parent-friendly material. I felt the sigh of adoration move through the phalanx of grown-ups waiting at the borders of the ceremonial space, like a summer breeze ruffling a wheat field.

The hosting mother didn’t presume to loom over this tiny vision of loveliness: she hunkered down instead.

Gently, so as not to startle the little one, she posed the ritual question: “Blue or pink?”

In a voice made of strawberries and daisies and little yellow ducklings, on a breath scented with violets and freshly baked fairy cakes, the small child lisped, “bink.”

(Yes, this was indeed an infant so skilled as to be able to lisp a word containing no sibilants.)

All the grown-ups melted into a squeaking puddle of goo.

And that’s when I learned…

No, stop, of course it wasn’t.

That experience was just one in a long, long line of social lessons about how to be in the world, same as any small child gets (except that being autistic, I have an atypical slant on things, so for me these lessons were harder and more bewildering than average, as a rule).

What I mean to say is, it wasn’t any kind of epiphany, at the time.

But it stayed with me. It’s been almost forty-five years, and I can still recall the vague feeling of somehow, unexpectedly, incomprehensibly, being in the wrong. When I said “blue”, that was the wrong answer to the question, and when the other small child said “bink”, that was correct – even though she actually said it wrong! Nobody seemed to pick up on that!

I had been offered what looked like a CHOICE but was actually a TEST

Not only had I failed the test, but the only way to have passed it would have been to pretend that my spontaneous colour preference — at that time, on that day — was other than it was.

In turn, to do that I would first have needed to have absorbed the ridiculous gender–colour correlation our dominant discourse has invented — which, mind you, nobody in my life had ever attempted to propose to me, a child of 70s academics, before this moment — and then to have brazenly pretended that I wanted the pink bag.

Even that might not work, because I might not pretend plausibly enough.

The extent to which this bullshit can die in a fire is hard to overstate

Gender is hard enough to navigate without adults going around setting up petty little obstacle courses to entrap unsuspecting three-year-olds. (If that seems to you a harsh way of describing what they were doing … congratulations on your gender conformity?)

That’s really all I have to say today.

I have absolutely zero memory of what was in my bag, by the way. It’s apparently not germane to the experience at all, as far as my brain is concerned.