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(There is a point in all this backstory. Keep reading onwards.)While in one of my nearby malls on New Years Day the other day, I came across a child (who at first I thought was a girl) who wasn’t more than 2 years old but still was able to be held in mother’s arms. I couldn’t tell by too much by the face. The kid had blonde hair (something I only tend to associate to girls) yet, by the looks of the edge of the colored band of the training pant that was starting to stick out of their pants was blue. Was wondering, (how often/what percentage) of boys have blonde hair. I was talking to my brother, but although I didn’t get an approximate number (1 in x amount) of boys having blonde hair (2years+), so I come to here wondering this very same question. When I saw the blonde hair I was thinking, that’s a girl? I know that some parents choose to use boy pants on girls and sometimes girl pants on boys, but that’s just awkward.

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Mm, okay, a couple things. Let’s start from the top. A) No such thing as boys clothes or girls clothes, imo. There’s clothes that are socially accepted to be boys and girls clothes, but this is changing. If I want to wear blue pants, I’m hella gonna do it. We’re challenging these social standards, let’s be a little progressive shall we? B) Keep in mind a lot of women dye their hair. If it’s blonde there’s a decent chance it’s not naturally blonde. So if you see a lot of blonde women, decent chance it’s bleached. The percentage of blonde guys vs girls naturally is about the same.

3

^ +1

If you want, I can get a little more into the nitty-gritty of it. Yay, I finally get to use those 10th grade biology class skills now!

Genetically speaking, blonde hair is a recessive trait. Let’s refer to brown hair as B, and blonde hair as b. If a sperm and egg cell joined together to create a zygote, and both of them had the genotype of Bb, then there would be a fourth of a chance of the offspring having blonde hair. As you can see, it’s naturally a bit harder to have a child who is blonde, especially if the parents are both brown-haired. (My parents are both brown-haired, and I’m a blond boy, so it is possible, but it’s not that likely.) If the egg cell had the genotype of BB and the sperm had a genotype of bb, or vice versa, there would be no chance of having a child with blonde hair, since you’d need two bb genes to have a blonde child.

The trait for hair color is not sex-linked, meaning that the sex chromosomes of a zygote don’t affect whether the trait shows up or not. (An example of a sex-linked trait is red-green colorblindness or hemophilia; the genetic mutations of those rest on the X chromosome. Since people assigned male at birth usually have only one X chromosome, they’re more likely to be red-green colorblind or have hemophilia than people assigned female at birth.) Since the trait for hair color is not sex-linked, there’s no correlation between having blonde hair and the child’s assigned sex.

However, as Marina points out, there are plenty of people who dye their hair, and unless the roots are coming in, it’s usually pretty hard to tell if the hair color isn’t natural (provided whoever dyed the hair knew what they were doing, which most of the time, they do). And honestly - assuming a child’s assigned sex or gender over the color of their clothes is quite silly. There are lots of men who wear pink, and lots of women who wear blue (and in fact, pink used to be the masculine color and blue was the feminine color, but then Hitler changed that by “tagging” gay people with pink stars, which swapped it around because of homophobic stereotypes).

TL;DR: There’s no correlation between assigned sex and hair color, but natural blonde hair is genetically a bit more “rare” in the first place due to it being a recessive trait, and assuming a child’s assigned sex or gender on the basis of their hair and clothing color doesn’t make sense. Does that answer your question?

4

I totally forgot about the biologic cross method of figuring out. I just thought there’d be a better statistic out there than that; more of a “1 in a” written statistic more than just “it does happen”. It was this oddball thought I had when I saw it. I knew there was the possibility that colors shouldn’t matter on items being used, but I thought it very awkward when I saw it walk past me and got thinking about it.

5

My brother was blonde as a baby and has naturally dark hair now as an adult, just putting that out there…As a European, I don’t know if this makes a difference, I have NEVER thought blonde babies or toddlers were more likely to be girls. I personally think it’s a little odd to have any assumptions about gender or sex based on hair colour. Scandinavian types probably rarely, if ever, make this assumption. In China, would someone with the same mind set as the thread starter assume ALL infants were male? If I was lucky enough to have an adorable cherubic infant with curly, blonde hair, it’d be heartbreaking to have it cut, so, my little boy might look a bit girly, and, I wouldn’t care, and, I’d dress him in non-gender biased clothes!

6

Blondness is usually associated with youth, not with a specific gender or assigned sex. My family is of German/Irish descent, and everyone in the family started out with blond hair that darkened to some extent over the years. (Look at old photos of my mom’s family: two parents, three blond boys, two blond girls.) Blond hair usually darkens as a person grows up, hence the youth part. All my mom’s siblings are more brown-haired now.

My icon shows a drawing of me with very light blond hair. This is what my hair naturally looked like when I was small, and as I grew into a teenager, it changed into this really unflattering color and my mom kept encouraging me to get highlights. Now I’m artificially back to the blond I was.

Perhaps you associate blondness with femininity because in teen and adult years, women are more likely to dye their hair than guys are, which could include dying it blond. Blond hair is considered desirable for women in the fashion world, probably due to its associations with youth and whiteness. There’s also some weird stereotype that teen/adult guys with blond hair are “less manly,” which is gender binarist garbage. Judging people based on gender stereotypes is not cool and those people need to stop.

But yeah, my brother had hair like that when he was little, and according to old photos, so did my dad and my uncles. Now my dad’s hair is black (and part white, and part missing) and my brother’s hair is brown.

@Galactic-Radiance I had no idea you knew so much about science, hair color, & history! You’re really knowledgeable.