Obviously, I'm not a girl.

There comes a time in every woman's life where she is faced with the inevitable. A time when her gender and femininity and even her worth are called into question. It often sounds like, "Every girl can sew!"

In this case, it happened in the craft store down the yarn aisle. Miss Pink's friend has taken to knitting during indoor recess. Her friend has made a scarf. Her friend is making a baby blanket to donate to the hospital. Clearly the only thing for Miss Pink to do is to knit her own scarf!

I don't have anything against yarn. It's... soft. Kind of stringy. Pretty, for an inanimate lump of string. And I have nothing against knitting or crochet (no I don't know the difference). It's just that I never learned to do either. I did try, once many years ago in college for a group that was donating baby blankets to some charity or another. I might even have the yarn somewhere. It's just that I don't knit.

Which is what I told Miss Pink.

I helped her find a Knit For Kids kit with hooks and directions. I helped her pick out the yarn for her scarf. I told her I would support her. But I told her I didn't know how to knit.

An older woman somewhere between 50 and dead looked at me over the rim of her glasses. "Can't knit?" She scoffed. "Every woman can knit!"

Really? REALLY???

No one told me I could knit! I was so excited I bought my own yarn! I could knit, because ALL GIRLS CAN KNIT! It's part of our genes! I have a knitting organ hidden inside my body, probably right next to my uterus, and I never knew! My knitting organ was going to waste! It was being an appendix!

Well, we came home and I sat down with Miss Pink to read the book and help her out. We stumbled through the first few steps and then started her scarf. She sat there smiling with all the joy of an eight-year-old who has found a fun new hobby she shares with her friend. I... sat there.

"Isn't this fun, mom?" Miss Pink asked.

I looked at my tangled yarn and my twisting mess of what we aren't even going to pretend may be a scarf one day... "No."

I don't like knitting.

Yes, there's a certain relaxing rhythm to tying knots in yarn, but it's not what I would classify as fun. And I'm pretty sure the mess I made doesn't count as knitting, to be perfectly honest.

So, it is with a heavy heart that I have concluded I am a man. If women can knit, and I can't, I am no woman. The uterus, four pregnancies, my deeply held internal belief that I am female... none of that matters because I can't knit. The laws are clearly defined: if it knits it's a girl, if it doesn't knit, it's a boy. Problem solved!

... Or maybe, just maybe, gender stereotypes are stupid beyond all reason and we should stop assuming that a person can or cannot do something because of the genitalia they were born with. Maybe? No?

Okay. No worries. Books by men sell better in sci-fi anyway.