Just gave birth. Still prettier than you.

Let’s be honest: everyone’s a little disappointed that the Prince formerly known as Royal Baby isn’t a girl.

But the only person who’s come out and said it is my mother, who let out a disappointed, “oooohhhh,” when I told her the news over breakfast. “They even changed the law to acommodate a firstborn Queen,” she said as she buttered her toast.

Indeed they did. Such was the anticipation over a future mini-Kate that laws were amended on her behalf, to ensure a firstborn girl could ascend the throne. A potential new queen was the odds-on favourite at the bookies. So at least one group of people – the ones who lost money – were disappointed.

The media was surprisingly polite. That is understandable for print media, where certain professional standards have to be mantained (gossip rags not withstanding). But the online content-makers, who roam freely across the internet without such expectations and at times derive their popularity from not mincing their words, held their tongues as well. Not a wee peep of, “we were kinda hoping it was a girl”.

I was fairly surprised at the deferrence shown to the Royal Family. Not that this is a particularly bad thing, given how intensely their lives have been dissected and scrutinised, mind. But let’s face it, unlike tampongate and selling access to your ex-husband for the right price, a small admission that we were all hoping for a girl was unlikely to affect anything.

William and Kate do not give a damn about the gender we hoped their baby was going to be. And rightly so. Their child is theirs alone, and not ours.

But you know, it would’ve been nice if someone said something. Not just because we were all thinking it (and I know you were, don’t deny it), but considering how much more prized boys have traditionally been to us humans, this would be one of the few times were a female baby is far more desirable.

Across history, sex-selective infanticide was practiced in many cultures. Among the Chinese, Arabs, Inuits and other cultures, if a girl popped out of the uterus, it was bye bye baby. To the Chinese, males are favoured as breadwinners and the ones with the ability to carry on the family line, as opposed to females. Poverty and China’s one-child policy meant that even in the late 20th century, mothers chose to abort the foetus if the ultrasounds revealed that it was a female.

My mother sometimes recounted the preferential treatment my grandmother showed her older brother while they were young children growing up in Singapore. One Chinese New Year, when the same grandmother handed out the traditional red packets to my siblings and I, it turned out that she’d given me less money. My younger brother received the most, because he was a boy. My sister received the second most, because she was the oldest. As for myself, a female middle child, I had no redeeming qualites to deserve more money.

Of course I was upset. It wasn’t about the money, which went straight to my bank account (I’ve yet to spend any of the red packet money I’ve collected through the years). It was about the favouritism. My grandmother didn’t hate me – if so she wouldn’t have given me a red packet at all. As my mother explained it, my grandmother couldn’t help her favouritism. It was how she’d been brought up. That boys were more valuable than girls was a fact of life to her, and she never thought there was anything wrong with it. She thought my uncle, i.e. my mother’s aforementioned brother, as superior even to herself.

My grandmother later called me to apologise after my mother talked to her. And if I could tell you anything about her, it would be that she is not one for apologies. She loved us all very much. She was simply raised in a society where it was made clear that men were superior to women.

This was a belief that went unquestioned not merely because it had stood so for thousands of years, but because Chinese women were inferior, but not necessarily actively oppressed. Matriachs often ruled in Chinese and Peranakan households. They were fierce and formidable women who were not to be trifled with, who had the final say in many things from the food one ate to the person one married – regardless of whether you were a female or male. But yet they subscribed to the notion of male superiority.

So an admission of disappointment at the lack of a Princess Georgiana may not mean anything at all, besides the fact that we won’t have a Jenny Packham ‘Royal Mummy & Me’ collection. And it would be impolite. But let’s face it: killing babies because they are female is far worse than mere bad ettiquete.

It would be a acknowledgement of how far we’ve come in the fight for equal rights, albeit an unnecessary one. We’ve still got a ways to go, but I’m pretty glad I wasn’t smothered at birth on account of my gender.

But maybe it doesn’t need to be said. Maybe it’s good enough that it is.

But you know what, sales of those ‘Mummy & Me’ dress sets would be a sweet injection into the British economy. I doubt a similar collection for William and wee George would fly off the racks.