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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhat’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?
By RUTH PADAWER
Published: August 8, 2012 435 Comments
The night before Susan and Rob allowed their son to go to preschool in a dress, they sent an e-mail to parents of his classmates. Alex, they wrote, has been gender-fluid for as long as we can remember, and at the moment he is equally passionate about and identified with soccer players and princesses, superheroes and ballerinas (not to mention lava and unicorns, dinosaurs and glitter rainbows). They explained that Alex had recently become inconsolable about his parents ban on wearing dresses beyond dress-up time. After consulting their pediatrician, a psychologist and parents of other gender-nonconforming children, they concluded that the important thing was to teach him not to be ashamed of who he feels he is. Thus, the purple-pink-and-yellow-striped dress he would be wearing that next morning. For good measure, their e-mail included a link to information on gender-variant children.
When Alex was 4, he pronounced himself a boy and a girl, but in the two years since, he has been fairly clear that he is simply a boy who sometimes likes to dress and play in conventionally feminine ways. Some days at home he wears dresses, paints his fingernails and plays with dolls; other days, he roughhouses, rams his toys together or pretends to be Spider-Man. Even his movements ricochet between parodies of gender: on days he puts on a dress, he is graceful, almost dancerlike, and his sentences rise in pitch at the end. On days he opts for only boy wear, he heads off with a little swagger. Of course, had Alex been a girl who sometimes dressed or played in boyish ways, no e-mail to parents would have been necessary; no one would raise an eyebrow at a girl who likes throwing a football or wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt.
There have always been people who defy gender norms. Late-19th-century medical literature described female inverts as appallingly straightforward, with a dislike and sometimes incapacity for needlework and an inclination and taste for the sciences; male inverts were entirely averse to outdoor games. By the mid-20th century, doctors were trying corrective therapy to extinguish atypical gender behaviors. The goal was preventing children from becoming gay or transgender, a term for those who feel they were born in the wrong body.
Many parents and clinicians now reject corrective therapy, making this the first generation to allow boys to openly play and dress (to varying degrees) in ways previously restricted to girls to exist in what one psychologist called that middle space between traditional boyhood and traditional girlhood. These parents have drawn courage from a burgeoning Internet community of like-minded folk whose sons identify as boys but wear tiaras and tote unicorn backpacks. Even transgender people preserve the traditional binary gender division: born in one and belonging in the other. But the parents of boys in that middle space argue that gender is a spectrum rather than two opposing categories, neither of which any real man or woman precisely fits.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/magazine/whats-so-bad-about-a-boy-who-wants-to-wear-a-dress.html?pagewanted=all
Brickbat
(19,339 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)it's a long essay and a pretty good one.
HopeHoops
(47,675 posts)NV Whino
(20,886 posts)purple-pink-and-yellow-striped dress
spinbaby
(15,090 posts)I recently saw a preschool dance class that you could have mistaken for a convention of rodeo clowns.
maxrandb
(15,334 posts)I'm A Boy
(Pete Townshend)
"One girl was called Jean Marie
Another little girl was called Felicity
Another little girl was Sally Joy
The other was me, and I'm a boy
My name is Bill and I'm a headcase
They practice making up on my face
Yeah, I feel lucky if I get trousers to wear
Spend ages taking hairpins from my hair
Chorus 1
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But if I say I am I get it
Put your frock on Jean Marie
Plait your hair Felicity
Paint your nails, little Sally Joy
Put this wig on, little boy
Chorus 1
I wanna play cricket on the green
Ride my bike across the stream
Cut myself and see my blood
I wanna come home all covered in mud
Chorus 2
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
But my ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy
I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy, I'm a boy"
Initech
(100,081 posts)Enrique
(27,461 posts)fwiw
FedUpWithIt All
(4,442 posts)He carries the pink version of the iXL, requested several Princess toys for his birthday, likes to have his older sisters paint his fingernails and chooses videos like the Lalaloopsys and Strawberry Shortcake as readily as he will his beloved Spiderman and Justice League.
It was clear when he was a young toddler that his style of play was far more stereotypically "male". There was a lot more crashing and banging and "vrroooming" than we'd ever seen with his sisters. We never restricted his play choices (allowing him the same freedoms of play choices we'd allowed his sisters) and it quickly became clear that his interests were broad. He isn't particularly sporty, he adores board games and puzzles, he is incredibly active physically and imaginatively.
Neither my husband or myself bat an eye when he asks for a Princess coloring book or sashays in mimicry of a little girl on television. Increasingly, as he ages, he moves more and more into stereotypical "male" fantasy play, usually as a superhero or an "Inja" (ninja) but there are still moments where he prefers a baby doll or wants to play "house".
I love his interest, curiosity and diversity of spirit and wouldn't change a thing. It makes me extremely happy that more and more people are allowing their children to just "BE". Our world will be so much richer as a result.
Zax2me
(2,515 posts)Who all don't wear dresses.
Sooner or later and consistently they will get the the 'dress-wearing' boy.
Adult reason counts for shit.
ibegurpard
(16,685 posts)no matter how hard his parents try to shield him. I feel sorry for the pain he's going to go through in life. I agree that it shouldn't matter but no matter how much you wish it and think it shouldn't be, he WILL be a target.