How My Views of Gender Rules Changed Due to Stories of Girls in Pants And Boys in Dresses

Ever since I was a child, I was told that there were strict gender limits. No, scratch that, I wasn’t told, necessarily. It was implied to me. My parents never told me that I couldn’t do things, but due to seeing and being given feminine objects and clothes, I formed that opinion. As a child, I didn’t care about gender differences at all. However, as I grew older, I thought gender limitations were pointless—to me there was simply no difference to argue about. I didn’t think they mattered at all. However, that changed when I read several articles about how bad the discrimination has gotten.

                I think, to be honest, I simply had no idea that gender discrimination was so harsh. In the short story that we read, “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story,” the parent’s reactions shocked me. I know that perhaps the story is an exaggerated, fictional account, but the basic message still hits home. The other children’s parents in that story do not want their children to play with X, as they did not know its gender. They forced X to go through an examination to determine its gender, before they would let their kids continue to befriend it (Gould 5). Now, even if this is just fictional, it raised a few flags for me. Perhaps the world does have a problem with those who do not conform to their own gender after all? Perhaps I was living in a secluded bubble, wherein I believed that such things didn’t happen. My family has always been accepting of anything, so I had never thought about unaccepting parents deeply.

                I don’t think I have ever known someone as strongly opposed to gender integration as the woman Katrin Bennhold wrote about in her article. When the shop was completely desegregated, a mother shopping for her niece got angry. The mother quoted in the article stated that “ It would help if it [Girls toys aisle VS Boys toys aisle] was marked out more clearly, you know” (qtd. in Katrin Bennhold 1). It is rather shocking, because all my life I had just assumed that the baby aisle was the baby aisle. Although t was typically pink on one side, and blue on the other, it was not bluntly GIRLS and BOYS. But the mother quoted in “Toys Start the Gender Equality Rift” who was overheard seemed to believe that such separation would be helpful (Bennhold 1).

                There is a huge rift I had never noticed between gender variant children and children who act strictly like their own gender is typically seen. I thought, always, that a child who displayed feminine interests even as a baby was thought of as cute, and at least in my family, whenever a young boy displayed feminine interests he was encouraged. Like when my male cousin took interest in my female cousin’s makeup. She dressed him up all cute, and my entire family thought this was cute and praised both my male cousin for looking pretty, and my female cousin for being the makeup artist.

Perhaps I just got the good end of the stick with my family, though. Reading the article “ Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?”, and examining its several examples of boys wishing to wear female clothing only to face peer harassment, was a huge eye opener. A lot of boys get grief for wearing dresses and skirts, as opposed to girls in pants (Jan Hoffman 2). I never realized how vastly different the accepted norms are, until I got a feel for what life was like outside of my large, accepting family.

                There are some things that are detrimental to children that adults, and people of my age group, simply do not recognize. Even I, when I was younger, I didn’t recognize these detriments that can make children feel self-conscious.  In the article ‘It’s OK to Be Neither: Teaching That Supports Gender-Variant Children,’ modern me was shocked when Temple stated that “In one conversation that I had with Allie's mother, she told me that Allie did not like using public bathrooms, because many times Allie had been accused of being in the wrong bathroom” (2). Allie was made very uncomfortable by the division in gender, but her teacher never realized this until she found out about Allie being teased for going to the girls’ bathroom, because her classmates assumed she was a boy. This is something I never stopped to think about. After all, I had never encountered any students who myself, and my peers, could not tell the gender of. Reading this article helped me to understand that discrimination can happen even at an extremely young age, something I never quite understood before.

                Something that rattled my opinion would have to be when the article ‘What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?’, states that women are the ‘lesser gender’ and so boys who want to be feminine receive much more attention than girls who want to be masculine (Padawer 7).  It was also shocking when the article explained that “sometimes [a] boys’ violation is as mild as wanting a Barbie for Christmas. By comparison, most girls referred to gender clinics are far more extreme in their atypicality: they want boy names, boy pronouns and, sometimes, boy bodies”(Padawer 7). It had never really occurred to me that there was such a huge difference! In fact, girls are thought of as normal until they want more extreme things, such as name changes and physical sex changes. However, the second a male even thinks about wearing a dress or playing with a Barbie, it’s a great alarm. Reading this made me realize that I had no idea how drastic these issues were. When I was a child, all of my boy friends dressed alike and my girlfriends did, as well. As a child, I did not notice how much more common it is to see a girl in boys clothes than vice versa.

                Although I have never experienced anything in my life like the short story “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story,” I realized it has a real-life counterpart. Mentioned in the article, ‘What’s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?’ was a family who actually kept their babies sex hidden. “ . . . there was Kathy Witterick and David Stocker, the Toronto couple inadvertently caught in a critical spotlight when word spread that they wouldn’t reveal their newborn’s sex because they wanted to free him or her from gender expectations”(qtd. in Padawer 8). I never expected this story to be real, or have a real basis; the concept seemed too odd for someone to do. But they did and that is a new thing I have learned. Now, the lines between genders have become clearer to me.