What's Wrong With A Boy Who Wears A Dress?

I can hear it now.  The answers will embrace a range from "Absolutely nothing!" to "Absolutely everything!"

I am still digesting the stories of "gender fluid" boys and the parents who are raising them as reported by Ruth Padawer writing for the NYTimes in the Sunday Magazine, "What's So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?"

I can tell you that while I recognize biology's influence on who we are and that the expression of our own sexuality takes place across a broad spectrum, I am also uncomfortable with coming face-to-face with children who recognize that things are not so black and white as "girl" and "boy."  I think what I'm saying is that it takes a little personal growth to respect and support the notion of "live and let live" even though it collides with the "right and wrong" world in which I was raised, where adults were right and children were wrong.

Matthew Hutson seems to think there remains a strict moral underpinning to who we Americans are, as discussed in his article, "Still Puritan After All These Years".  A problem with moral uprightness is it can bring out the dark underbelly of bias, judgment, opinion, righteousness, and hatred.

It's often so difficult for us as adults to clearly articulate, "I want to be who I am!"  So, I say to the children and their parents "be of courage and confidence" for behaving in the way that is who you are.  They are not hurting anyone - let us not hurt them nor ourselves as they teach us that we all have a place here however fluid, however uncertain.

Perhaps this story and in-classroom exercise will be of use to those working with anti-bullying:

"Toward the end of the first week of kindergarten, Alex showed up in class wearing hot-pink socks — a mere inch of a forbidden color. A boy in his class taunted, “Are you a girl?” Alex told his parents his feelings were so hurt that he couldn’t even respond. In solidarity, his father bought a pair of pink Converse sneakers to wear when he dropped Alex off at school.

Alex’s teacher, Mrs. C., jumped in, too. During circle time, she mentioned male friends who wore nail polish and earrings. Mrs. C. told them that when she was younger, she liked wearing boys’ sneakers. Did that make her a boy? Did the children think she shouldn’t have been allowed to wear them? Did they think it would have been O.K. to laugh at her? They shook their heads no. Then she told them that long ago, girls weren’t allowed to wear pants, and a couple of the children went wide-eyed. “I said: ‘Can you imagine not being able to wear pants when you wanted to? If you really wanted to wear them and someone told you that you couldn’t do that just because you were a girl? That would be awful!’ ” After that, the comments in the classroom about Alex’s appearance pretty much stopped.

It took Alex several weeks to rouse his courage again. And then, about once a week, he would pull on his pink socks and sparkle kitten sneakers and head boldly off to kindergarten."