A Boy in a Dress: My Jumbled Thoughts on Parenting and Gender

            Easter 2019 was a big holiday for my twins. They were five months old and becoming more aware of the world. They were also spitting up and peeing through their cloth diapers constantly, so we packed a massive amount of spare outfits. My son, A, who suffered from then-unmedicated acid reflux, ended up spitting up right through every outfit we had for him. Toward the end of the holiday, we put him in one of my daughter’s spare outfits, a pastel pink onesie with a pattern of gold crowns and little puffed sleeves.

            The moment we remerged from the changing area, comments sparked like shrapnel from a detonated grenade.

            “Tell me you don’t put him in that all the time!”

            “Well, isn’t he a pretty little princess? :laugh:”

            “It’s okay, he doesn’t know the difference, so it won’t mess him up.”

            None of these comments were mean-spirited, hostile, or intentionally harmful. It was an automatic response for my beloved family. A little boy was wearing girl clothes, and that was something that required comment. In our culture, that goes without saying.

Despite my desire for progressive trends to take hold in our larger culture swiftly, rigid gender roles are still very much alive and well in the U.S. I am given harsh reminders of this fact during each milestone I cross that is traditionally tied to the sexes, like marriage and pregnancy. The expectation to “settle down” and become more behaviourally and even politically conservative with each domestic chapter remains fully expected by the majority of older Americans. The moment a ring was on my finger or my belly swelled with child(ren,) I felt a subtle but dramatically increased pressure to immediately morph into a mild-mannered, soft-spoken “Lady” instead of the foul-mouthed and fishnet-clad little freak I’ve always been. When the pressure is put on me, it’s annoying, but I can handle it. I’m more than happy to shatter that belief with a sledgehammer of sarcasm and fiercely maintain my individuality. I even take slightly smug pride in breaking these common but significant gender expectations and doing my small part to show new generations a different way of being a woman, wife, mother, whatever.* But now those expectations are taking aim at my children.

And Mama’s claws are coming out.

The vast majority of my social circle, and therefore my invisible readers, are undoubtedly very well-versed in the gender dynamics we push on babies from the moment their genitals become distinguishable to the ultrasound technician. Big strong dirty boys wear blue. Sweet, delicate, sensitive girls wear pink. Guns or glitter, to invoke a depressingly pervasive gender reveal party theme. You are likely also aware of how toxic these dynamics can be, not only to men and women, but to those who lie betwixt: our gender fluid babes, trans darlings, beloved enbies,** and our intersex loves.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with gender. Not my own, to be clear—I’ve always been comfortable in my cis-ness—but in my feelings about gender in general. Obviously, I’m more than acquainted with toxic gender dymanics, the issues with pushing a purely binary view of gender, and all that jazz. However, I can’t pretend that these dynamics are deeply, deeply ingrained in my thinking and behaviour. Without being drowned in a marinade of “Girls are this, boys are that” culture my entire life, I highly doubt I would, say, soften my opinions with padding like “Well, I was just thinking” and “If that makes sense” to prevent being accused of bossiness or harshness, something that rarely happens when men speak directly. I wouldn’t be more inclined to trust female strangers and be wary of male strangers. I wouldn’t be able to shatter my male friends’ egos with a raised eyebrow and two simple words: That’s cute.

I don’t approve of these inclinations in me—in fact, I despise them—but they’re there, and they’re so unconscious that most of the time, I’m barely even aware of them, let alone able identify and stop them before they’ve materialized. And another inclination, one about which I am truly, deeply ashamed, is the fear of putting my male progeny in feminine clothing.

Yep. There it is. Despite my fierce advocacy for my gender-blurring friends, for allowing men to be sensitive, loving, and emotional, despite my pure unadulterated hatred for toxic masculinity, I am afraid that putting my son in a skirt, a dress, or a tutu will harm him.

To be fair, my fear is more nuanced than “BOYS WEARING GIRL CLOTHES BAD!!” I don’t think putting babies with penises in traditionally feminine garb will inherently fuck them up. I remain a fierce and loud advocate for blurring gender lines and destroying toxic masculinity across the board. I dress the babes in each other’s clothing indiscriminately when we’re at home. What I fear is future classmates, strangers on the street, The Outside World™.

Ladies and gentlemen, the aesthetic paragraph break.

Summing up my fear in a succinct…sentence…scenario…thing…gods, I need sleep: Say I raise my son in his early, relatively socially-isolated years, with little or no barriers between masculine and feminine clothing. He loves green dinosaur slippers, he loves pink tutus, and he doesn’t know anything of The Outside World™’s expectations of how little boys and girls are supposed to dress and act. Then, he goes to preschool in his favourite pleated skirt. How would that not be prostrating my son on a sacrificial altar of social rejection? Wouldn’t sending him into the world with no understanding of its gender expectations, however fucked up, be like throwing him into chum-filled waters for the sharks?

Well, Dee, my inner SJW hisses in my ear, you need to put your money where your mouth is. You hate the way The Outside World™ portrays and protects bullshit gender dynamics. Smash the patriarchy, bitch! Be the change you want to see in the world and all that!

And you know what, I want to. And to an extent, I do. I encourage male friends to open up emotionally and have cut back on my ball-breaking tendencies when it comes to reinforcing male gender norms (example—I try not to playfully emasculate my male friends by calling them Princess or teasing them when they do something slightly outside homosocial norms, like showing affection or crying.) And I break gender norms when it comes to my own behaviour often and loudly by just being me. But that’s me. My decisions and my choices as someone who is well-versed in society’s gender expectations.

Yeesh, another aesthetic paragraph break.

My son is an infant. He’s not well-versed in the societal expectations of masculinity and femininity. He won’t be well-versed in the damned alphabet for another five years. Even by the time he’s old enough to interact socially with other kids, he won’t have the agency to decide what he wears, let alone deal with or even understand the consequences of that decision. As much as I want to dismantle the gender binary and #smashthepatriarchy, I am not comfortable with the idea of forcing my son to deviate from a society he isn’t capable of understanding but will absolutely punish him for his deviation. It isn’t his decision, it’s a decision I’m making for him. And I’m not comfortable with that.

…

……

However…

I am buying my son his own dress.

It’s going to be a simple dress; no loud floral pattern or lace detailing or anything, but it’s going to, unmistakably, be a dress. As a baby with little memory and no social structure to punish him, I want to dress him start breaking down my own fears and discomfort, and possibly those of my family. When he’s old enough to show a penchant for what he likes to wear, if he decides to wear very feminine clothing, I will hopefully by then have consulted every teacher, psychologist, and gender-blurring person I know about how to encourage his individuality while preparing him for any social roadblocks he may face. “Times are different now,” so they say, and I’ve seen some distinct differences in the interactions and ideas of children and teens than what I dealt with in my own childhood and adolescence. We also live in as liberal an area as Ohio can be in this moment with countless daily examples of individuals who don’t conform to gender with whom my children will interact. Our current home is a far cry from my still largely white, evangelical, conservative, rural hometown. I truly hope these factors will spare my son the horror and grief too many people have experienced by blurring gender lines.

I desperately want to be the change I want to see in the world, but I also want my child to have agency. I don’t want to throw him into the lion’s den with no understanding of gender expectations. If he wants to defy them, I will support him with my whole heart and fiercely defend him like the Mama Lion I am. I just want that to be his choice, not mine. A is already full of personality, but he’s still an infant, and we have no idea what sort of kid he’s going to be, how he’ll want to dress. For all we know, he’ll be masculine with a capital ‘M.’ Given his parentage and his already apparent emotional sensitivity, I doubt it, but who knows? Babies are beginnings to books we haven’t read, and as much as we want to be, as parents, we aren’t the writers. Above all, even my own dreams of smashing the patriarchy with boys in skirts, I want my children to have agency. That’s why we didn’t circumcise, and that’s why I want to make sure my son is as informed as he can be about society’s issues with gender presentation, and how to break them down with his choice in wardrobe, if he wants to.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned my daughter, M, much in this discussion of gender dynamics. There’s a reason for that. Though harsh gender binary lines are drawn for all genders and the binary itself is very much a tool designed to keep women in second-class status, when it comes to presentation, it is far more acceptable for girls and women to exhibit certain masculine affinities than for boys and men to exhibit any feminine proclivities. In other words, girls can be tomboys (so long as they eventually ‘grow out of it.’) Baby girls can wear grey and blue without batting an eye. In fact, “gender neutral” baby clothes aren’t so much devoid of gendered characteristics so much as devoid of specifically feminine characteristics: Pink, unicorns, glitter, etc. “Gender neutral” clothing and little boy clothes are, to an extent, interchangeable. This is because in our patriarchal culture, “boy” things are the “default,” and anything “girly” is an aberration. See the “BUT WHY DO WE HAVE TO HAVE A FEMALE TRANSFORMER/FORCED DIVERSITY!” bullshit. In our patriarchal society, a girl being a tomboy is fine, especially pre-puberty. But a boy, at literally any phase of childhood and life in general, showing an inclination toward anything even remotely feminine, including fucking crying when they’re a fucking child, is a BIG PROBLEM. This is why gay men are so despised and illicit such disgust in general society, why so many trans women are murdered, and why sensitive little boys are viciously bullied. Patriarchal societies only work when to be a Man is better than being a Woman, so any perceived male inclined toward anything labelled as feminine or “of a woman’s world” must be eradicated. Because if the gender binary, the “natural” differences between men and women, are exposed as the illusions they are, then Patriarchal culture is subsequently exposed as a lie. To put it dramatically--If boys wear dresses, the Patriarchy crumbles.

In conclusion, I want my kids to upend the gender binary and smash the patriarchy and all that. But I want them to have the information they need to make that decision for themselves. If A wants to wear a dress or nail polish, I want him to know that some kids with jerkoff parents may make fun of him for it. I want him to be prepared for that in whatever way a kid can be.

So teacher/psychologist/gender-queer friends, be prepared for a lot of questions from this Mama Lion in the coming years.

*Wow, that last part just reeked of self-aggrandizement. Whatever, I’m too tired and lazy to backpedal. Moving on.

**Enbies: Short for non-binary individuals. Enby = NB = Non Binary.