canisfamiliaris:

What’s So Bad about A Boy Who Wants to Wear A Dress?

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. 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. Alex, they wrote in their email, “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.

[photo: New York Times]

Related articles

• My Gender Fluid Husband (thornynotprickly.wordpress.com)
• “The Gender Revolution For Boys” (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• How would you handle a gender-variant child? (timesunion.com)

(via gyrwolf)