Pierced ears and pink nails not required

I don’t know if you follow Jennifer Carr’s blog, Today you are you but you should. She is the loving mother of a little girl who lived her first four years as a boy until she told her parents one day that she was a girl inside. Since then Jennifer has written the much lauded children’s book “Be you who are”, launched her blog and, most recently, launched the website Gender Conversations as a place for people to openly and respectfully talk about gender identity and expression.

Today on Gender Conversations Jennifer re-posted from the archives of her home blog her thoughts about someone asking if she was going to pierce her six-year-old’s ears.

My knee jerk reaction was that this person thought that getting earrings could help my daughter “pass”. Then I considered that perhaps they thought I had fewer parental restrictions, like “she accepts her child is trans but can’t let her have holes in her ears?” type of thing. Or maybe they were just making conversation?

My first thought upon reading this was that this is the kind of question so often asked of the parents of girls. All children are expected to behave certain ways and like certain things based on their gender. We try to put them into these neat little boxes, not allowing them to explore the beautiful messiness of the in between spaces. It has always stunned me the degree to which so many people are entrenched in their assumptions about boys and girls.  I have never fit into what a girl “should” be but I have also always felt very at home in my female body. One need only to rub shoulders with some butch dykes to understand that gender identity and gender expression are two very distinct things.

So when someone asks Jennifer about piercing her daughter’s ears she hears that in the context of her daughter’s gender non-conformity, the kind of gender policing with which she is most familiar. If someone asked me that, I would hear it as an expression of someone’s assumption that all little girls are into jewellery and adornment. I would ask myself, “Would they ask that if she were a boy?”

So often when we hear about gender non-conforming kids we hear about children who were born with the body of a boy but have declared a love of pretty dresses and sparkly shoes.  Does this mean that the child is really a girl?  Not necessarily, I know at least one mother with a son who loves to wear pretty pink dresses but has expressed no interest in being a girl.  On the other hand, is it necessary to love pretty pink things to be a girl? Certainly not, but our notions of what a girl is make us blind to the complexities of gender. It would never occur to us to think that a little boy who wears pants and loves soccer is truly a girl.

Gender is not one thing. It is multifaceted and complicated and sometimes messy. Just because one identifies as a boy (gender identity) doesn’t mean that one will present in traditionally masculine ways (gender expression) or subscribe to expectations of how a boy should behave (gender role). With young children we tend to lean much more heavily on external, superficial cues. We put the girls in pink and the boys in blue; give the girls dolls and the boys trucks. This not only serves to reinforce the primacy of gender in how they understand the world, it also serves to conflate the various elements of gender.

Just because a natal boy “feels like a girl inside” doesn’t mean that she has to be a “princess boy”.  And just because a girl was not born with a girl’s body does not mean that she’s any less vulnerable to the perils of being raised in the tiny little box of girlhood. 

So here’s where I take what my seem like a leap – but trust me, it isn’t.  Violence against women – and this includes sexual violence – is the ugliest side of a society defined by an imbalance of power between women and men.  It is a many sided beast and one of the sides that we are so reluctant to question is the way in which we raise our children.  From infancy we teach them that gender is the most important element of their identity. We then proceed to teach them that there is a right way and a wrong way to be a boy or a girl.  Girls should be pretty, attractive, nice, friendly, accommodating, nurturing, peacemakers.  Boys should be strong, active, competitive, adventurous, bold, aggressive, risk-takers.  And then there’s the other messaging to which we, as a society, refuse to own up: girls should be sexy – but not too sexy, available – but not too available, and focused on the needs of others, particularly male others. 

What we don’t want to see when we look at these little princesses is that we are also making them that much more vulnerable to abuse.  We teach them how to give boys what they want, but we don’t teach them how to know what they want. We teach them to be nice and friendly but we don’t teach them how to say “back the hell off”.  We teach them to take care of others, but we don’t teach them how to take care of themselves. We teach them that they need a man, any man, to make them complete. After all, what would Snow White be without her prince?

So what about the princess boys?

Trans women are significantly more likely to be the victims of violence, sexual and otherwise, than cis-women. And yet we tell trans women and girls that in order to “pass” they must subscribe to all of the most harmful assumptions about what it means to be a woman.  We owe it to all of our children, especially those who don’t fit in the boxes, to raise them with the whole range of options of how to be. Not how to be a boy or how to be a girl, but how to be whole.

When people in the mainstream media talk about gender neutral parenting they treat it either with condescending disdain or outright contempt, more often than not it’s some combination of the two.  From [http://equalitymatters.org/blog/201109260010]Fox News hauling out their hack shrink to the [http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/Baby+Storm+mother+speaks+gender+parenting+media/4857577/story.html]gross misrepresentations of Kathy Wittericks’ words and actions, the media loves to dismiss gender neutral parenting as some kind of misguided, 1970’s holdover doomed to failure.  But there is nothing fatuous about the decision to eschew the gendering of childhood.  When I get upset about princess worship or 5-year-olds in bikinis it is not because I hate all things femme. It is because I see the big picture. I know what it means to take abuse from boys because you don’t think you’re allowed to speak up. For many girls the message is that you must “go along to get along”, whether this means accepting sexual harassment, remaining silent when another girl is being victimized or staying with an abusive boyfriend, the outcome is the same. We are raising our girls to be broken.

What I want to see is all girls, cis and trans, raised to know the breadth of options available to them without the pressure to go one way or the other.  Regardless of whether a girl’s gender identity aligns with her body at birth, she needs to know that her gender is not dependent on her fitting into that tiny pink box.