Gender roles are soul crushing so why are we still gendering kids clothes?
I was two minutes into writing a post about shoes for toddlers when I had to stop and throw a public fit. Why the hell are we still gendering kids clothes? Why am I forced to gender my child before they even have a chance to figure it out themselves just so I can them get some damned shoes?
Tired of being misgendered?: Cute pronoun pins to the rescue
Pronoun pins could help con attendees, but also people who work in the service industry too. Or… hear me out… gentle but obvious reminders to your family during the holidays!? So let’s dive in and look for some of the cutest pronoun pins I could find.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” How do you explain gender to a child?
My kiddo is biologically male, but when kids ask him if he’s a boy or girl, he says, “I’m me. I’m a person.” Kids, however, don’t accept this answer and pester him to the point of tears. I don’t know how to tell him the difference between boys and girls, or if I want to tell him that there is a difference at all (besides anatomically).
How do you explain gender to a four-year-old?
Finding affordable gender-neutral fashion
We received a question from a reader asking us to find inexpensive gender-neutral fashion:
“I recently have come out as genderfluid, and it’s so helpful to see others going through it as well! Any chance of a fashion roundup of affordable gender non-conforming clothes?”
This has proven to be more difficult than anticipated…
Defying gender binaries with Alok Vaid-Menon — a gender non-conforming writer, performer, & fashion icon
Alok feels that the concepts of masculinity and femininity shouldn’t have relevance in this day and age. “We need to be much more colorful, expansive, and precise about what we mean rather than defaulting into ideological catchalls that do more harm than good,” he tells me.
Being that Alok is a person of color, I wonder if they feel that ethnicity/race ties into the equation in a meaningful way. Their reply is so profound that I’m still sort of reeling from it…
I want my son to understand that he can wear, do, or play with anything he wants
I have a four-year-old son, and his father is very “that’s for boys and this is for girls,” and “you can’t wear/do/play with that because you’re a BOY.”
My hope is that this beautiful community of families can help me by suggesting books, movies, or other resources that might help us get the point across to our son. I have looked high and low and I’ve nabbed the materials that I feel express my feelings, but I want as many tools as I can to help my son understand that he can wear, do, or play with anything he wants.
The tricks to getting dressed when your gender is ambiguous
Given my strange gender identity, this means that my outside rarely feels like it’s reflecting myself. It can be frustrating. And depressing. This means I had to develop a few coping mechanisms just to be able to get out the door every day.
So here are my tips for getting dressed when your gender is ambiguous…
My gender identity is confused and I’m okay with it
I should probably start by identifying my gender, but that is… complicated. I am a female, physically. What I identify as is where it gets blurry.
As a teenager, in the early nineties, I had no internet to help me figure it out. And, as a broke young adult in the new millenia, I still didn’t have the amazing resources and web connection of, “Hey, my specific gender identity has a name and I’m not alone!”