The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[DanaC]

Stuff like this, as tiny as it is, really gets under my skin. Partly because it seems insane to me to bracket children so tightly (and if it is so fucking natural and innate why do the people who feel that way also seem to feel the need to encourage and reinforce it so strongly in children?), but also because it resonates with some of my own experience of growing up - where what I thought being a girl should be didn't always match what the culture I was in thought being a girl should be. To be clear I mean the wider culture - my family pretty much let me be what I wanted to be and explore what I wanted to explore - which was a range of stuff some of which was seen as boyish by others some of which was more 'girly'.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...be-pirates-too

I am with my three-year-old twin daughters at a princess and pirate-themed child’s birthday party where there is an Anna from Frozen character dishing out temporary tattoos. She is, however, nonplussed by their preferences. “Are you sure you don’t want a princess one? Look at this sparkly tiara! Or there’s this fairytale castle!”

“No, this one please.”

“Are you really sure?” Lookalike Elsa’s wide eyes look to me for confirmation.

“She’s sure,” I say, pointing to the skull and crossbone tattoo. “She loves pirates.”

“Oh-kay,” says Elsa. “If you’re really sure. Look! Here’s a glittery wand!”

“No thanks,” my daughter says. “I really like this one.”

By now I’m giggling. I’ve just spotted my daughter’s twin sister behind her in the queue, and she’s holding a transfer with a pirate’s galleon on.

“Another unusual choice! There’ll be none left for the boys!”

Daughter number two looks absolutely crestfallen. Her hand falters. “Of course you can have a pirate one too!” I overcompensate for Elsa’s overly pencilled arched eyebrows.

“My girls are really into all things pirate. They love Peter Pan and Swashbuckle’s their favourite CBeebies programme …” My girls break into a rendition of the Swashbuckle pirate salute, and nearby parents smile. They don’t think my daughters are odd. Do they?

“Proper pair of tomboys you’ve got there.” Elsa’s parting shot.

“I’m not a boy!”


“I’m a girl, not Tom boy. She’s a silly lady!”

“Yes, she is a bit silly, isn’t she?”

Even before that:

At their two-year health check, one of the tests was to identify words on picture cards. I spotted the friendly childcare assistant quietly putting aside certain cards, while cherry-picking others with an excited, “Ooh, you’ll get this one!”

What was on the discarded pile? You guessed it, pictures that could be considered to be for boys: trucks, tractors, worms and dragons. As soon as I spotted what was happening, I asked the lady just to turn the cards as they came up, explaining that my twins loved playing with a range of toys. I know she’d meant well, but it just sat too awkwardly with me not to say anything. Why should they only get to look at princesses and ponies? Why should their world be shrunk in such a way?

There's quite a bit more, but this bit struck me as particularly interesting, given the earlier comments about the effect of this stuff on boy's opportunities:

A friend recently asked me whether she should be concerned that when she picks up her three-year-old boy from nursery he’s often dressed as a fairy. Another friend’s son is usually to be found pushing a vacuum cleaner or making everyone cups of pretend tea. She gets constant comments about him being “soft”.

“It’s worse for boys,” both friends have said when we’ve nattered about our non-fixed-gender-play conformist children. They feel that girls can get away with being tomboyish, but with boys the assumption is that there’s something seriously wrong with them if they embrace what are considered to be feminine traits and behaviours. “I bet you’ve not seen a boy attend at a themed party in a dress …”

Until this month, they would have been right. That was before Paul Henson, a dad from Virginia, posted a picture on Facebook of his son dressed in his Halloween costume of choice – Elsa from Frozen. Paul explained that his son had chosen this costume for a Halloween party, and that he’d also asked him to go along as Anna, something he was game to do. “Halloween is about children pretending to be their favourite characters. Just so happens, this week his is a princess.” The post went viral, featuring on BuzzFeed, and had over 28,000 Facebook shares in a week.

What an awesome dad.

Why the fuck shouldn't a little boy play at being a princess? We're fine as fucking dandy with him imagining himself as a dying soldier (remember how fun death throes were as a kid? They were the best part of a pretend battle), or a gun-wielding criminal, a morally questionable, rage-driven super hero, a tiger, a lion, a wolf, or an alien species from a different galaxy - but to imagine themselves momentarily as a female character is an unnatural and dangerous reach.