We have this gross obsession to color code our infants, force them to play with their gender-corresponding toys, make them fit uncomfortably into one pink box or one blue box with absolutely no overlap. I used to think I was going to have a daughter and paint everything pink and put little bows on her head every day, but the world I have been exposed to has left me rethinking my future parenting. (Now, Im not blaming any parents who did that! I just think the world is much different now than it was even, say, five years ago.) I like to think Ill give my children a splash of all the worlds, and when theyre old enough to have opinions, thats when they can choose rather than me pretending to know what theyll like. My male toddler may decide he loves trucks and everything with trucks on it, and gosh dangit, I will buy him those trucks! But I am not going to bring him home freshly born with zero ability to voice his opinions to an entirely blue room with trucks plastered all over the walls. I am not going to only buy him action figures and force masculine colors down his throat. And no matter what he ends up liking (because its not about purposefully defying gender stereotypes, its just about letting him like whatever the heck he wants to and actually giving him the freedom and tools to do that), I am going to teach him how gender IDENTITY and gender EXPRESSION are two separate things, and that any other human he sees can occupy a wide range of those two separate things, and that all of it is absolutely, positively okay. When I do reach that point where I am expecting a beautiful child and I have a baby shower, what I WILL do is ask everyone who comes to not bring only the strict gendered items in the baby sections of all stores. My unborn daughter will not be receiving LITERALLY only pink items already confining her to a box that she cant get out of. And to reiterate, theres nothing wrong with liking stereotypical gender things (I FREAKING LOVE PINK AND BOWS AND DRESSES AND STUFF), I just think our society has a completely sick obsession with gender roles and the boxes of each gender and we need to make it STOP. Its strange, because growing up thats what I was shown/taught was the correct way to do things just from watching the world, and going against my childhood dreams about how I would parent is odd. But I will be so proud to contribute to a new world that doesnt shame children for being who they are and liking what they like and LISTENING to them rather than forcing them to do what you think is right because of what their genitalia looked like when they came out of the womb. All this because of someones GENITALIA. This hurt, confusion, anger, shame, intolerance, because of if you have a penis or a vagina. That is wrong.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 22:40:32 +0000
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