Stop Looking at My Tutu

This is one of my current non-fic reads.

If you happen to know anything about me, you might be wondering why I'm reading a book about raising a girl when I have one son. It's not because I am announcing a pregnancy or doing a "gender reveal" thing, it's because I want to raise a person who does not make assumptions about others based on their sex or gender. It's because I want to understand more about my own female identity, and what impacted me as I was growing up. And it's because I want to make sure I am setting the best example possible for any girls I encounter, whether they are daughters of my friends or the students at my school.

Right now, we are in the middle of the #metoo movement, and we are encouraging our young women to stand up for themselves and to speak out about any type of harassment. We are showing them a dark side of what it means to be female, and encouraging them to fight it, but I don't think we have equipped them with the full arsenal of tools to think critically about what it means to be a female, or a girl, or a woman. 

Rather than wait until they are teenagers or young adults to tell them to speak up, we need to start speaking honestly with them from the time they can communicate. This is tough because it requires us to think about our own stereotypes and preconceived notions of gender and confront the parts of our past that informed our own understandings of femaleness.

I recently had a conversation with a couple of my friends recently about the hopes we had regarding ultrasounds, and finding out the sexes of our babies. One of my friends really wanted a girl, and when she found out she was expecting a girl, she was very happy. However, then she got scared that maybe the ultrasound wasn't accurate, so she started mentally preparing herself, in case she ended up giving birth to a boy. My other friend admitted she was hoping for a girl, but then found out she would be having a boy. I really, really wanted a boy, so I was relieved to find out that I would have a son.

Just because I don't need to navigate the same issues as people raising daughters doesn't mean that notions of gender are simpler.

My son was three years old when he first had his haircut; many people saw his long curls and referred to him as her/she. Whenever I paint my toenails, he asks me to paint his, too. I am trying to get away from our ingrained notions of "Boys do _______" and "Girls do _________". As he gets older, I hope to talk to him more about how he understands gender, but as this book describes, and as anyone with kids knows, talking with toddlers is baffling. Maybe when our kids are toddlers, we should just use that opportunity to talk to ourselves about gender.