How My Five Year Old Understands Gender Fluidity

When I was 4-5 years old, I thought people changed races growing up. That explained why there were different races. I just figured we were born one colour and could decide which ever one we wanted to be when we were older. I went and told my (white) mother that I wanted to be white like her when I grew up. She explained to me that I was black like my daddy and would always be black.  OK, fair enough, I thought. No biggie.

My son has not really spoken about race. He has pointed out that people are different colours, but he hasn't really expressed much interest in it. It helps (I suppose) that we've always been open about the fact different people look different and so it's not a confusing concept to him.

However, gender might be more abstract for him. I have quite a few trans* friends. I also have homosexual friends. Because I want my son to understand all sorts of people can make up a family, I have always explained that some people have two mommies or two daddies (or more!). I have also explained that some people are born female and then change to male (or vice-versa). This is where it starts to get more complicated.

Since my son is apraxic, one common habit is to call everyone by the same pronoun - "he." Every once and a while, a "she" might make it out, but pretty much everyone is "he" for him, and that has nothing to do with appearance. However, some people can get offended and I have to explain that everyone is "he" to him.

"You had me at your ask of my preferred gender pronoun"

Following the same logic I did as a child, my son seems to think that when he gets to my height, he will become female and black. Then when he gets to his father's height, he will be male and white. This sounds pretty cool to me, but I don't think that will happen.

Even more interesting is when we asked him which sex he preferred for a sibling, he said, "a girl baby that will turn into a boy when it gets older." I'm just not sure the adoption agency can swing that!

It's pretty cool to me how my five year old understands gender fluidity - at least to a very basic extent. I want him to have that freedom to feel like gender is mostly flexible.

While I wish it were easier for people to transition as they please, I'm having a hard time getting him to understand it's just not that easy! But maybe his generation will be cool. Maybe his generation won't see it as such a big deal, and that's promising.

Gender Bending

I have seen a lot of posts from people wanting to raise "gender-neutral" children by not giving telling others what the sex of the child is, dressing them androgynously, using gender-neutral pronouns and providing an ample variety of toys/clothing colours/styles.

However, other than offering a child a lot of options, I'm not really sure how effective all this is. In the end, we all have our preferences and as parents, all we can do is be open to nurturing whatever our child is interested in. I think that offering the options is as close as we are going to come in this society to realistically raise "gender-neutral" children. After all, all around them are signs and behaviours already codefied for them. When they watch TV, they see boys do certain things and girls do others. They see how mommy and daddy (or even mommy and mommy and daddy and daddy) behave. They understand mommy and daddy use different public toilets. They hear "she" and "he" on the playground. They see stores where racks and racks of clothing are separated by colour and style. No matter how hard you try to hide these facts from a child, unless you live in isolation in the woods, they will see these things and internalize them.

I read a post today called Why That Boy Acts Like A Boy and it resonates with me. I'm horribly aware that there could be a bias in the way people see my boy. It seems that over time, "boys being boys" has also become less acceptable. I'm not sure how making us all "genderless" really helps - I believe we all have qualities we can learn from each other and strengths we can benefit from. But the pressure right now seems to be asking boys to change more than we`re currently asking of girls.

The fact is, while I am absolutely all for ALL of us, as humans, becoming less violent towards EVERYONE, I don't believe we need to inherently change too much about how our children play and what clothes they choose to wear in order to achieve that. We need to develop and teach acceptance of everyone, regardless of how they look. As long as they are conducting themsevlves respectfully, we should be able to do the same.