#aaand there's a glaring lack of stories about nonbinary kids

[chrismcshell]

gender stuff of the day

i got a book of short essays/memoirs/etc written by mothers of trans & gnc kids, thinking it would be both a good read for me and a good tool for when i come out to my mom

so i read the whole book over the past two days & put little sticky notes on parts that really resonated with me

one in particular that stuck with me was a lesbian mother asking her son why he never showed any signs of discomfort with his gender as a little kid, and his response was something like: when i was 5 and i said i didn't want to wear dresses anymore, you said ok, no more dresses! when i wanted short hair, you said ok, we'll cut it!

and later in the book there was yet another story from a lesbian mother with a trans son, and this mother said that, before she knew her son was trans, she had been happy and proud that her "daughter" was a "tomboy"

now, unlike these mothers, my mom is very straight, but she's relatively open-minded for a straight white middle-class canadian, and has always been all for feminist "girl power" type stuff. she's also always been against the strict division of "boy things" and "girl things", especially the extreme limitations put on how girls "should" be, what they should play with, etc

and this is absolutely a huge part of the reason why i didn't realize i was trans until i was almost 15. my mom tells me the story of when she took me to get a new comforter for my bed; there were two on sale, a pink flowery one and a blue racecar one, and she let me choose which one i wanted, and i chose the blue one. i got a lot of boys' clothes as hand-me-downs from my cousin, and i loved wearing his old baggy t-shirts, especially the one with the dragon on it which was my favourite for a long time. i played with barbies and baby dolls sometimes, but preferred stuffed animals over anything else, and almost all my stuffies were boys - and none of this was ever a problem. i watched my cousin play video games, i went outside to catch bugs, i wore dresses on special occasions and i was okay with it because i was almost always allowed to be me.

so i always was, and still am, encouraged to be a gender-nonconforming girl. and i still wonder sometimes if maybe i am just a confused "tomboy" after all. but at the end of the day, no matter what my gender is, i'm happy that i had a childhood that wasn't overly restricted by gender roles.