Calvin and Hobbes

How would Jean Calvin feel about all this? And was there feedback about the possible names Wesley or Luther? (And why are no American boys named Knox or Zwingli or Hus? But I digress.)

My own daughter, now 7, has not been much interested in acting like a boy. (One of her classmates has, and that has passed without much comment.) I keep waiting for her to bump up against one of the zombie prohibitions on women. Perhaps in classical music, which has no canonical female composers? I’m not sure what to say when we get there — perhaps, “Grazyna Bacewicz, though no Stravinsky, was at least as interesting as Nico Muhly (or whoever the flavor of the year may then be).” But I don’t plan to bring this up unprovoked.

Just out of interest, is Violet going to an international school or just the local school (Whatever that means in Singapore)? I get the impression it’s the former …? Maybe the reaction would have been different (regardless of gender) if it were the latter?

My 3.5-y,o, son has had a pro-female bias for awhile. Despite being an absurdly stereotypical boy in many ways (trucks, dinosaurs, farts; impervious to pain), he’s also very sweet and empathetic, and he adores his big sister (as all kid brothers should), his mama, and his grammy. A couple months ago he developed an alter ego, “Sister Slug”. Bizarre, but there it is. He’s shown no clothes preferences wrt skirts or dresses, but he complains about clothes that aren’t “pretty” (colorful), and he asks for pink and purple. He occasionally says things indicating that he expects to become a girl/woman at some point.

All of which we’ve rolled with. Presumably it’s not permanent, but if it is, well, so be it. No need to cause him angst now that he’ll have to fight later. He’s little enough that everyone laughs off his sister slugness (Waldorf School doesn’t hurt – he’s too little for public pre-K, which I can’t marine being so accommodating), so there’s no social stress.

I’ll admit to being helped by that woman who wrote about her kid who wanted to be Velma (?) for Halloween – it’s always good to be reminded that people can be strong, which makes it easier to take mild stands. And, now, to being helped by Violet.

I’m guessing that local schools – being generally part of a monolithic system – will tend to be less flexible about things like this than international or private schools, regardless of local cultural mores. Also in Asia, I don’t know whether the level of disapproval for boys being girls vs. girls being boys would be so different. Certainly in Japan cross-dressing and trans behavior in public is treated very differently from (generally much, much more tolerantly than) the West.

Are international schools in Singapore any good? My experience of young adults trained in international schools in Japan is that they got a really bad education compared to a local school, especially in language at a higher level.

I know a couple in rural Japan whose child, now just finished school, went to a local school and can speak perfect Japanese (including the local monstrous dialect) but can’t speak any English – until he returns to his home country, when he becomes fluent quickly. My concern for situations like this is that the higher levels of English learning (essay writing, literature studies, critical skills, etc.) can’t usually be taught at home and a lot of students at international schools end up having a grade 9 understanding of both languages (local and their parents’). I.e. fluent but uneducated.

That kid, btw, was the only foreigner in the village, as it were, and was very well treated – including all his idiosyncracies – by the local school. In fact he was a kind of bridge into local social life for his parents. I can imagine that shool being very supportive of Calvin-and-Hobbesism on his part in a way that a local school in Australia might not be. But in a bigger school in Tokyo …?

OMG this is too much for me, given I have a newborn. I am voting for Romney, sorry guys.

This strikes me as just weird.

Belle, I love this story. Thank you for sharing. I am trying to imagine the reverse, a boy being a girl for eight months, and I think the social backlash might have been harsh even if the parents were able to roll with it as you did. Thanks again.

Weird is good. Scary is straight.

I wanted to be an avenger. Luckily there weren’t any real guns around.

Of course Belle is a great mother.

I have the other problem: Cinderella Ate My Daughter. I suppose she doesn’t take it too far, and she maintains a healthy interest in non-Cinderella activities. But still, it was a bit shocking to see it happen, and I’ve had to do some soul-searching about the degree to which I can take a laissez-faire attitude about the whole thing.

Yes. This is wonderfully weird. As the parent of a (now 15 year old) autistic boy, such weirdness is the fabric of daily life. Example: My son developed an affection for girls/women’s feet awhile back. His (generally pretty great) teachers were quite worried about this development (no doubt worried it was a developing fetish that might, if not controlled early, become stigmatizing). These worries were not lost on his parents, not at all, but we were determined not to let them determine our default response. (We generally try to provide some space for him to indulge his weirdness, within certain limits, and wanted to follow this policy in this particular case as well).

Luckily, most of our friends happily indulged our son’s requests to allow him to get down on the floor and stare close up at their toes for a minute or two, after which we’d say — Ok, time’s up! That would generally be the end of it, until the next time. (We were generally able to convince him to refrain from such requests in public, though not always. Of course, in these cases we had to step in; but even in these cases folks were remarkably nonchalant about the whole thing, aside from one uncomfortable incident involving an elderly Greek man on a bus.)

Our son also wanted, and received, nail polish treatments (feet only of course!) several times a week for a month or so; he often asked folks if they would compare toe nail polish jobs with him. At one point, the fixation moved from people feet to the feet of an old talking DW doll (for the uninitiated, DW is Arthur’s kid sister, from the Marc Brown books ). Pre-bed time routine involved under the covers activity involving who knows what exactly, but it didn’t seem to be overtly sexual in nature. In any case, it was nice for him to have someone who would repeatedly and enthusiastically ask him to touch her feet without complaint. After a few weeks, he simply lost interest in the whole thing. This particular weirdness seems to have passed for good.

One of the things I like about Belle’s story is that, in spite of differences in detail, they remind me that it’s pretty much a characteristic of being a human to be weird. In the case of kids, it’s very easy to predict outcomes formed out of habitual adult anxieties than by anything in the reality of kids’ lives. Curiosity and wonder are, as Meredith wisely points out, invaluable qualities for adults to be able to rely on here. Embracing these qualities doesn’t eliminate the inevitable discomfort that arises along the way; nor does it forestall the need for some judicious parental ‘limit-setting’ in certain cases. But it helps to remind me that such limits should be enabling rather than disabling.

Me at #24
Should be … in my daughter’s CLASS is a boy …

“At various times in my early childhood I wanted to be AstroBoy, Gigantor, and Godzilla. (All Japanese exports, of course, but we didn’t know from anime back then—no wonder I drive a Honda now.) Sounds like you fielded it perfectly, if you ask me.”

Me too! Or really any superhero/action hero. Of course I never really grew out of it….
/ Wonderful story Belle. It sounds like your daughter has fantastic taste! Who doesn’t love Calvin and Hobbes?

(sorry about the pseudonym…) As a trans parent of a comfortably cis daughter, we’re amused (and sometimes exasperated) by the occasional policing of her gender expression from other quarters; we fondly recall the “that’s not very ladylike” from an aged relative when she appeared at a family function wearing Dr Marten boots; and more recently as her teenage years advance, concern has been expressed that she might be lesbian or, worse, trans, because she wears boy clothes sometimes. A concern expressed by people who would certainly describe themselves as liberal and open-minded.

Kudos to you, Belle, and to yours!

At least she didn’t demand to be addressed as “Calvin the Bold”. And I can just see John getting into being Calvin’s dad. At least until the recall petitions begin.

Stephen Hart @ 22 wrote:

At various times in my early childhood I wanted to be AstroBoy, Gigantor, and Godzilla. (All Japanese exports, of course, but we didn’t know from anime back then—no wonder I drive a Honda now.)

8 Man feels terribly slighted! (In my primary school days, I loved first AstroBoy and when he appeared 8 Man, but Gigantor always struck me as not really credible.)

Not gender play, but sometime before kindergarten, I was, so I am told, bitterly disappointed with my parents for not having named me Buffalo Bill. Not sure how long that lasted, but they offered to a partial accomodation by adding the prefix “Buffalo” to my actual name and that apparently mollified me somewhat.

and then had to settle for my boy cousin’s ratty cast-off baseball glove

Heh. I tried for awhile to talk my daughter into abandoning her old pretend baseball glove (really a toy for an infant) to get a usable glove. I only won that battle when she discovered that they make pink baseball gloves.

I feel conflicted about this, but at least the glove is of good quality.

This sounds like a wonderful thing. The question might not really mean anything, but I wonder how much of this experience is ‘really’ gender identity anyway. It sounds like maybe Violet just really liked Calvin.

[on the other hand]

It certainly can lead to gender identity discussions about society (as opposed to Violet), in that depending on the society it might be ‘wrong’ for a girl to identify so strongly with a boy-character.

In any case it sounds like you dealt with it well.

Yay for Belle! And yay for every parent who lets the truly harmless whims of a child run. Doing so is not harming the child, and might help other kids (and their parents) learn a little more, early on, about human diversity.

My son loved pink. And to get him to wear underwear instead of pullups, we let him wear girls’ underwear. It worked. He’s fine. Even though, once, he pulled his pants down in public to show off his panties.

Now, what made this easier, for me anyway, is that the behavior which might have led to stigmatizing went away before very long. Just as Calvin reverted to Violet, my son now prefers red and wears Phineas and Ferb briefs. (Odd to think of him passing gas through the face of his beloved Agent P, but I digress.) So I didn’t have to face the tougher question of how long, and how much, to support these preferences.

It wasn’t a gender thing, but its amazing how strongly attracted to some character a kid can be, then suddenly, they just decide “that was foolishly childlike”, and turn it off just like a light switch. One of my son’s absolutely adorned anything Thomas the Tank Engine, then suddenly he never wanted anything to do with it, it was below him.

Wonderful OP and comments, too – what a breath of fresh air at CT!

As the mother of 2 children who were raised in a bi-cultural and bi-lingual environment, both of whom (one a boy, the other a much younger girl) passed through nearly-continuous phases of weirdness while growing up, I was recalled of the years when they were little and I more or less let “anything go” (our friends in this SEE country just figured I was a weird American mother). Now that they’re adults and have both returned to the U.S. to study/work, one thing I’ve noted is how impervious they seem to be to many of the temptations/fads their peers have gone through – they both are really independent thinkers, and I hope that our parenting “weirdness” contributed to this (they think it did).

Ah, Calvin & Hobbes! My son’s absolute all-time favorite strip (he has nearly all of them memorized, and still recalls many, 20 years later), and in fact for a number of years studied comic art at the SVA …

Also the all-time favorite strip of his grandfather, now 102 years young. Really, the best strip ever.

Sebastian @39 raises a good question, I think: “…I wonder how much of this experience is ‘really’ gender identity anyway. It sounds like maybe Violet just really liked Calvin.” One of the reasons for not discouraging play like Violet’s, even joining in, is that we seldom know what any of these fantasies means for a particular child. We can only go along and see where it takes them.
Things may be changing (I hope so), but I tend to think that in most US families and communities, adults still are more comfortable with girls’ playing (what adults think of as) male roles (whether or not, in their own minds, the girls are identifying with a gender role or not, though I’m not sure how to talk about gender except in terms of role-playing — and in that concession maybe I’m contradicting what I suggested in my first paragraph about Sebastian’s question?), than they are with boys’ playing (what adults think of as) female roles. I’m thinking how “tomboy” isn’t (usually) used pejoratively; I can’t think of any corresponding term (except ones used pejoratively) for a boy who prefers, say, playing with dolls to climbing trees. I’m also thinking how it’s not just okay but expected of grown women that their boundaries of self be fluid, that they make multiple identifications and be skilled at adopting different perspectives on people and situations. These are not the expectations most people have of grown men. (I’m thinking Carol Gilligan-esquely here.) Which may lead many adults to discourage cross-gender fantasy/behavior in boys more than they do in girls.
In many ways, having this greater freedom to play puts girls and women at an advantage, if you ask me. (It’s sort of like being multi-lingual. Like being able to wear skirts and pants.) An advantage we want (or should want) to share with boys and men.

Slightly tangential, but I miss the days when my son wanted to be a jack-o’-lantern when he grew up. (Now that he’s the ripe old age of 9, his occupational aspirations vacillate, in nearly perfect correlation with the season, between professional baseball player and professional basketball player.)

@faustusnotes — I’m a mostly indifferent, occasionally ashamed graduate of the American School in Japan, Tokyo, and I can assure you that by and large we turned out fine. The top native Japanese speakers in my class had to settle for Harvard and Brown instead of Todai and Kyodai, but I think most of them got over it.

Violet may have chosen Calvin because

Calvin Is One of the Old Gods!

Interesting. I read that NY Times Magazine article as well. The girl in the NYT article was presented as very very sure of her transgenderness. To avoid puberty though you need to start those drugs pretty early these days, probably 10-12. I wonder if by 10 years old one, as a parent, would be confident enough in the non-transience of a transgender like period like the one you describe to put the child on those puberty blocking drugs?

What would you do if a (relatively) more mature version of this episode had started when Violet was 10, right before she was going to start puberty? What if it lasted a whole year and she started insisting less that she was Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes but more that she really wanted to be a boy? Would you be comfortable blocking her puberty at that point?

I don’t have children yet but my wife and I are planning on starting next year. In a case like that from the NYT article where it was a constant and insistent thing since the child was 2 or 3 I’d be fairly comfortable with the drugs. But what if the child was just sort of generally multiple choice as far as gender stereotyped activities and behaviors until 9 or 10, then started identifying more strongly with the opposite sex. I’d be very worried that the child was just more androgynous and maybe bi-sexual or multigender or semi-transgender or whatever you want to call it but would in fact be happier in the end remaining biologically the same gender he/she was born as. Thoughts?

I think I speak for all mankind when I say thanks for reading her Calvin and Hobbes and not Mein Kampf or American Psycho. The next time she overdoses on comedy, I suggest you sit her down and make her watch Carrot top or Dennis Miller to scare her straight.

Final thought: playing around with symbolic female-y-ness can also be fun for girls – maybe you’ve got that to look forward to. Or maybe not.

There is a photo in an album in a box, somewhere still in reach (I think) of me in the early 50s, 4 years or so of age, dressed in Calvin-typical striped T-shirt, shorts, and non-Calvin-typical (actually Mom’s) cloche with an illusion veil, handbag over one arm (almost to ground), and over-large high heels. Also, a huge grin on my face.

I have no memory of the moment, other than the artifact of the photo. That someone was easy enough to take it–and my parents easy enough to save it–suggests that even in the long time way back time there were parents enough like Belle and John to smooth the way for their child in an otherwise un-smooth time. Kudos to all those parents and their supporters.

Just out of curiosity, Belle, what kind of toy is Saki, if she isn’t a tiger?

Lovely post, Ms. Waring, and an adept handling of Calvin. There’s nothing like hysterical parents to freak out a child doing a bit of personal exploration. I’m also impressed that the school and teachers were cooperative.

Uncle Kvetch and others are correct, sissy and tomboy are not gender equivalents. I’ve seen fathers in particular lose all power of reason when confronted by a son who acts in a stereotypically feminine manner. I suspect that in the not-very-distant past, tomboys were not viewed as budding lesbians simply because lesbians were so unknown as to not exist in the minds of most parents, but fag, queer and pansy were in common use. The good Doctor, being skinny and bookish as a child, was often the target of the latter terms. I hate to recommend this tactic, but I found hitting my oppressor in the face ended the abuse even when I came out the overall loser. I hope non-jock boys have it better these days.

Steve – thanks – but, but, it’s different than I remember from nearly a half century ago…

Also, am I imagining that a girl could be called a “sissy,” either by other girls or by adults? (Is that TMI about the adults I grew up around? A neighbor once told me I looked like a “hippie,” too, because I was wearing a plaid poncho with fringe. I knew enough to know it wasn’t meant as a compliment.)

JanieM, soulmate: “The year I was 5, 1955, brought me not only Davy Crockett but Mary Martin’s Peter Pan on TV.” Me, too! I was also 5 in 1955! And I treasured my Davy Crockett hat, and Mary Martin. (I mark in memory the beginning of my adolescence, whatever age I actually was, by my disdain for clapping for Tinkerbell, when my parents were eager to clap for her — god what a creep I must have been. I remember with some shame that moment — my parents clapping, my making point of clapping disdainfully.)
As the girl in a boy-heavy neighborhood for my general age-group in a NJ town — fortunately, I didn’t “throw like a girl,” tomboy that I sort of was, so I could be comfortably part of this throng, though I was plenty invested in dolls and playing teacher and such…. Well, I was also from the eccentric WASP family in the midst of all sorts of ethnic groups (yeah NJ of the 1950’s!). But my most intense play at age 5 to, say, 10, went on with my Italian American neighbor (god, I want to use his name, so dear is he to me in memory! I refrain). With other kids (lots — bigger families, then) we played baseball and kickball in the backyard, tag, all kinds of games we’d make up. We’d ride our bikes, endlessly. But he and I, just on our own, we’d “play cars” (little moulded cars, and we’d construct roads and neighborhoods — did I say suburban NJ?). And dolls and dress-ups. A favorite thing for him and me: to walk around the block in dress-ups, both of us in cast-off garb of the extravagantly female kind.
No one in his Neapolitan-American family ever showed any concern about his “gender-play,” even in its most public display (this confirmed by my own mother, years later), including his staunchly Italian grandmother, who spoke virtually no English but who terrified all of us children (and, in retrospect, I realize must have terrorized her daughter-in-law, my playmate’s mom).
Anyway, just to say that we aren’t necessarily creating whole new worlds when we just let our children play –well, no, we are (in a good way), but we also aren’t. The wisdom of the ancients, or something. Which can be reassuring. The parents of a very real and incalculably dear child want a better world for her or him, but don’t want this child to be an experimental subject, either. Well, don’t worry, that’s what I say. (I feel the nonna’s voice becoming mine.) Let them play.

fortunately, I didn’t “throw like a girl”,

Not quite the same thing, but I remember struggling terribly to master straight-arm overarm bowling when we were first made to play cricket at school. A boy who was even further down the athlete list than me was permitted to throw under-arm when it was his turn; I thanked the Lord I hadn’t been reduced to that. The words “like a girl” weren’t actually used, but they were there in all our minds.

My daughter (aged 11) has just started at a single-sex school. A couple of weeks in, she told us she’d learnt how to “run like a girl”, and demonstrated (body upright, arms down, hands out horizontally; if you picture “run like a penguin” you won’t be far off). Part of it is tactical – running in the corridor is of course verboten, and running “like a girl” is much easier to switch out of than getting your head down and running properly*. But part of it is definitely “running like a girl”. I just hope she doesn’t get stuck like that.

*Around the same age, I addressed this problem by inventing my own speed-walking technique, which involved hunching down and leaning back slightly. My sister asked me if I’d watched a lot of Marx Brothers.

“A boy who was even further down the athlete list than me was permitted to throw under-arm when it was his turn; I thanked the Lord I hadn’t been reduced to that. ”

Which is ironic because overarm bowling was introduced into cricket for women players who were unable to bowl efficiently underarm because of their skirts.

Way back in the last century, there was the rise of feminism during which Lois Gould wrote an awesome little short story (eventually made much bigger etc.). Here is a link to the story (it speaks volumes about this post).

http://www.sa.ucsb.edu/women/blog/file.axd?file=2011%2F4%2FBabyX.pdf

Well, the calvin phase is pretty harmless, I’m sure you’ll have more trouble being supportive when she goes through her skinhead, racist, or republican phase …

Calvin and Hobbes also have something to say about the economy: http://andreasmoser.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/calvin-and-hobbes-explain-the-economy/

Meredith @75 — fun to know there’s someone else in the Davy Crocket+Mary Martin fan club. And I too remember with a red face some of the things I did to prove to my parents that I was my own person…but I won’t go so far off topic as to tell any of those stories here. :)

Salient @86 — thanks for that link. It’s a great piece, starting with the title: “It’s Okay to be Neither.” Reminds me of my all-time favorite book title: Kate Bornstein’s “Gender Outlaw: Men, Women, and the Rest of Us.” The teacher who wrote the piece ought to be training teachers all over the country, but no, we have to get our textbook content out of Texas….

*****

Meanwhile, a couple more thoughts before this thread fades off.

One is an observation about the way kids’ movies (I’m thinking especially of Disney) changed and didn’t change between my childhood and my kids’ childhood. Ariel in The Little Mermaid is a lot spunkier than Sleeping Beauty or Snow White; that was a change for the better.

But all the plots still had marrying the handsome prince and living happily ever after as the end of the story. However spunky a girl might be, her destiny was still determined by a relationship, not by her own independent self.

Even beyond that, and sliding across the overlap between the topic of gender and the topic of relationships, the endlessly repeated plot framework teaches kids that the story ends with marriage. This is wildly unhelpful in relation to the reality that marriage is a beginning far more than an ending, and that it’s messy and difficult and challenging, bearing very little resemblance, a lot of the time, to “happily ever after.”

*****

Second thought: Lots of comments (e.g. Belle @69) have alluded to the overlap between gender questions and sexual orientation questions. Because I’m both gay and not very traditional genderwise, this has been an interesting topic for me to think about ever since I figured out I was gay during college (yes, it was late; see aforesaid Italian Catholic + Baptist 1950s upbringing).

My own unscientific sense of it is that there’s a lot of overlap — i.e. that a higher percentage of gay people than straight people are also “non-traditional” in their gender presentation and/or (like me) even their sense of what their gender is.

But underneath all of that — which is a rich topic for discussion, and libraries have no doubt been written about it, and careers made thinking about it — it seems to me that gay people, regardless of how they present or think about themselves gender-wise, do unanimously violate one of the most universal gender stereotypes, and that’s the gender of the person you’re supposed to fall in love with. We mostly don’t even think about that as a gender stereotype, but I think it is, and because of it, gayness is always tangled up with gender questions, even if a lot of gay people are perfectly traditional/stereotypical in their gender style.

And then there was Shrek. where, be it noted, the handsome prince is definitely not being held up as an ideal. And Princess Fiona goes thru Robbing Hood and his Merry Men like a hot knife thru butter. She still ends up marrying someone, but she is hardly the “frail, fragile, flower of feminity” that the earlier Disney cartoons protrayed.

As you describe it, your situation is pretty much exactly matches my nephew’s experience, who was born a girl and decided that “she” was really a “he” very early on. Now a high schooler, he takes testosterone and had his top surgery last year, and is the happiest I’ve ever seen him.
The part in your story that makes me think that Violet may indeed be trans is her insistence that she doesn’t want to develop breasts; that was very important for my nephew too. Time will tell, of course.
I think it’s wonderful that you were so supportive of Violet/Calvin’s need to be in charge of her/his self-identity. The only part of your post that gave me pause was the following:
“I know there is debate over whether children can make an informed decision about these matters, and about whether they might not just be gay as adults rather than trans (certainly many of my queer friends strongly identified as the opposite gender when they were young).”
In my experience and belief, gender identification and sexual orientation are two completely independent aspects of the human psyche. There are plenty of gay men who express a “feminine side” who have no interest whatsoever in altering their genitals because they self-identify as male.
I’ve never heard of a person who started out thinking they were trans and then later decided they were gay. Gender identity is so basic to the human condition that it is usually felt/experienced way before the emergence of a sex drive and the self-realization of what a person’s sexual orientation is. I knew for a fact that my brain was wired as a male years before I knew that I was gay. (Some men claim to have been very precocious in their knowledge of their sexual orientation, though.)
In any case, keep up the great parenting!
Best,
Cliff

FB — my family wasn’t quite that bad, but your story sounds pretty familiar. I just mostly conformed: Catholic school, uniforms (skirts/jumpers), dresses to school dances, etc. It was the 50s and not the 90s and 00s (?), but having brought my own kids up in rural Maine I can also imagine that it’s still easy to find people who say “girls can’t play baseball, they have to play softball” (etc.). (I went through that when my daughter declared that she was going to play baseball like her brother….)

If memory serves, the last time my mother mentioned that I would look “pretty” if I would just wear a little makeup, I was in my 40s. I guess I should be grateful that she finally did give up. I never broke contact with my family, but once I left for college I never went back except for short visits — not even summers. At the time, all I was conscious of was that my home town couldn’t hold my vast intellectual ambitions (ha ha), but as the years went by I gradually understood that there were other reasons as well (not all of them having to do with gender/sexuality).

I hope you keep looking for friends and possible relationships — and I’ll stop there, lest I start sounding like an advice columnist, which I most definitely am not; my own life is more than I know what to do with most of the time. But — good luck.

*****

I don’t see anything fruitful coming out of an attempt on my part to discuss Ariel further with J. L. Rowan, but here’s one more memory triggered by thinking about that time in my life.

From the time when she could first stick a tape in the VCR, my daughter was a movie buff (I am not) and a natural-born, if not politically declared, feminist. When she was about three she started to count the number of boys/girls in the kids’ movies and cartoons she watched, and she was not happy about the results. Sweet, then, in a way, that one of the speakers at her college graduation was Geena Davis, who was being awarded an honorary degree in appreciation for her work on gender in media, inspired partly by her own daughter’s experience in viewing kids’ programming…..

feeling miffed that being a boy or girl wasn’t something we got to have a choice over

This reminds me of my favorite children’s book: The Mountains of Tibet, by Mordecai Gerstein. “In a tiny village, in a valley, high in the mountains of Tibet, a little boy was born. He loved to fly kites….”

My 4 yr old boy has been happiest in a flowing hem and pretty frills since 13mths. Funny, I thought it would be harder if he were a girl! He wears the boys uniform at school, and, it’s sort of cooling off. I figure if I stop him it’ll bite me and him on the ass. If I let him be he’ll wrk out his own way… Be yourself everyone else is taken… You have no idea how much shit I have taken from my inlaws for refusing to tell him wearing a skirt is wrong. Once we told girls wearing trousers was.