Mothers For Women’s Lib

I knew there would be people who criticised the way I brought up Austin, because they’d say that I was (in my father-in-law’s words) “making a lass out of him.” I was ready for that, and have been able to live with it. But the awful realisation came to me just the other day, when Austin was telling me about his ‘best’ friends – I, too, have a good amount of these gendered ideas left in me.

Austin has five close friends, of which four are girls. And when he went through his list of friends, I found myself wondering whether I’d done something ‘wrong’. Whether I’d forced my views on him so much that he could only identify with girls (ignoring, of course, the boy amongst his friends, as one does when guilt tripping happens!). I was pleased that he could make friends with girls, of course, but realised that I felt guilty about the amount of female friends he had compared to male. I want my son to have the friends he wants – if he made friends with lots of traditionally-masculine boys I’d put up with it, though I’d wonder what I’d done to him to make him feel so comfortable with them. I never thought I’d worry about female friends.

It just SHOWS how central the gender divide is in life, though. The first thing you know about a child is hir  sex: zie is labelled “boy” or “girl” from the moment of birth, and that knowledge affects what the child wears, what zie is shown, how zie is treated. No matter how much we disagree with the gender divide, it’s still THERE – and it still affects us to some extent.

I’ve never put Austin in dresses. Although I say I let him choose his clothes (hence his pink tops and purple trousers), I’ve never given him the option of wearing a dress as ‘normal’ wear (he tries things on, of course, at home). I’ve done this so that he won’t be teased, but as long as everyone (including me) continues to make this distinction between what is suitable for boys and what is suitable for girls, the teasing is always going to be an issue.

There are two problems here. Firstly, the fact that no matter how much we may agree or disagree with them, gendered ideas are fairly central to our world. Secondly, given problem #1, it is difficult to know how far to push the boundaries with our children. I want my son to be a happy, well-balanced boy. The fact is, if I ignored all gender ideas and (for example) sent him to pre-school in a dress, the teachers would have some sort of negative/weirded out reaction to him, and so would some of the children he goes to school with. I might think that the idea that “boys are like this” and “girls are like this” is an unhelpful way of looking at the world, but do I have the right to make an example of my son? As an adult, I can choose to accept/reject the gender ideas and understand what I am doing. But Austin is three. He’s too young to understand all the background to it, so is it fair for me to ask my son to do things which will almost certainly make his young life harder, and get him teased, perhaps bullied, by his peers?