However, I have not in my life ridden a horse for any purpose besides fun, and few of us ride motorcycles. By connecting the whole “Open or closed at the crotch” feature to gender, we are sadly forgoing a whole spectrum of cool fashion choices, many of which would be of great benefit to men, as they require far fewer motions in order to complete a whole host of daily bodily functions.

Give the boy a plaid dress and tell him to have fun. More power to them.

Many little boys like dresses and pink just as much as the next kid. Who cares? Seriously people, if the kid wears it and doesn’t like the reaction… then he won’t wear it. If he likes wearing it despite the reaction.. then he’s decided. Why does it have to be something the parents step in on? It sounds to me that you are making it all about the comfort of the school, the parents… anyone but the kid. I’m not sure I would have emailed all of the parents, but you wouldn’t believe how often people assume the parents want other parents to step in and encourage the child to not be weird. So maybe this was their nice way of saying “back off”.

I was a tomboy. I have a degree in science. I played sports, I like construction vehicles. I was awesome at math. I also liked sparkly unicorns and skirts that twirled when I spun around. Why is that ok for girls, but not boys?

I don’t really get what “proper” girl behavior and boy behavior is I guess. I dressed like my favorite AD&D character for the middle school Halloween dance. :D Should my parents have worried and put their foot down and made sure I wore a proper fairy slut costume?

Anyway, I find this conversation all rather surprising. I guess libertarian non-coercion is only for adults, huh? Repeat after me, “It’s for his own good…”

To Maggie’s and many other commentators’ point, I wish people could feel uncomfortable with each other’s choices and let it go at that, but history tells us otherwise. Almost all of our terrible social laws stem from one group of people feeling really uncomfortable with another group’s choices. From drug use to homosexuality to prostitution to gender identity – these laws and rules are in place to keep some one from feeling all out of sorts about some one else’s choices.

Maybe what we should focus on is addressing the discomfort (i.e., homophobia, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc) and coming to a point where we can say: “I don’t have an issue with that person doing what they need to do, but I would never make that choice for myself.”

Maybe then no one would care if a boy wore a dress.

LOL. Naw, no womynly agenda HERE. Nuh-UH!

And yes, if my kid wants to wear a dress, and there are 6 year olds who have imbibed enough hatefulness from their fathers to stand around in a circle calling him a faggot, then yes, I would feel absolutely right in saying, “kid, those children at the school today, calling you faggot? They were wrong, and you are right. Furthermore, they are small-minded morons. And I’m sorry you had to learn this so early, but we have a technical term for grown-ups like that: they are called ‘assholes.’ Those kids were assholes, and their parents are assholes, but you can’t use this word, only grown-ups can.” Wholesome child: “like fuck?” Me: “Exactly.”

Who’s right when an interracial couple moves to a South Carolina town so small there are white and black schools (i.e. church and public) and they send their kid to the church school and a whole bunch of kids want to beat up the new 7th grader for being a nigger? Are the parents right to say “all those kids are racist assholes, and their families are too, down unto the last cousin-sister.”

If this was 1954 what makes you all so sure you wouldn’t have a lot of good reason why girls shouldn’t be allowed to wear slacks to school?

Now what would Freud make, I wonder, of someone who is so reluctant to state something as simple & basic as his/her *gender*? As you no doubt larnt in all them thar doctoral-level psychology classes, this is clearly indicative of a whole *squirming* can o’ psychological worms, wouldn’t you agree? Gender Identity issues? Gender confusion? _Shame_?!?

Or, more to the point, obfuscation?
Manfully yours, _EL_ Coronado

If you’re not smart enough to be able to find out something so simple as that, what makes you believe you’re smart enough to understand anything more complicated?

But it’s still bullshit nonetheless. Here in the real world , any “nervousness” you so (erroneously)(condescendingly) detected isn’t because I/we are worried about the continued “justification of male privilege”, fool. It’s concern for the boy in question. Because here in the real world, his little *issue* – and his parents’ profoundly stupid and destructive mass publication of it – is going to guarantee him a world of hurt and ass-whuppings until he a) ax-murders his folks one night or b) graduates HS and then changes his name & moves far away – never to speak to his ‘doting’ parents again. Because boys _will_ be boys, despite the best efforts of doctoral-level psychologists to load them up on literal and psychological estrogen.

As opposed to Victorian times, when the natalist imperative was so pervasive and demanding. YOU know! Say, apropos of nothing, are you a woman, by chance, #35?

Nature not only abhors vaccuums, she abhors bright-line differences. That’s how she does speciation: through imperceptible gradations from one state to another.

We humans are limited-capacity, serial processors (there’s a little self-test by which anyone who doubts that can prove it to themselves).

That means our ability to perceive those gradations is limited, as is our ability even to label them meaningfully, and so we tend to reduce difference to categories. Our taxonomies ignore detail.

Gender is a continuum just as sexuality is. Both are distributed under that so-called “bell” curve that everyone’s seen in schoolbooks.

Most people are bisexual by nature, but western religions and political cultures demand that we be heterosexual: the kings, priests, and wealthy get more warm bodies that way for their army, religion, or labor pool.

We know that most people are bi by nature because we’ve lots of evidence from non-western cultures, where same-sex affection and sexual expression is accepted or even, for certain life-stages, demanded.

We know gender is a continuum because most of us are androgenous in our likes and dislikes. Women enjoy sports, men cook, women do carpentry, men enjoy childcare – the list goes on. We also know it from a Polynesian society written up by the late anthro Dr Margaret Mead and from the anthropology of an area in India (I’m blanking on the name) where gender roles are nearly reversed.

Even sex membership is a continuum. We used to think everyone was either M or F, with the few cases of ambiguous genitalia dismissed as extremely rare anomalies.

But we can now share information around the world very easily, and tests that were once impossible are now commonplace. And so, lo and behold, it turns out that such anomalies aren’t that rare after all.

There are even cases in the literature now of XX men and XY women. Seventy years ago, nobody could test for such conditions. Now we know that there’s at least one woman in the world who, despite lab work that shows her to be what convention calls a “normal male”, she’s a normal female who had periods, got pregnant in the usual way, and had a daughter. This was thought to be 100% impossible. But she’s a member of an extended clan in Croatia all of whom present with various differences from what was thought to be “normal”.

“Normal” is not really “normal”, it’s just “usual”.

Males have higher social standing than females. This is true almost everywhere in the world.

So, it’s “understandable” that girls will be tomboys, but it’s conventionally a terrible status violation for boys to be …we don’t even have a name for it, that’s how terrible it is.

It’s like Victorian times, when the natalist imperative was so pervasive and demanding that legislators who wanted to criminalise non-missionary-position sex found that they had no way to describe what they meant. And it was totally impolite to refer to a “leg”. It had to be referred to as a “limb” -even if it was a table’s!

That’s what all the nervousness on this topic is about: unlike a girl in a shirt and jeans, a boy in a dress is a Major Status Violation. He’s rejecting the symbols of male privilege and threatening the status of every male, because if boys really aren’t both different and superior to girls, what justifies male privilege?

If an African-American child wanted to put on white-face and dress like a Klansman, I would hope that his parents wouldn’t go along with such nonsense and send out an email to the neighbors asking for their understanding as he “has been race-fluid for as long as we can remember…”.

No, people would rightly wonder why he disliked who he was so much that he’d pretend to be something he wasn’t. Why would it be any different with one’s sex?

In this case, the parents are grooming and encouraging their child to “make a statement” on their behalf that conforms with their beliefs. I am less tolerant of parents who use their children in such a manner. They may claim that he threw a tantrum in the store until we bought it and then threw a tantrum until we let him wear it to school. I call BS on that. I have three children of my own, 2 girls and a boy. Throwing a tantrum in a store because they want me to buy something for them is the quickest way to ensure that they don’t get the item in question.

As far as their fashion taste goes, I am more concerned that all the important areas are covered than in the color or style. If my daughter wants to wear hiking boots with a dress, fine. I will tell her she looks ridiculous and some people will laugh or make fun of her. The same goes for my son who wanted to wear a scuba mask and snorkel for a thankfully short phase. He has lately taken a fancy to a fedora that he purchased with his own money earned through extra chores and yard work. He wears it well and gets complements from the ladies. It’s not every day you see a 7 year old boy in a fedora. If he told me he wanted to wear a dress, I would ask why. As his sisters are more than willing to point out, dresses are not all that practical for many situations they find themselves in- ie: playing, climbing, running etc. then you also have to be careful how you sit so people don’t see your underwear.

If they want to make a statement, fine- make it. Get some signs, picket somewhere, start a petition whatever. Don’t put a boy in a dress and expect everyone to be understanding and accepting of something that is clearly not the norm in social behavior. If you want to change the norms, go for it- more power to you, but you don’t start trying to make that change by sending your 3-4 year old boy to preschool in a dress and announcing to everyone ahead of time this is his decision and we should accept his gender fluidity.

A young child is not mature enough to undertstand the likely short term and long term consequences of these actions. Open bullying of the child would be prohibited, but the child would surely be subjected to subtle forms of harassment if not outright social rejection from many of his/her peers. The impacts to the child’s feelings of acceptance and self worth (often synonymous at young ages) would no doubt be severe and long lasting.

I think the child would be better served by parents who were loving and accepting of this behavior at home, but explain to the child that it’s not allowed publicly until he/she is more mature. When the child becomes a young adult, he/she will be in a better position to evaluate just how important this behavior is to them relative to potential consequences in terms of narrow public acceptance, employability, and even physical danger from bigoted douchebags.

This is clearly not ideal, but I’m afraid it’s reality.

“…therapeutic high school…?”

You made that up. There is absolutely no such thing!

Oh, and for the record, the parents “susan” and “rob” are either the world’s biggest assholes, or complete idiots. They put evidence of their son’s uniqueness/nonconformity/whatever *ON PAPER*, and then sent it off to a crapload of strangers. Yeah, that “our son likes to wear dresses sometimes” email won’t follow their son around and make his life utterly miserable until he moves away and changes his name. Sure it won’t.

All I can do is continue to assure him that it’s fine to like what he likes as long as he’s not hurting anyone else and that the people who attack him for his likes are either ignorant or are afraid of what they don’t understand. I can’t shield him from all of the consequences of his choice, but when I hear someone being purposefully cruel — adult or child — I can and will nip that in the bud, which may simply be a matter of avoidance.

Long before all of this started, I taught my son that unless he was offering a compliment or was speaking out of a concern for someone’s immediate well-being that he shouldn’t comment on others’ appearances. In fact, I think Edith Ann said it best: “If you can’t say nothin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”

Then let him make an informed decision on what to wear to preschool.

I’m a psychologist at a small therapeutic high school. We’ve got a fair number of gender noncomforming students. You can lecture other children to death and they’ll still make snarky comments, but when I walk through the door as a hyper-masculine, well-respected authority figure wearing a kilt and all but daring someone to make a comment about it the perceived norms start to fray. It takes bravery, it takes a willingness to soak up social opprobrium and laugh at it, but at the end of the day social rules are just constraints whose power comes from the people constrained by them. If you’re a libertarian because you believe that liberty (in the form of choices restricted only by harm to others) is a virtue in itself then you need to stand up and challenge rules which have no grounding in the protection of others.