If you heard about this blog from its mention in the New York Times, you might want to read the post that was quoted. Here are some of my other favorite (or most popular) posts, in case you don’t have a lot of time to read.
I have a special interest in the way social constructs of gender are encoded in children’s clothes:
- From Subversive Spongebob (Oct. 2010): Never mind that boys regularly wore pink in the US in earlier times, that boys in other cultures wear pink (and flowers, and dresses) and still grow up to carry guns just fine, that it magically becomes ok for men to wear pink again once they’re grown
- Aggressive and violent masculinity pushed on toddler boys (Oct. 2010)
- Ideas for putting your own decorations on shirts for kids (Dec. 2010)
I write a lot about holding contractions and being comfortable with ambiguity:
MLK–Remember by moving forward (Jan. 2012)
A lot of my posts are personal essays that start off as musing about a recent event or news story and end up who-knows-where:
- On seeing Paris Is Burning (March 2011)
- On the soundtrack to Hair (April 2011)
- The hold of the gender binary, gay cavemen and all (April 2011)
- Real princesses kick ass (April 2012)
- Somehow I started with male nail polish and ended with Mitt Romney (April 2012)
I was touched by the New York Times article about your child. I am a 60-year-old woman with a transgendered history. I grew up in the 50s and 60s, secretly wishing I was a girl beginning at the age of eight. But in that era, the concept of talking to anyone about this longing was an impossibility. It was not until I was in my mid-fifties that I made peace with my authentic self, transitioned, and found much happiness. I read your story with a pang of envy, wishing that I had been born in an era when I could have been so open about my true self at such a young age and lived another–much different–life.