That is, she does not fit into the mold that we adults - who have increasingly eschewed millenniums-old gender roles ourselves, as women work outside the home and men participate in the domestic sphere - still impose upon our children. To me, she is not gender nonconforming, but gender role nonconforming. It is considerate of adults to ask her - in the beginning.īut when they continue to question her gender identity - and are skeptical of her response - the message they send is that a girl cannot look and act like her and still be a girl. In many ways, this is wonderful: It shows a much-needed sensitivity to gender nonconformity and transgender issues. She is sporty and strong, incredibly sweet, and - so far - a girl.Īnd yet she is asked by the pediatrician, by her teachers, and by other adults who have known her for many years, if she feels like, or wants to be called, or wants to be, a boy. Most, but not all, of her friends are boys. She has shaggy short hair (the look she requested from the hairdresser was “Luke Skywalker in Episode IV”). My daughter wears track pants and T-shirts. Later, when I relayed this conversation to my daughter, she said, “More girls should look like this so it’s more popular so grown-ups won’t be so confused.” She’s a girl, and you can refer to her as a girl.” How could she not have figured it out by now? But my daughter had been attending the after-school program where this woman taught for six months. In fact, I love correcting them, making them reconsider their perceptions of what a girl looks like. I am used to correcting strangers, who mistake my 7-year-old daughter for a boy 100 percent of the time. “Your child wants to be called a boy, right? Or is she a boy that wants to be called a girl? Which is it again?” “I just wanted to check,” the teacher said. So here’s what I wish I would have written. It made me wish I could shift some language in the op-ed I wrote, even as I stand by my point. I spent two months talking to experts, activists, critics, trans and gender nonconforming people, and regular old “cisnormative asses” (to borrow from one critic’s description) like myself about gender. I’m putting them here in part because I’m having a hard time getting editors to publish them, and partly because having no control over headlines and sometimes not being allowed to tweak my own language has on some occasions undermined what I’ve written.

This will be the first of far too many posts about gender.

Tomboy lisa selin davis