Ignoring gender rules and the transgender culture
These things don’t make us gay or transgender, they make us unique human beings.
I wanted to be a boy. Desperately wanted to be a boy. I thought boys had more fun. I felt like a boy in the way that our society views genders.
Blogger Lindsey Bentley wrote an absolutely fabulous article regarding the influencing of gender roles in children. Though I feel that perhaps, albeit not directly by my parents, I was put a bit more in a box by certain matriarchal influences than, Lindsay.
Thankfully, my parents didn’t adhere to the archaic stereotypes that “boys like blue” and “girls like pink;” that “boys play with dinosaurs, and girls play with dolls.” Had they told me that liking these things made me a boy, I would have concluded that I was a boy.
I had, and still to this day have, struggles of being put into the box of being a girl despite my interests not conforming much to those of the majority of my female peers. I may be a good cook and can talk about food, but recipes, and talking about them, bore me out of my mind.
At Thanksgiving we would play “cowboys & indians” with my cousins and I was always, always, the wild Indian. Never the prairie maiden who had been captured….boooooring.
I continue to ignore the gender rules as well as this new transgender culture. Though in some circles it still often leaves me feeling like a freshwater fish in a saltwater aquarium.
My skill with make-up and my long blonde hair seem to belie my anecdotes about rebuilding our lawn mower, replacing a toilet or changing the alternator in my husbands car. Like Lindsay, I desperately wanted to be a boy when I was a little girl because it seemed so much more interesting. While there are many things I still feel that way about, I don’t think I truly want to be a boy as much as I just want to be a person and not have any expectations of how I am ‘supposed’ to behave or the things I am ‘supposed’ to like. However, I don’t know that I could express myself any better than Lindsay has here; as her article is spot on! Lambs are dumb!
They just let me be me. They let me be a girl who wore jeans more often than skirts. They let me play with slingshots rather than princess wands. They didn’t conclude that I was gay, or transgender. They didn’t put me in a box that would shape my future, at the expense of my own free will. You can see the full… Read More »