Some boys like pink and prefer princess outfits over army gear during dress-up. And yes, some of those boys—like some of the men over at “Born This Way”—turn out to be gay. But liking “girl things” isn’t necessarily an indicator that a little boy is gay; that assumption, says writer Sarah Hoffman, only serves to reinforce destructive gender stereotypes in our country.
Sarah Hoffman’s third-grade son, Sam, is a “pink boy,” and yesterday she published a terrific article over at Salon about her experiences raising him, including how peeved she gets when people ask whether she thinks her son could be gay. In the piece, she writes:
My son knows exactly what he likes. When Sam was 4 and his male peers trick-or-treated as Batman and Spiderman and gorillas, Sam was a princess. At 5, he was a queen, regal and proud and full of the royal prowess that Disney offers all little girls. He liked feather boas and lip gloss and dancing. Did he think he was a girl? Nope. Was he confused about being a boy? Nope. Did he need to be taught what boys are supposed to like? Nope—how boys are supposed to behave was abundantly clear from the trains and trucks we bought him before we realized he was a pink boy, the behavior of all the boys he knew, the messages on TV, and the judgments of all the Random Moms. He just liked what he liked, the way other kids did—only his likes were different.
Hoffman, who uses a pen name to “protect the safety of her family,” has been delivering really smart commentary on parenting for quite some time on her blog, but this piece is one of the first to attract a large audience.
It’s a good thing, because the piece is whip-smart, attacking these issues of gender role conformity through the narrative about her son. She takes on Dr. Phil’s recent advice to take away “girl toys” from boys, and tracks the troubling history of mothers being blamed for their children’s departure from “normalcy.” This last part is particularly interesting—she says:
I get all kinds of email from readers telling me that if I just stopped encouraging my son to be girly that he’d man up and try out for the football team. Ah, yes: I am the All-Powerful Mother, whose magic is strong enough to make boys run from Thomas trains to pink tutus. Really, I’m that good. And if I just directed my magic toward good and not evil, then my boy would become all boy.
Our obsession with sticking to specific gender boxes is getting old. Why do we do this to kids? We are teaching them that they must belong in the bounds of a certain gender and that they must fit these very silly, yet very strict, rules. The kids who don’t follow the leader are taunted, and the worst part is that we allow or even encourage that taunting. Hoffman expresses this worry perfectly:
Random Mom [who asks whether I think my son is gay] doesn’t know who or what my son is going to grow up to be, any more than she knows who or what her kid is going to grow up to be. … She’s repeating cultural biases that she’s absorbed, raising her eyebrows at the things that might, to her, signal future gayness. In this I can hear the click of the first domino falling into the second in the cascade that flows from judgment to disapproval to bullying.
So read Hoffman’s full piece. And leave the pink boys alone.
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Childfree outsider here, so I’m not speaking from parenting experience. I can see some issues because of the shape of clothes, not so much the gender assigned to them. If I had a son or daughter over a certain age who liked to wear dresses but also liked to lift it up over his/her head in public, that would be a problem and I might choose pants for him/her more often. Really, a lot of this disagreement sounds like semantics. It might reassure heavily gender-focused people to use different words. Don’t like your son wearing a skirt? Okay, it’s a… Read more »
In response to Daddy files, liar liar pants on fire. Sorry mate but your post is full of contradictions. You’ll allow your son to be gay, “if it makes him happy”, but you’ll make his life miserable if his preference is to wear a dress. hmmm. If your son teased Hoffman’s child for wearing a dress, you’d put a stop to it. But what would you say to your child, that’s its OK for Hoffman’s child to wear a dress and shouldn’t be laughed at? Hmmm doesn’t quite add up. “He’ll wear boys clothes because he’s a boy.” Just wondering… Read more »
First of all, this is such a great piece and I have to commend Sarah Hoffman for being clear-sighted enough to realize that gender should not be used as a way of arbitrarily policing peoples behaviors and choices, even and perhaps especially children. Gender is a system that, in my observation, exists and is specifically designed to tell people NO; it operates as a means of closing down possibilities for everyone. Allowing children to transgress gender norms is, I think, a very healthy way of creating in them a sense of entitlement to their own tastes and expressions whether those… Read more »
Sandy: Sorry, but I fail to see how wearing a dress makes one courageous. Hoffman’s son is 4 or 5 years old. He’s not making a political statement or firing back against societal norms. Pants are for everyone. For the most part they aren’t gender specific. And unless my son or daughter was going to the job site (or if it was Halloween, dress up time, etc), I don’t see why I’d let them dress like a construction worker either. I’m not begrudging anyone the right to dress their kids as they want, and I’m against other kids (and adults… Read more »
It’s totally courageous for a boy to wear a dress! It’s courageous to do anything that society tells us is not acceptable. (And as I wrote in my essay, I’m all for saying no to kids who want to do socially unacceptable things that harm people or property—but when it’s socially unacceptable to just be who you are, I have to take issue with that.) And it was totally courageous for women to wear pants in the 20s, when they were mocked and ridiculed for it. What you see today, that you correctly identify as “pants are for everyone,” is… Read more »
“For the most part they aren’t gender specific.”
I think I missed a memo somewhere. Is there something innately feminine about a dress? Because it’s an article of clothing. It doesn’t have a pre-assigned gender. It can’t mate or reproduce.
Dresses are “for girls” only because someone a long time ago said so.
If you don’t want to let your son wear a dress, that’s fine. But perhaps you should question your (and society’s) weird gender hang-ups.
Johnathon: You’re kidding right? You’re really going to tell me that dresses aren’t feminine? Last time I checked there were pretty apparent spaces left for breasts on most dresses. So the answer to your question is yes, you definitely missed a memo or two. But more than that you’re missing the point. I never said “only girls can wear dresses.” Obviously people can (and do) dress however they want. And that’s fine. More power to them. But jock straps are designed for men, and dresses are designed for women. I really fail to see how this is even in question.… Read more »
I can’t say whether or not you’re weird – I don’t know you – but yes, I do think the concept of clothing being either masculine or feminine is weird. I’m not sure you understand what I’m getting at, though. A dress may have room for breasts, but pants have room for men to dress either left or right. But look at the garment itself – it’s a long, pant-less, and may or may not have sleeves. Sounds a lot like a tunic, which was definitely in fashion for men at one time. The idea that dresses are for girls… Read more »
Little girls don’t have breasts… yet wear dresses. At this age… kids kinda all look the same. You fail in proving your point.
Men used to wear togas which were just dresses… or in Jesus times… actual dress-like garb. In fact, most of human history men wore dressy looking stuff. Frills. Festoons. Copious amounts of jewelry.
Look at the Masaai people, its the men who wear their hair long and braided or in dreadlocks and the women who shave their heads.
Oops! I posted the above before I saw the previous post. When i said i agreed with “the sentiments above” I meant Sarah Hoffman’s article. The Daddy Files post is familiar to me in the sense that this is an issue that really hits a deep spot with both men and women. Even the most “liberated” people I know have trouble with allowing boys to dress as they like. Yes, lots of people want their children to wear clothes that are “appropriate” to any given situation (eg, uniforms for school or teams, “fancy” clothes for special occasions) but that really… Read more »
Thanks, Sandy, for your support and thoughtful reading of my essay and the situation. You’ve hit it on the head–girls have far more leeway to dress/act as they want than boys do. I love that your son got that clothes are just clothes–regardless of what advertisers tell us!
As a devout feminist (actually, I prefer the work “egalitarian”) I couldn’t agree more with the sentiments expressed above. Girls are encouraged to do any and everything now, but boys are still heavily strictured in their dress, behavior, movement and speech habits. I tried hard to give my son the space to grow in the way he wanted to. (Proud parenting moment: When he was about four or five, he was in the Gap buying socks with his grandmother when a saleslady came over and actually told him he was looking in the wrong department, that the boys’ socks were… Read more »
Everything you (and Sarah Hoffman) said is right. I know it makes sense. My brain tells me it makes sense that a boy in a pink dress will not necessarily be gay. But I don’t care about that part. My son is turning 3 soon and if he tells me he’s gay one day then so be it. As long as he’s happy. But for now, at this young age, he won’t be wearing a dress because I won’t let him. That doesn’t make me a homophobe or a close-minded bigot. And if my son saw Hoffman’s son and started… Read more »
Our decision to let our son wear a dress outside the house (after a long time of wearing princess dress-up costumes wherever he could find them, including daily at preschool) was difficult and fraught, namely for the reasons you outlined above–we didn’t want to set him up to be made fun of. I wrote about that struggle here: http://www.sarahhoffmanwriter.com/cookie-sh-article.pdf In short, our decision to allow him to dress/play as he wished came out of his consistent, persistent insistence that that was what he wanted to do and who he wanted to be. I never would have imagined that I would… Read more »
The only reason he would be made fun is because people like you… who cling to these notions of ‘what boys ought to wear’ would be the ones making fun of him. (Even though you magnanimously say you would never! As if we buy that.)
Adam, thank you so much for this strong post, for the compliments, and for standing up in defense of pink boys–and free gender expression in general. –Sarah Hoffman