The gender creative boy

[Ray]

When I was growing up, I read a huge amount - mostly factual science books, but a fair dollop of fiction. Reading just was not seen as girly. Lots of boys read books. That's what you did when it was too late to play football.....

[Caultron]

I was disappointed about that aspect of the article as well. In fact, are there really any "girls only" activities at all?

I have to say that this was not the reaction I expected from this group.

Reading? Cooking? Sewing? Yes! There is still a very real bias in the general population about little boys who do any of these things, just as there is a very real bias in the general population about girls who want to build things or like math. Is it getting better? Yes, but it is very much still alive and well.

I applaud the actions of the parents of both girls and boys who encourage their kids to do "non-typical" activities and wear clothing that they're not "supposed" to wear. These parents are still the minority, unfortunately. Some day that may not be the case, but we're nowhere near that yet.

You may be right, but I really have a hard time imagining that if a boy started taking interest in his mother's cooking and wanted to try it himself, his family would tell him to shut up and go play football.

Like, you don't grow up LGBT or not depending on whether you cook or snap a football. Or dance or play basketball. Or play with dolls rather than action figures.

Not that there's anything wrong with LGBT, but it's probably not what most parents have in mind when they get a new baby.

[Sinned]

Ray, I read a lot when younger, still do and can read the average full book in a day, and was probably the only minor in our large town to have an adult fiction ticket for the public library because I had read all the science fiction in the junior section and this gave me access to the adult section. So I read Poul Anderson, James Blish the Lensman Sereis and others at a very early age. I was considered unusual but not mocked and my father was a great reader of science fiction as well but I had more time and quickly left him behind.

Caultron, I was never really interested in playing sports and in my early years I did a lot of cooking and baking, taking an actual course in home economics as they called it then and I wasn't ridiculed for this. My parents both worked when I was young and I would often cook my own tea after school finished at 15.30 and prepared things for when they arrived in at about 18.30 so that the cooking was quick and we could sit down for tea quickly. My mother was never one for sewing so if I had a button come off or a minor repair I had to do it so I learnt to sew at an early age. I did start to learn to knit but wasn't really interested in that. I also remember doing country dancing at primary school. I never felt that any of these activities were girly, I was never discouraged from doing them or ridiculed either. And I come from a very working class heavy steel industry background.

Now I think about these things maybe I was destined to wear a skirt/

[Caultron]

...Caultron, I was never really interested in playing sports and in my early years I did a lot of cooking and baking, taking an actual course in home economics as they called it then and I wasn't ridiculed for this. My parents both worked when I was young and I would often cook my own tea after school finished at 15.30 and prepared things for when they arrived in at about 18.30 so that the cooking was quick and we could sit down for tea quickly. My mother was never one for sewing so if I had a button come off or a minor repair I had to do it so I learnt to sew at an early age. I did start to learn to knit but wasn't really interested in that. I also remember doing country dancing at primary school. I never felt that any of these activities were girly, I was never discouraged from doing them or ridiculed either. And I come from a very working class heavy steel industry background.

Now I think about these things maybe I was destined to wear a skirt

I doubt there's much correlation between skirt-wearing and cooking, sewing, and dancing in one's early years.

Back in the days of mods and rockers, I was definitely a mod. I had ruffled shirts, bell-bottom pants, and clunky heels. Later I fooled around with pantyhose, and later still I got my ears pierced. Now I wear skirts. So maybe I was destined or maybe I just remained the same person or maybe there's no correlation among all that. I'm just myself and try not to worry about it. It's all really quite nebulous.

[skirtyscot]

Orange Apple, I focussed on the thing that struck he most about the article. You are right that sewing and dancing (and, of course, wearing dresses) have long been seen as girls' activities, and it takes some determination for a boy to take part in them. Cheering for those boys is good. But that is the first time that I have ever heard of skating as being "girly". Cookery, although it used to be a girls-only subject in my school and many others, has always had men in charge in many places, and most men learn to cook something. So I've never heard of a boy or a man being ridiculed for wanting to learn to feed himself. I think that the photographer dilutes her own message by including the skater, the boy who likes to cook, and the readers. But she did make some of us step back and consider the bigger picture.

[r.m.anderson]

Something odd here:

Men sewing - tailors
Women sewing - seamstress
Men skating - skater
Women skating - figure skater
Both Men and Women skating - skating in pairs ?
Men cooking - Cooks or Chefs
Women cooking - Cooks and lately Chef
Both Men and Women dancing - Line dancing - Square (Contra) dancing

Way too much effort spent these days trying put round peg in the round hole when often it can fit oddly in the square one too !

[Sinned]

Caultron, I definitely had my tongue in cheek when I made the statement correlating skirt wearing with the activities mentioned hence the emotive following. A lot of them are men's activities as well but it probably would be considered unusual in the late 50's/early 60's for a boy to do them. But then maybe not ....

The dancing was what we called country dancing, gay gordons and all that but definitely not line dancing which I'm not sure had been invented then, certainly not in my part of North East England.

[Pdxfashionpioneer]

Between the apartment project I live in and my church, I come in contact with a lot of kids while I'm skirting.

During the reception after the celebration of a long-time congregant's life a tweenage girl came up to my table to ask me a question and then she chickened out. The lady I had been visiting with and I practically had to drag her question out of her. Finally she asked me, "Are you a man or a woman?" So as gently as I could I explained to her that I am a man who likes to wear dresses. "Ok" and she bolted to my friend's and my bemusement. How with a buzz cut and a bald pate she could wonder if I was a woman is beyond me. Clearly, she had a lot more on her mind and either didn't have the language for it or the courage to ask.

My friend and I in trying to figure all of this out realized that when young kids ask about my wardrobe choices, they're more or less just plain curious because they don't see it every day and it doesn't take long for a young human to figure out I'm working outside of the norm. At church, most little kids, especially the girls just take it in stride. It doesn't hurt that they see their moms complimenting me on my outfits or asking where I got one item or another.

A number of teenaged girls have complimented me on my outfit or asked for shopping tips, as a conversation starter. They seem relieved to find an adult nonconformist to talk to.

At my apartment the kids will ask me, "Why are you wearing a skirt?" or "girl's clothes?" The first one I actually answered was a young teenage girl and I told her I didn't wear girls' clothes, I got them in the women's department, and as an adult I could wear anything I liked. "Make sense?" "Unh huh." She was as confused as before but decided I was harmless so we were able to have some conversations since.

That same Sunday as the celebration of life I ran by my apartment to catch a quick lunch and a little boy about 4-5 asked me why I was wearing a skirt so I returned his question, "Why are you wearing that T-shirt?" "Because my mother picked it out for me." I hadn't expected that answer, but thinking quickly I said, "Well my mother lives a thousand miles away (actually more like 1100, but that's too complicated for a pre-school mind) so I have to pick out my own clothes." That answer satisfied that little questioner as well.

However, an older playmate, he looked about 10, repeated the question, but with clear disdain. So I just told him I was wearing my outfit because I liked it. And went my merry way to my apartment.

It's those kids in the transitional phase, my friend and I decided, when they're trying to suss out their identities that kids have difficulty with our wardrobe choices. I mean, look at it from their viewpoint. They're having enough trouble figuring out who they are and what it means to be a man and here I come along to stand something as basic as clothes on its head!

I expect that about the only men any of us have gotten a hard time from are guys who weren't too sure of their own masculinity.

[Caultron]

Caultron, I definitely had my tongue in cheek when I made the statement correlating skirt wearing with the activities mentioned hence the emotive following. A lot of them are men's activities as well but it probably would be considered unusual in the late 50's/early 60's for a boy to do them. But then maybe not ....

The dancing was what we called country dancing, gay gordons and all that but definitely not line dancing which I'm not sure had been invented then, certainly not in my part of North East England.

No problem.

In the end, it all comes down to just letting everyone do their own thing.

[Caultron]

...It's those kids in the transitional phase, my friend and I decided, when they're trying to suss out their identities that kids have difficulty with our wardrobe choices. I mean, look at it from their viewpoint. They're having enough trouble figuring out who they are and what it means to be a man and here I come along to stand something as basic as clothes on its head!...

Yeah, I was out shopping a couple of day ago when a boy about four years old asked behind me in a loud voice, "Mom, why is than man wearing a skirt?"

I couldn't hear the Mom's answer clearly but I think it was just, "Shush."

But at an age like four, children are still learning about the world and tend to have very simple, black-and-white views of it. So I suppose this boy had never seen a man in a skirt before, and I contradicted his world view by doing it, and so he asked his mother what was going on. The fact that he did so in a loud voice was just childish exuberance. He hadn't yet learned how to talk behind people's backs properly (irony noted). But the mom pretty much took it in stride and perhaps the boy learned, at least a little, that the world is a more complex place that he'd perceived so far.

[Ralph]

In short, I feel Category 1 is a myth.

I just stumbled across this thread but it doesn't look like it's quite a dead horse so I don't feel too bad beating it a bit more

I think that as soon as you start trying to tell other people what's going on in their heads, you're fighting a losing battle. None of us (well, with certain exceptions that are unwilling to divulge our gifts) can claim powers of ESP or Vulcan mind-melds or whatever. Even if you fully understand what one man's motives and self-perception are, you can't apply that as a whole to all men who dress or behave a certain way.

For many years as I struggled with understanding what drove me to shop on the other side of the aisle, I was convinced I was #2 in that list or even #3, and it took, as they say, the love of a good woman to make me realize how wrong I was. So for the past 30+ years I have been a firm advocate of position #1: I am man, all the way through inside and out, and I just happen to prefer wearing skirts and dresses.

But of late I've come to realize that even that isn't accurate. The problem with this list is assumes discrete categories, each with traits unlike the others. Now I see there are some finer distinctions that make it more of a spectrum than a finite set of discrete points.

Just for the sake of using myself as an illustration: I have no intention or desire to appear, become, or be treated as female. Not in public, not in private, not in my own bizarre fantasies, not ever. I have more than enough obnoxious qualities that entitle me to retain my man card: I care nothing for personal hygiene, social niceties, "feelings", etc. After nearly 30 years of marriage I still live like a bachelor, letting dirty dishes pile up on every available surface until we're out of clean ones, wadding up my dirty clothes -- jeans and dresses and t-shirts and nightgowns and skirts -- in a wad that gets kicked around the floor until I get around to doing laundry (every fabric and color in one load, of course), wadding up the clean clothes in a drawer... when I think nobody is looking I'll pick my nose and wipe any residue off on my rayon skirt. I play first-person-shooters and watch stupid violent movies with lots of car chases and explosions. The ONLY thing that sets me apart from my fellow cavemen is my choice of clothing.

So you might be inclined, as I was for all those years, to conclude that I'm solidly in category #1 in this list. And yet... it's more complicated than that. You can keep your denim skirts, your utilikilts, your masculine cuts. When I wear a skirt or a dress, I go all-out on the feminine side. Soft fabrics like rayon and velvet, satin, nylon, etc. with long, full skirts billowing around me... I'm Prince Charming wanting to dress like Cinderella but still identify as Prince Charming. Except it turns out you can't really find those satin princess gowns in a size 46 waist with a size 40 chest, but I digress.

I'm sure there are deep psychological reasons for this -- some long-buried childhood trauma, dysfunctional family issues, got a weird mix of hormones in the womb, or maybe I'm just plain crazy. I don't know, and I stopped trying to figure it out long ago. My point is, it's hard enough for each of us to pigeonhole himself; don't even waste your time trying to pigeonhole anyone else. Everybody's story is different, as are our motivations and worldviews.

[Pdxfashionpioneer]

Hello Ralph,

You're indisputably right that unless you're a professional psychologist or psychiatrist and seeing a lot of your client, it's tough to know another's motivations. All I was getting at was that just as you came to, there's something in you that's on the feminine side of the spectrum, as you also said, that makes you "want to dress like Cinderella," rather than the current mold.

I see the Masculine and Feminine as the end points of a very analog spectrum, though like all spectrums there are distinct points. We all can identify the six primary and secondary colors of the visible spectrum, but anyone versed in physics can tell you it's tough at the boundary to tell where one ends and the other begins.

That's about all I was getting at. And I think you got it.

[crfriend]

I see the Masculine and Feminine as the end points of a very analog spectrum, though like all spectrums there are distinct points.

Pardon me, but arbitrarily putting the "points" at the ends of the spectrum is doing everybody a very large dis-service because practically nobody is on those end-points. More likely, the "masculine" and "feminine" ones are (ideally) closer to about a quarter of the way "in" from the endpoints. Humans are complex creatures, and to try and divide them into binary "boxes" is a waste of time. Worse, society and local culture tend to overlay notions of "masculinity" versus "femininity" onto the natural "spectrum" with confusing, sometimes contradictory results, and frequently with disastrous results.

To the latter point above, note the "butching up" of women in the modern USA -- which has the corresponding effect of shoving men necessarily towards the "masculine" extreme and which deprives them of many opportunities for expression that used to be commonly open to them. This hurts everybody. Yet it's rampant, and clearly has support somewhere, else it'd not be happening. I suspect that much of, if not most of, the trans-* dissonance going on now is a side-effect of the shove towards the "masculine" end of the spectrum and may indicate that the boat is about to capsize -- nobody really knows how to behave and what to think any longer. Guys especially suffer from this because of the reduced latitude of allowed behaviour and expression. Gals can always retreat towards the "feminine" end if they get uncomfortable or if it gains them advantage. Men are, indeed, stuck inside a small -- and shrinking -- box. What happens when the box becomes infinitely small?

We all can identify the six primary and secondary colors of the visible spectrum, but anyone versed in physics can tell you it's tough at the boundary to tell where one ends and the other begins.

That's the joy of the analogue world. We can produce incredibly accurate wavelengths of radiation which correspond to colours, yet in a roomful of people, it's unlikely that any two will agree precisely on what a colour so produced actually is because of the vagaries of our sensory apparatus and perception processes. Our machines are better than we are.

To overlay the notions of "masculinity" and "femininity" on the colour spectrum as proposed might put masculinity at the border of our sensory/perceptive capabilities at the extreme end of "violet" and femininity at the opposite extreme end of red. I think this notion is bogus, and to use the analogy above, the notion should be more along the lines of "normal masculinity" could be akin to a blue and "normal femininity" might be an orange-ish yellow. As with radiation, stuff probably exists in the "gender spectrum", but, as with light, we can't see it and it's "terra incognita".

[Ralph]

I see the Masculine and Feminine as the end points of a very analog spectrum, though like all spectrums there are distinct points. We all can identify the six primary and secondary colors of the visible spectrum, but anyone versed in physics can tell you it's tough at the boundary to tell where one ends and the other begins.

We're in the same neighborhood, but crfriend was a little closer to what I have in mind:

Humans are complex creatures, and to try and divide them into binary "boxes" is a waste of time. Worse, society and local culture tend to overlay notions of "masculinity" versus "femininity" onto the natural "spectrum" with confusing, sometimes contradictory results, and frequently with disastrous results.

Say you start with some imaginary person who is "100% male" on your spectrum -- Y chromosomes from head to toe, all the right amounts of the right hormones, the ideally masculine skeletal frame, totally heterosexual, eats only raw meat from the mountain lions he has killed with his bare hands, his back is a forest of hair, etc. But he also paints his fingernails pink.

Does that trait slide him down some few percentage points from "male" to "female"? I submit to you that it does not. He is still fully male in all biological and psychological sense of the word; he happens to have a trait that *our society* has aribtrarily decreed belongs to women.

And so it is with us. Where you see some kind of "percent male" to "percent female" linear sliding scale, I see a scatterplot, maybe in 3D with "biological" on one axis, "psychological" on the other, and "social conventions" on the other. For each of us, our traits are individual points on that plot with the vast majority of them near the male end of all three axes, but occasional pink specks mixed in. That doesn't pull us any further percentage down some linear path, but gives extra color and depth to our graph.

Does that make sense? I can visualize it perfectly in my mind; there's this 3D graph with a cloud of blue dots in one corner and a few specks of pink along the periphery, but I can't adequately put the concept into words.

[Orange Apple]

And so it is with us. Where you see some kind of "percent male" to "percent female" linear sliding scale, I see a scatterplot, maybe in 3D with "biological" on one axis, "psychological" on the other, and "social conventions" on the other. For each of us, our traits are individual points on that plot with the vast majority of them near the male end of all three axes, but occasional pink specks mixed in. That doesn't pull us any further percentage down some linear path, but gives extra color and depth to our graph.

Does that make sense? I can visualize it perfectly in my mind; there's this 3D graph with a cloud of blue dots in one corner and a few specks of pink along the periphery, but I can't adequately put the concept into words.

I like your idea. It captures the idea that there are many dimensions to all of us. And I think that one of the things that is changing slowly in society is the link between some of them and gender. For example, when my wife graduated from high school in rural MN decades ago, there were basically three options for her -- teacher, nurse, and mother. A few female high school graduates went on to college but the ones that took on typically-male jobs were almost as rare as men wearing skirts. This has changed. When I graduated from college there were two women in my class in engineering. I visited the campus a few years ago and discovered that it is now about a 50-50 gender mix.

As a society we are making progress in unlinking gender from things that it shouldn't be linked with.

This thread started with a little boy who likes to wear dresses. Kids are programmed. This varies greatly by geography and by parent. I applaud the parents who allow their children to explore what they want to explore without regard to gender stereotypes.