What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

My son, who is four, has a beloved toy owl called Oswin. It was the first toy we gave him when he was born, and which we named for sentimentality’s sake. For most of his life, we’ve referred to Oswin as she, but now that he’s old enough to talk, he often switches between using she/her and he/him when talking about his toy. For the sake of deferring to his preferences, I’ve asked him a few times if Oswin is a girl owl or a boy owl, and each time he looks at me, laughs and says, “No, just an owl!” 

It is literally this easy for children to understand that not everything has to be gendered; that gender isn’t the most important aspect of a thing. Little kids often get their pronouns mixed up in conversation, not only because they’re still learning language, but because the visual distinctions between male and female are complicated, learned and not always consistent. The fact that I have a shaved head causes even older kids to stall out on identifying me as easily male or female, because they’re just not used to seeing it on someone who isn’t otherwise unambiguously male-presenting. 

Generally speaking, children don’t struggle with obvious visual contrasts: even toddlers aren’t prone to continually confusing yellow and black. So if parents are still saying shit to prepubescent kids like, “you can’t wear that, it’s for boys!” while asserting that gender is obvious and simple, they should maybe wonder why, if that’s so, they inevitably spend so much time explaining it anyway.

  1. esrahtheorganizedmess said: Oh my gosh I saw this post and immediately remembered how I didn’t initially give a gender to a lot of toys growing up even though I did choose pronouns for them (because I didn’t know they/them pronouns were a thing at the time) and honestly I’m now really proud of kid me because they had a lot of gender ambiguous toys without knowing it 😂
  2. v0idbird reblogged this from fozmeadows
  3. autiefutaba reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
    I lowkey want people to do that to me“Is that person a boy or a girl?”“They’re just a person!”
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