Keeping a kid's gender secret...

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

 

[Adios]

ITT: Why LMNO gets tail. And head. At both ends at the same time.

The potential side to side action makes me ghey for LMNO.

[Kai]

 

LMNO: Saving this forum, one thread at a time.

[Triple Zero]

You don't think it really odd that he wants his parents to write a note saying he is a boy?

Well, the way I read that was that based on his choice of clothes etc he looks like a girl, but since he likes these people, he wants them to know he's a boy. Maybe he tried to say "I'm a boy" and the people just thought he was confused. I dunno, without the full story,  its hard to say.

Most likely, he gets a lot of approval from his parents for not following traditional gender roles, so as much as he would like to be recognized as a boy, parental approval outweighs that.

If I were in that parental position, I'd probably tell my boy "If you want people to know you're a boy, you should probably wear boy clothes.". And I'd like to add "it's the easiest way to go about it and probably works a lot better than writing a note", depending on whether the boy would get more clarity or more confused by adding that extra info (depending on age, etc).

But then, I'm not that hung up on abolishing traditional gender roles either. IMO it's most important to stress that each and every gender is not worse or better than another (i.e. no discrimination), but to deny there's gender roles (traditional or not) seems ridiculous to me. Boys will be boys and girls will be girls. And sometimes but not often they'll be in between or the other way around, and that alone will most likely cause trouble for them, due to friction between confusion about their own gender identity and society's confusion about their gender identity. And that is if they can't help it, and in that case the best thing you can do as a parent is to be supportive about it.
But if on the other hand, you got a boy that really wants to identify as a boy, but also likes to dress up as a girl, that is something they can control, and it's probably best to explain them that if they dress up as X but they want to be recognized as Y, obviously that's going to confuse the hell out of a whole bunch of people. And you don't even need to wrap that into a context of gender-roles either, it can also be "a king dressed up as a poor person" (you know, from the fairytale?). It's an important life-lesson to realize that people will judge you on your appearance, whether you like it or not, yet on the other hand neither your appearance, nor people's judgement of that determines what/who you really are.

Or something like that. Does that make sense?

TL/DR: If your son that likes dressing up as a girl wants you to write a note to explain he is in fact a boy [that happens to like dressing up as a girl], IMO it's best to explain him "If you want people to know you're a boy, you should probably wear boy clothes.".

Additionally it may help him realize that <a note written by daddy> doesn't have magical powers that make everybody instantly believe what it says, and that instead his own behaviour/appearance/presence allows him to control people's perception of himself to a much greater degree, and that doing so is mainly his responsibility.



... sometimes I really wonder if I'd make a good parent or not.

[Triple Zero]

I DO want, as part of attacking the problem, to try to convince people not to do things that are destructive to their bodies or psyches, nor to do things that will compound their experience of marginalization. Like eating nothing but cheese burgers for a whole month.

Fixed for you

Every person who lives the life they want to live without succumbing to social pressure to "normalize" their body to fit social gender role expectations is a kind of freedom fighter, IMO.

THIS WOMAN IS YOUR FRIEND
SHE EATS CHEESEBURGERS FOR YOUR FREEDOM

[Triple Zero]

I like to frame those as questions in order to get people to actually think about it, and maybe even ask themselves whether they live up to these artificial gender standards that are defined in part by a community that exists to sell gender reassignment. I'm certain I don't, other than having long hair and occasionally wearing a skirt.

Heyyy that's a very interesting question.

What is it, except for my primary and secondary sexual characteristics and a few arbitrary socially defined choices in clothing, that makes me a male?

I don't particularly like cars or sports, to name something.

It's mostly that I "feel" male, right?

And vice versa, what is it that makes you, Nigel, female, except for the above-mentioned characteristics and choices?

What's it mean?

If anything, I once had an extra-curricular course on "Emotional Intelligence & Communication", which discussed gender and gender-roles a lot--although didn't dwell on transgender/queers much, it rather said some characteristics or personality traits are more "female" and others are more "male" [didn't say socially, historically or biologically btw, it even got a bit "spiritual" at some point], while there's also physical characteristics that not necessarily, but often, correspond with these, up to some extent, but hardly ever 100%.
Then I filled out a questionnaire with all sorts of stereotypes, added up the scores and was pleased to find out that I am a male with 70% stereotypical female characteristics

I dunno actually, looking back at that course, the woman giving the lectures was a highly knowledgeable sociology professor specialized in sexuality, but in hindsight I learned a bunch of other things about the subject and they don't always match up.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

When I was a kid, eating cheeseburgers for your freedom, I would occasionally get into fights over being called a boy. Not because I picked the fight, but because other kids thought I was fucking with them. Everyone seemed kind of taken aback when I git puberty and actually turned out to be, for real, a girl.

But after a certain point, I stopped correcting people. I realized that I looked like a boy, I was "acting" like a boy, so for all practical purposes in my interactions with most others, I was a boy. And it didn't really matter, except as much as we assign a value to being "boy" or "girl". At the end of the day I was still a little girl; it's possibly to be socially a boy and privately a girl. And either way, my body is female.

[Elder Iptuous]

...yet you peg every man you are with, no?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

...yet you peg every man you are with, no?

wat

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

...yet you peg every man you are with, no?

Erm, no. When I was married, my husband liked to be pegged. Haven't used the dildoes (on a guy) since then... it's not my thing, but I'll do it if a guy digs it.

[Elder Iptuous]

Oh...
for some reason, i thought i recalled you mentioning that every guy you had been with was able to be convinced to receive, and enjoyed it in the end. (<-LMNuendO)
which is odd, because, if you never said such, then that means i pulled that straight out of my ass. (<-again)
so, maybe i just dreamed that.  which is really odd...
blushing appologies, ma'am.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Oh...
for some reason, i thought i recalled you mentioning that every guy you had been with was able to be convinced to receive, and enjoyed it in the end. (<-LMNuendO)
which is odd, because, if you never said such, then that means i pulled that straight out of my ass. (<-again)
so, maybe i just dreamed that.  which is really odd...
blushing appologies, ma'am.

I don't think I said that...  but who knows, maybe I said something that strongly implied it? But at one time, both my husband and then-boyfriend enjoyed having things stuck in their bums. Space Cowboy was up for it but we broke up before it happened, and Mr. Language was like "NO FUCKING WAY".

I think Surfer Boy and the pretty one, the crossdresser, expressed interest but we never got around to it.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

(It was a running joke for a while, though. About the dildoes.)

[Salty]

Repost. For SCIENCE!
NSFW:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WoQQ-mAQeE

Ah, days gone by...

[Salty]

As for the OP, which I just read:

Those fuckers are assholes and I feel bad for their kids.

I was often asked if I was a boy or a girl as a child, and always resented people for asking. I was even asked this as a young adult. Some small child wrapping Christmas presents asked his mom. I gave her a look imploring her to do the right thing here. She just shushed him and kept wrapping. How disappointing.

Most folks who live around me assume I'm gay and tend to relax significantly when they discover I am indeed SOME kind of queer. It fits their worldview and pathetic gender assumptions.

Gender identity is as personal and none of my business as choices in clothes or music. It doesn't really affect my life and I don't really care. People should be free to express themselves as the please. But I would never want to destroy the concept of gender any more than I want people to fit into a specific role.

I read a book called Stone Butch Blues which I liked very much at the time, don't know how I'd feel about it now. It covered a broad range of gender and sexuality issues. If nothing else it convinced me that these deeper issues should be subject matter in education systems. Of course, not American education systems. They'd just fuck it up.