The other day when my 4-year-old son and I were at the grocery store, he spotted something that stole his little heart: a blue-green nightgown with flamingos and flowers on it. “A dress!” he squealed. “Can we get it?”
I hesitated, but only for a moment. And not because I don’t want my son to dress up in a feminine way.
Girls have long been dressing up in more “boyish” ways without anyone batting an eye, but for whatever reason, the opposite makes people freak out
Especially people in my majority conservative area.
I hesitated because I am terrified of what the world will do to my kid if he steps out in a dress.
But I bought it anyway. The moment we got home, he put it on. “My dress!” he said. “Can I pretend to be a girl?”
“Of course!” I said. “Girls are awesome.” Just like dolphins and babies and all the other things my 4-year-old pretends to be.
He pranced around in his dress the rest of the day, proudly showing it off to my partner when he got home
I took several photos of him beaming in his dress. Then I posted them to our family Tinybeans account, where conservative, old-fashioned great-grandparents regularly coo over the more “boyish” pictures of my son playing with tractors.
“He’s such a boy,” they’ll say, as if my son were growing up in the ’60s and not the new ’20s. If my kid’s hair starts to get long, the great-grands start commenting things like, “He needs a haircut.”
Which means, “He looks too much like a girl.”
I posted the photos anyway, along with a strongly worded caption that warned everyone on the Tinybeans that derisive or negative comments about the dress would be deleted immediately.
No one left any comments, and I figured we all understood each other
A couple of weeks later, though, when my son proudly donned his dress for my mom, who was visiting, I said, “Isn’t it cute?”
She said nothing. In fact, she gave me a look of horror. My mom, who voted for Biden and supports Black Lives Matter and “likes” my Facebook posts supporting LGBTQ+ rights, could clearly not accept my son wearing a dress.
I wasn’t prepared for the rage that ballooned in my chest
All my young life, my parents discouraged me from becoming a “girly girl.” They refused to buy me Barbies and encouraged me to ride my bike over jumps and do rowdy, boyish things.
I used to think that was progressive of them, but now I see that it’s not progress at all if it doesn’t work both ways. Plus, there was something sinister about their pro-tomboy stance. The term “girly girl” was always used in a mean way. Girls who liked nail polish, Barbies, and makeup were somehow less than.
It’s all wrong, wrong, wrong.
Our world has not made nearly enough progress in the gender roles department
I’ve seen a few glimmers of hope recently. Like the male students and teachers in Spain who wore skirts to school to protest the expulsion of a boy who’d worn a dress to school.
Fresh after the rage of my mom’s reaction to my son’s dress, there was nothing more beautiful than those skirt-wearing men.
Because as the hashtag goes, clothes have no gender. They are pieces of fabric crafted to make us feel beautiful and confident. Why should anyone decide what that looks like for someone else?
I am also grateful to Billy Porter, Harry Styles, Jaden Smith, Jonathan Van Ness, and all the other famous men who rock skirts and dresses.
For the sake of my son and all the other dress-loving boys around the world, let’s normalize boys wearing dresses.
It’s way past time.
