Night Shift Thought(s) from last night:

It makes me feel really uncomfortable when people with young children do the “She’s such a girl / He’s such a boy” thing just because their child seems to be drawn to things that, based on societal expectations based solely on the child’s assigned gender, that a girl or boy is “supposed” to like; they assume that if the child seems to gravitate to these societally gendered things without them consciously pushing them on the child that this some how makes these “gender norms” innate to girls or boys.

These parents don’t realize that even young children can be influenced by things other than their parents–other relatives have an impact, any media the child consumes (even media a parent may to realize a child is consuming), and the way that children’s toys are packaged and marketed in-store can have an influence.

Certainly many children conform to gender norms in their tastes. This doesn’t just hinge on gender, though–children have personalities and may like something just because they like it, not because it’s a “boy thing”/“girl thing” and happens to match their assigned gender.

Some kids may seem to like things because they have received the message–from anywhere in their environment, whether parents realize or not–that those things are what their assigned gender is *supposed* to like.

As a kid who got the message “girls are *supposed* to like x, y, z” and then made the mental jump to “…but I don’t like x, y, z…does that me bad at being a girl?” and decided that clearly I had been rejected by girlhood and thus ran in the direction of “eww, girls” for many years because I didn’t understand girls who–for whatever reason–did conform to gender norms in childhood play and other things and only in nearing adulthood learned to accept that not conforming didn’t mean I failed at being a girl/woman and that conforming didn’t mean that other girls/women automatically saw me as a failure…

Well…it hurts to hear parents describe their children that way, unspokenly also saying that societal gender roles/norms are just natural, just biology. It hurts because I remember being that girl who mainly liked “boy toys”; and now I’m a gender non-conforming woman who doesn’t really understand what it feels like to “feel like a woman” or anything but just “just…me”, but who very strongly feels a need to stand by women and girls, both those like me who don’t “fit” and those who do that I spent so many years resenting.

And I wonder what these “my child is *such* a/an [assigned gender], lol” would say if their child…*wasn’t* so apparently gender conforming. And I don’t know if I would really want to know the honest answer.