From a conversation this evening: Your daughter who likes to do “boy” things will be much happier as a girl-who-does-boy-stuff than going through life pretending to not be a girl.
Don’t let sexist haters keep your daughter from enjoying:
- fast cars
- contact sports
- science
- math
- dark colors
- trains
- firefighting
- yard work
- heavy machinery
- carpentry
- electronics
- dinosaurs
- martial arts
- sci-fi
- sports bars
- electric guitars
- short hair
- comfy shoes
- chainsaws
- grilling steaks
- professions that earn a living wage
. . . or anything else that uptight, misogynist neo-Victorians decide “isn’t ladylike.”
She doesn’t have to identify as a tomboy. She can pick and choose which “girl things” she likes and which ones she doesn’t, and she can change her mind back and forth depending on whatever she feels like at the moment. Let her take risks. Let her try hard things. Let her see where the limits of perseverance and determination can take her.
Sex is the fact that people are either male or female. Sexism is when we decide that certain human activities are supposedly biologically-constrained to one sex or the other, but actually they aren’t.
Menstruation? Conception? Gestation? Lactation? Only females can do these things. Insemination? Only males can do that.
Sports, hobbies, professions, talents and aesthetic preferences, in contrast, are not biologically determined.
Your children will be much, much happier if you let your girls be girls and your boys be boys, and you don’t set artificial, culturally-prescribed, biologically-irrelevant restrictions on what kinds of good clean wholesome fun they are allowed to enjoy as a consequence.
Photo: Rhododendron flowers in the Carpathian Mountains, Western Ukraine, via Wikimedia, CC 4.0
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