The appropriate hashtag to use here might be #SorryNotSorry.
A mother with impeccable social-justice bona fides, who writes young adult novels for a living, is getting tired of all the progressive adults trying to convince her daughter she’s transgender because she likes boy things.
Lisa Selin Davis writes in The New York Times that she appreciates the sensitivity these adults – including her daughter’s teacher – are showing toward LGBTQ issues among students, but really, stop shaming my daughter into being a boy:
My daughter wears track pants and T-shirts. She has shaggy short hair (the look she requested from the hairdresser was “Luke Skywalker in Episode IV”). Most, but not all, of her friends are boys. She is sporty and strong, incredibly sweet, and a girl.
And yet she is asked by the pediatrician, by her teachers, by people who have known her for many years, if she feels like, or wants to be called, or wants to be, a boy.
This is not only insulting to her daughter’s wishes, but it reinforces gender stereotypes, Davis writes:
She is not gender nonconforming. She is gender role nonconforming. She does not fit into the mold that we adults — who have increasingly eschewed millenniums-old gender roles ourselves, as women work outside the home and men participate in the domestic sphere — still impose upon our children. …
Somehow, as we have broadened our awareness of and support for gender nonconformity, we’ve narrowed what we think a boy or a girl can look like and do.
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