Why are adults so confused by gender non-conforming children?

Most of the time, society groups children by their assumed roles according to their assigned sex. People assigned male at birth wear pants, play sports, and keep their hair short to look boyish. People assigned female at birth paint their nails, shop for dresses, and enjoy colours like pink and purple. The gender hierarchy has existed longer than any of us have been alive: and assumed gender roles have existed alongside it. Gender is something that needs to be challenged; it's a spectrum, and there is so much more to it than just male or female. Challenging gender norms doesn't come without backlash, and this is why it's so important to continue doing it.

My son is seven years old. He was assigned male at birth, but this by no means gives him an obligation to act in stereotypically male ways. As a little boy with long hair, he's often gendered differently by strangers depending on what he wears. Society has a long way to go as far as gender roles. It's so important to educate, but it takes an army, and there will always be people who are unwilling to learn. When my son wears a dress or sparkles, he's called she by strangers. When he wears his expected jeans or sweat pants, he's called he. The thing about gender is it's ever-changing, and it isn't equivalent to expression. This, I think, is especially hard for people to understand.

Why are adults so confused by gender non-conforming children? Because older generations, especially, were raised to believe that boys look this way, and girls look that way, and nothing exists in between. Why should I force my child to dress a certain way and behave a certain way just to make others comfortable? He likes unicorns, rainbows, sparkles, and pink. Clothing has no gender, and gender is overrated. The problem, though, is that because he is a young child, the responsibility to deal with ignorance falls on me - and I happily accept this responsibility. It isn't just adults, either. People are afraid of what they don't understand, and young children of adults raised to follow rigid gender rules become bullies because of this.

As children, we need the opportunity and the space to express ourselves fully: to experiment and explore. If this isn't provided to us, we grow into insecure (and often angry) adults, stifling any parts of ourselves that were never acknowledged growing up. Besides, gender non-conforming kids don't hurt anyone. Still, it's something that is often met with hostility, especially online. I could write a novel with the number of threats I receive from insecure strangers - who are angry that I confuse my child, that I force him to be a girl, that I don't deserve to have children. And although society is becoming more accepting of trans and gender non-conforming people, it's reactions like this that fuel my determination to keep sharing.

I sometimes wonder exactly why people are so threatened by things like this. I spend a lot of time trying to teach my son that the way people react to him is not his problem, and none of us have the obligation to conform to what others expect of us. It's easier said than done, of course. As an adult well into my twenties, I still have difficulties with this myself. The biggest nuisance, I've found, is push back from family members: because although I have learned that my life is my business, my son is just a child, and he's very moldable.

Something important that I find a lot of people still don't quite understand is that what we wear does not determine how we identify. Clothing is just that: clothing. It's almost 2023, and people still believe that clothing has gender. When my child grows up, he may discover he's a woman, or a man, or a little of both, or neither, and it won't be because of the clothes he wore in childhood. I've been told by uneducated strangers that letting a boy wear pink will turn him gay - and it's laughable to me.

Why are adults so confused by gender non-conforming children? Because they aren't exposed to them often enough to understand that any type of human can like any type of fashion. This is why it's so important to let children experiment in a safe environment, and to help them understand that gender can be anything we want, and at the same time, it really means nothing at all.