4thWaveNow

roslynholcomb:

roslynholcomb:

4thwavenow:

roslynholcomb:

4thwavenow:

Of course, life is easier for males - there’s no getting around that. Being a woman is like playing on “hard” mode. It sometimes sucks. But it doesn’t have to suck to the point of constantly (emphasis on constantly) wishing you were born otherwise.

Tomboys, unite.

I read these notes especially the kids talking about their parents and it sounds like something out of another century. It’s incredible to me that with all these fabulous female athletes around that parents are still telling their kids that being a female jock is “masculine.” Or that no guy will like them. It’s crazy because I remember my sister being a phenomenal athlete back in the 70s and it was no big deal. The softball team she was on was even called The Tomboys. Yeah, we had to wear froufrou dresses, but that was only for Easter or Christmas. The rest of the time we wore what all the kids wore; jeans and t-shirts. My niece who grew up in the 80s was a terrific athlete as well. Played on the boy’s basketball team, and no one made a thing of it except that she was small and everyone was afraid she’d get hurt. 

So what in the holy hell has happened in the past few decades that we now have folk talking like it’s the 1950s again? (Not even the fifties because my aunt was a “yardman” back then because the pay was better than being a maid and she preferred to be outside, and no one called her a man, though she wore overalls every day and was a butch lesbian.) Is this some kind of backlash against feminism? Because it’s depressing as all hell to read these posts where a girl thinks because she likes science and jeans that she’s somehow not a girl. People have personalities. I didn’t like dolls either. My mama loved them, but never said we had to be boys because we didn’t. Something has gone terribly awry here and it’s just sad to read about.  

Every day I wonder how we went so far backwards in terms of women’s liberation. If you’d told me in 1985 that this is where things would be 30 years later, I wouldn’t have believed it.

The scary thing is, it happened to quickly. While women were being distracted by all manner of fuckery our daughters have been left to fend for themselves. And yeah, here there be dragons. 

I guess it’s sort of like “hipster racism.” We had a generation of parents who believed that being “colorblind” was the way to deal with racism. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. You have to openly address differences and explain to your children why treating people differently because of them is wrong. If parents simply accepted their sons who want to wear nail polish and daughters who want to play baseball as they are there would be no “dysphoria,” because it seems in all these cases thus far the so-called gender norms are being policed by their own parents. 

When my son was about a year and a half old he asked for a baby doll we saw in the discount bin at a big box store. It only cost $5 so I got it for him. He loved that doll and though I thought his dad might have problems with it, he was like “how else is he going to learn how to be a dad?” And that was that. He also had a tea set and loved to have tea parties. He played sports and other people often comment that he’s “all boy,” (yeah, that’s annoying) yet he can sing all the songs from Frozen and berated me for calling it a “girl movie,” (I know, bad feminists, but dammit I can only listen to those damned songs for so long.) 

In other words, it would seem to me that maybe dysphoria, at least in these very young kids could be very much an issue with parents and parenting. It’s typical at these ages to rebel and reject parental norms. If parents are very focused on gender norms, it may well be possible that dysphoria is informed by that. Sounds to me that if these posts are valid, rather than treating the kids with drugs and surgery, we might want to do some type of treatment with the parents instead.