4thWaveNow

snowflakeespecial:

ashypinky replied to your post :

Do you think the tide is receding? Can’t we just…

Snow, we’re round-about the same age. Do you remember “Free to Be You and Me?” - a film we saw each year in schools and the kids loved it. If you remember that, can you imagine it being shown today?

Haha yeah of course! And this one really spoke to me! I mentioned that in an earlier version of that reply, I guess I should have left it in. I had that record growing up, and listened to it endlessly.

But what felt so frustrating is that I was getting all these affirming messages from the record, but at kindergarten I told my teacher I was thinking about getting a perm and they all started laughing at me. Then I said I wanted to become a baton twirler but everyone said “No, you’re a boy so you can be the team mascot.” Like, wtf? How is it equivalent to wear a furry animal suit and be a physical comedian, or to wear a sequined costume and wave pompoms and twirl a baton and dance gracefully?

So like, I don’t want to romanticize the 80′s. Except, I kind of do. Because none of this princess bullshit, none of pink aisle/blue aisle bullshit, none of the two year old trans girls bullshit. There were still gender restrictions that were total bullshit, but nothing like today. The world I want to live in, is like the early 80′s but without the homophobia. I think that removing the homophobia would have gone a long way towards making it ok for a boy to be a baton twirler.

Anyway in answer to your question: no, that would never be shown today! They’d show a special about how Jazz Jennings “knew” she was a girl because she liked the color pink. And how “brave” Jazz is for showing women how to “woman”. It makes me so so so sad.

Never thought I’d be saying in 2015 that my girlhood in the 1960s-70s, as far as the freedom I had to be a “gender nonconforming” female, was light years ahead of what kids have to put up with now. Hell, we didn’t even need that GNC term back then. Even in the 1940s women got to wear trousers and not be told “maybe you should transition.”