👇 “Dear Parents of America or Anywhere Else: I’ve decided that we need to have a little chat. You have to do better. You owe it to me, to the trans community, and to your kids’ emotional development to do better. When your child turned to you and said “Look, that boy is wearing lipstick!” what they were really doing was asking a question. Beneath every observation of difference is an implied question about whether or not that difference is acceptable. When you turned to your child and awkwardly said “It’s not nice to talk about strangers,” you not only didn’t answer their question, you effectively shut down what could’ve been a productive and affirming conversation. You took a moment when your child could’ve learned an important lesson about how to respect the broad diversity of gender expression, and reduced it to a tangential and less important lesson about manners in public. Furthermore, by demonstrating your own discomfort with the situation, you made your kids uncomfortable too — inadvertently furthering the culture of stigma and discomfort that surrounds gender-nonconforming people. The next time your child turns to you and says, “Look! That boy is wearing lipstick!” You could say “Yes, Johnny, sometimes boys do wear lipstick and that is perfectly okay. You can wear lipstick too if you want!” Or you could say, “Why yes, Sarah, she is wearing a bowtie. Girls and boys can both wear bowties. Would you like one?” Or, if your child is a savant, you could even say “Yes, Tabitha. While we are often presented with the myopic notion that gender is biological in nature, it’s actually a socially constructed, performative/discursive system that creates hegemonic power within society and varies across cultures, time, and anthropological space.” Any one of these responses (particularly the last one) not only answers the question that your child is really asking you, it also teaches your child, early on, to respect the natural diversity of gender in our world. Equally importantly, it opens up new possibilities for your child to lovingly explore their own gender identity in years to come.” —@jacobtobia #gender #gendernonconforming