Haiku

Not yellow, not green
Indefinable unseen
Sought: one peerless bunch

10,000 Dresses

Chloe: “Hi!”

Rachael: “Hi!”

Chloe: “I’m a baby!”

Rachael: “Well, whaddya think I am – a loaf of bread?” (Stereo shrieks of five-year old laughter.)

One of the twins’ favorite playacting scenarios at the moment is from “Free to Be You and Me,” a hippyish children’s album from the early 1970s. “Free to Be You and Me” was eventually turned into a visual special of sorts, which I borrow periodically from our local library, tucking the DVD in surreptitiously with the twins’ weekly requests for Angelina Ballerina, Charlie and Lola and any Disney movie they can get their hands on. Call it Mom’s subtle effort to mix it up a little on the gender front: stories that challenge gender roles for both girls and boys can be hard to find.

For those who didn’t grow up with it, “Free to Be You and Me” is heavily loaded with social messages about individuality, tolerance, and gender stereotypes. It has a star-studded cast, including such treats as a young Michael Jackson singing the duet “When We Grow Up” with Roberta Flack, Rosie Grier singing “It’s All Right to Cry,” and my personal favorite: an animated skit about an annoyingly prissy little girl - a “tender sweet young thing” - who comes to a most satisfactory end when she is eaten by a tiger. But it’s the skit called Boy Meets Girl, that makes the biggest impression on Rachael and Chloe. Diaper changes, penises, and silly voices (Mel Brooks): good lord, what more could any self-respecting five year old ask for?

“Boy Meets Girl” touches on gender differences – both real and assumed - in a lighthearted way. Two newborns in a hospital are trying to figure out if each one is a girl, or a boy. They use standard assumptions about what boys and girls look like, and like to do, in order to find the answer. The only problem is, each baby discovers it doesn’t really fit the mold.

I have a special place in my heart for this skit – the subject of gender has always fascinated me, and twenty-three years of teaching young children and raising five of my own has only deepened my curiosity about the subject, and my respect for its complexity. Over time I’ve come to see gender less as a dichotomy, and more as a continuum. The big question I’ve come to ask as a teacher is, how do I create an environment within the classroom that actively supports children along the entire continuum, and encourages them to think about gender more fluidly?

I once found a paragraph written by author Amy Bloom that so resonated with my feelings about gender that I keep it on a sticky note on my computer desktop. It is from her book Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Cross-dressing Cops and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, and reads:

“A great many people, sick of news from the margins, worn out by the sand shifting beneath their assumptions, like to imagine Nature as a sweet, simple voice: tulips in spring, Vermont’s leaves falling in autumn,” Bloom writes. “Nature is more like Aretha Franklin: vast, magnificent, capricious, occasionally hilarious, and infinitely varied.”

Each year, my co-teacher and I begin our PreKindergarten curriculum with a unit we call “Getting to know each other: Who am I and who are you?” We make gender awareness a big part of this theme: children this age sort and categorize each other based on concrete information and observations, and will assign each their fellow classmates a gender from the get go. We have had to search far and wide for good literature and fiction to inspire ideas and supplement our conversations: some of the best books about gender for children are now out of print. You try to find “Pugdog,” by Andrea U’Ren, or “What is a Girl, What is a Boy,” by Stephanie Waxman -- you’ll find yourself – as we did, ordering remains from used and out-of-print book catalogs. There are other books still in print that have value from a gender perspective; “William’s Doll,” by Charlotte Zolotow, “Oliver Button is a Sissy,” by Tomie dePaola, and “I Look Like a Girl,” by Sheila Hamanaka, but there are not enough of them, and not enough geared appropriately to varying ages.

A large piece of why I love teaching 4-5 year olds is because it is an age where you can still inspire children to think for themselves. You can open up a book filled with photographs of naked women, men and children, and they will talk freely about the differences in the bodies. A child might comment “Hey, that looks just like my mom!” or ask a question about body hair, but uncomfortable fidgeting and giggling are still a year or so in the future: the emotional “loading” of the subject is minimal, and most importantly, doesn’t inhibit the curiosity or the discussion.

One of the simplest and yet most powerful things we do each year during our “Getting to know you” unit is have our students generate lists of the differences between girls and boys. We split the class in half and do it in two separate lessons with smaller, more intimate discussions.

“What makes a girl a girl?” We ask the class. “What makes a boy a boy?”

Our students’ hands shoot up in the air.

Group One:
Girls stand still
Boys push
Boys have short hair
Girls have long hair
Girls wear flowers and hearts and rainbows on their shirts
Boys wear shark shirts
Girls wear tights
Boys don’t wear tights
Girls wear dresses
Girls wear roses
Boys wear brown shoes
Girls wear pink shoes
Boys like animals
Girls like Princesses and Barbies
Boys like cars
Girls like dolls
Girls wear skirts
Boys wear pants

Group Two:
Boys have short hair
Girls have long hair
Girls like pink
Boys like black
Boys like to play with boys
Girls like to play with girls
Girls wear dresses
Boys wear short or long pants
Boys like Star Wars
Girls like to play Barbies
Girls like girl movies like Cinderella
Boys like boy movies
Boys like scary movies
Girls like to wear jewelry
Girls like to dress up
Girls play princesses
Girls wear heart and flowers
Boys wear transformers

After the kids have shared all their ideas, we revisit each item individually. We ask, “Does anyone have a comment or observation they’d like to make about this idea?” Children are eager to provide examples and specifics of when the observation holds true, and when it doesn’t: “Wait a minute, I’m a boy and I don’t like sharks!” Or “Well, I’m a girl and I love to watch scary movies!” Once they get the hang of it, finding the exception becomes a delightful game. Boys freely confess that they too, occasionally like to play with Barbies, or dress up in a tutu at home, and girls point out that they like to dig in the sand and even build guns with Legos. It is easier for girls to travel the spectrum openly and freely, but at the ages of four and five, boys are willing to confess their own gender benders: a fondness for nail polish, and wearing the color pink. The children delight in saying, “Cross that out!” for each item with an exception. “Take it off the list!”

At the end of the lesson, our girl and boy lists are empty. It is a powerful thing: the large easel chart with every last observation struck through in colored markers. When we ask again if there is anything that should be on those lists - any differences they think hold true for all girls and all boys, the children volunteer two new items: boys have penises, and girls have vaginas. C’est tout.

Last year, a student at my older daughter’s high school ended his freshman year as a boy, and began her sophomore year as a girl, in a dress, with a new, more feminine name. I silently applauded our public high school’s low-key acceptance of it: the girl’s name was changed on class attendance forms, and she was moved to the girls’ gym locker room for P.E. class. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come.

As gender barriers like this begin (hopefully) to fall in our classrooms and schools, I think more about our responsibility as educators to acknowledge and explore children’s feelings about their own gender earlier in the learning process. We have only really scratched the social surface of gender: girls and boys can do and be anything they want to be. But what about girls who want to be boys? And vice versa? How does it feel to be a young boy in the dress up corner: wanting to dress up in heels, perhaps to be the mommy in a game? Living in Massachusetts, we have had the luxury of watching dramatic play in our classroom open up to involve male/male weddings and families having tea with “two mommies.” Honestly, I think we’ve done way better with educating children about sexual orientation than gender orientation. But how comfortable does the girl who wishes to be a boy, or vice versa, feel with expressing those feelings in play?

Last year I came upon a new children’s book, entitled 10,000 Dresses, by Marcus Ewert. 10,000 Dresses is about a child of initially ambiguous gender, “Bailey,” who imagines designing and wearing beautiful dresses. The pronoun used to refer to Bailey is “she,” and the cutout collage style illustrations of Bailey are deliberately gender neutral; Bailey has spiky short hair and a body short on details.

Bailey begins her story by describing in loving detail her dream world of dresses, with reverence for color, glitter and detail, and the imagined pleasure of wearing them. Eventually, she goes to ask her Mother if she would buy her the crystal dress she dreams of. Her mother responds, “Bailey, what are you talking about? You’re a boy. Boys don’t wear dresses!”

“But… I don’t feel like a boy,” says Bailey, and the story reveals its conflict: Bailey’s feelings, dreams and wishes are at odds with her biological gender, and her family’s expectations. Not until Bailey happens upon an older girl in the neighborhood who enjoys sewing dresses, and is happy to sit and dream up new fashion ideas with Bailey, regardless of her gender, does she find the connection she needs to express herself.

The first time I read this book to young children (I practice everything on the twins before trying it out on my class), Rachael and Chloe were confused – it took some discussion and a few read-throughs for them to get the gender situation straight. Once they’d developed an understanding that Bailey was a boy who wanted to be a girl, all was well. Chloe announced that sometimes, she wishes she could be a boy. Like Bailey, both Chloe and Rachael are inspired by beautiful dresses, and could happily share Bailey’s dream of a dress made of crystals with rainbows jumping out. I was struck – as I so often am when I discuss so-called “sensitive” topics with young children, that what is emotionally loaded for us, is not yet loaded for them. It simply is what it is.

The matter-of-fact acceptance of gender variegation shown by young children should be heartening, but the bummer is that it is short-lived. With each passing year, there will be more embarrassment, more giggles, more peer pressure, and more discomfort. Still, I want to believe that if we keep giving the subject of gender orientation (and in later years, sexual orientation as well) a bigger voice in the classroom, some of it will eventually stick. That underneath the whispers and looks and giggles of tweens and teens, will be hearts and minds that can allow for all the variegations, and accept all the possibilities.