Boys Will Be Boys Read online

  The boys are less able to express their emotions but more confident in their abilities, while the girls have lower self-esteem and a lesser ability to process numbers and shapes. All but one girl believe boys are ‘better’ than them and their self-perception is largely limited to their appearance. One pupil, Kara, says ‘girls are better at being pretty’ while another, Tiffany, declares ‘men are better at being in charge.’ The boys are similarly old-fashioned: little Louis says ‘girls look after the child and boys do lots of cool stuff,’ while Bradley declares, ‘men are more successful because they could have harder jobs.’

  But as detrimental as the effect of gender stereotyping is on cis kids, it’s even more damaging on trans and gender-diverse children. A 2017 survey conducted by the Telethon Kids Institute and the University of Western Australia found that transgender youths are roughly ten times more likely than other young Australians to experience severe depression and anxiety. The Trans Pathways’ anonymous online survey had 859 trans and gender-diverse respondents between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five as well as nearly 200 parents and guardians of trans and gender-diverse youths. One-fifth of trans kids reported having an eating disorder, four-fifths reported self-harming behaviour and three out of four had been professionally diagnosed with depression or anxiety. But the worst statistic of all was this: almost half had attempted suicide, which is a rate six times higher than that of the general population.

  These are our children, for fuck’s sake.

  I’ll tell you another reason why I have a dogmatic approach to this: because even when we think we are Super Right On about these issues, the chances are that we’re much weaker than we perceive ourselves to be. In her ground-breaking (and hysterically funny) work, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, the cognitive neuroscientist Cordelia Fine discusses the implicit associations of the mind, which, as she puts it, is an otherwise ‘tangled but highly organized network of connections [containing] representations of objects, people, concepts, feelings, your own self, goals, motives and behaviours with one another’. Dr Fine points to Anthony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji and Brian Nosek’s Implicit Association Test (IAT), in which participants are asked to rapidly pair categories of words or pictures. Participants worked more quickly when asked to pair names commonly recognised as female with communal words (‘like connected and supported’) and names commonly recognised as male with more agentic words (‘like individualistic and competitive’) than when female names were paired with agentic words and male with communal. Fine writes, ‘The small but significant difference in reaction time this creates is taken as a measure of the stronger automatic and unintended associations between women and communality, and men and agency.’

  It’s easy to dismiss the impact of gender stereotyping as ‘meaningless’ or even ‘harmless’ (it’s not), but it’s worth reminding ourselves that humans are intensely impressionable. We are subject to a wide range of influences across every aspect of our lives and it’s foolish for us to think that childhood is immune to that. I mean, if we didn’t respond so enthusiastically to marketing then we wouldn’t be living in a destructive capitalist nightmare.

  Resisting social conditioning for children—even for people who count themselves as progressive—has so far only seemed to focus on how we can protect little girls from the evils of loving princesses, fairies and pink. Girls gravitating towards trucks and ‘gender-neutral clothing’ (which usually just means clothes that are coded as masculine) is often seen as cause for subtle boasting, because most people are still conditioned to think girls liking ‘boy’ stuff represents some kind of promotion. It’s not as common for people to celebrate the opposite—sons loving pink, tutus, fairies and anything more typically associated with ‘girliness’. This is partly because of sexism (because things girls like are inherently rubbish, of course) and partly out of a combination of homophobia, transphobia and fear of the feminine (yikes, our son likes girl stuff, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?!). Both motivations are utterly shit.

  But the tragedy of gender stereotyping existing at all (let alone starting so early) is that it doesn’t just limit our collective understanding and acceptance of what it means to be a girl (and the wonderful leadership, ferocity and strength that can be embodied by girls in a decidedly determined way). It also reduces our idea of boyhood to one in which softness and tenderness are considered ‘unmanly’. Why do people think baby boys shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy flowers, sparkles and butterflies while baby girls are required to have those same things glued onto their heads to offset their ‘unfeminine’ baldness?

  In 2017, a face painter named Sandra wrote a micro essay on Twitter that quickly went viral. In it, she outlined what she saw as a contributing cause of male violence in America. A four-year-old boy had asked for a butterfly to be painted on his face. His mother denied his request, insisting instead that he get something ‘for boys’. She then turned to his father, ‘a big guy in a jersey’, and had him confirm that he didn’t want his son having a big, ole GAY butterfly on his face [my emphasis].

  This boy’s parents taught him that day to associate shame with anything considered feminine and to apply that shame to himself for wanting it. And what did he walk away with? A skull and crossbones on his cheek. ‘Sorry,’ the face painter said to him as his mother walked him away.

  ‘And I am,’ she wrote. ‘I’m sorry that he is not allowed to love something as miraculous and beautiful as a butterfly.’

  When I read stories about little boys who have their softness and love shamed out of them by parents who are in thrall to their own fear, my heart breaks. This is why it’s so important to break down rigid learning around what gender is and isn’t supposed to be. It’s why it’s so important to advocate for the removal of gender labels in clothing and toy aisles, because these things exist more to shape behaviours rather than respond to them. It’s why we all have to be keenly aware of how we treat the children we interact with in our own lives, and question how much space for expression we’re providing them. We must be prepared to question the reductive, harmful stereotypes that limit the growth of our children into the perfect, wonderful people they are meant to be and not just the ones that we’re comfortable being around. Little girls can be brave and strong, and little boys might want to be a princess every now and again. Some children might want to be both or neither, and that goes for being girls or boys at all. As adults, all we have to be is supportive. As parents, all we have to do is love them.

  Trust me, there are enough people out there willing to hate children for threatening their own sense of what it means to be a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’. We certainly don’t need to make it any easier for them. To understand that, we only need to look as far as the response to Australia’s postal survey on marriage equality and the campaign against sartorial choices led by one man in particular.

  In 2017, the Australian government announced it would be conducting a frivolously expensive, totally unnecessary and blatantly homophobic postal survey to assess the public’s views on same-sex marriage. That numerous studies and polls had consistently shown the majority of Australians to be in favour of same-sex marriage was irrelevant. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull may have spent some years wooing otherwise left-leaning citizens into thinking he’d be an okay bet to lead the Liberal Party (for any foreign readers, to be a Liberal in Australia means to be conservative; it’s the upside-down land, after all), but once he wrestled the leadership from Tony Abbott, he became devoted to appeasing the right of his party in order to maintain his tenuous grip on power.

  Putting the issue of Turnbull’s stale legacy aside, one of the many repulsive things the plebiscite did was to provide a platform for people’s privately held and expressed homophobia to be broadcast to a much larger audience. The ‘silent majority’—as conservative newspapers and commentators referred to them—were ready to don their Loud ’n’ Proud t-shirts and take to the streets. (Sidenote: In my experience, the ‘silent majority’ is rarely
either of those things.)

  But this was no ordinary Straight Pride parade. See, campaigning against marriage equality was just the icing on the traditional three-tiered wedding cake for the Australian Christian Lobby and its army of sensibly dressed soldiers. The real target was the Safe Schools program, an initiative launched in Victoria in 2010 and then later rolled out nationally to voluntary participants. The Safe Schools Coalition Australia describes itself as ‘a national network of organisations working with school communities to create safer and more inclusive environments for same sex attracted, intersex and gender diverse students, staff and families’. Scary stuff! That is, if you’re a total dingleberry.

  One of the most prominent critics of Safe Schools and same-sex marriage was the far-right politician Cory Bernardi. If you want to see a case study of the terror felt by some people when they even contemplate the thought of boys acting outside their strict ideas of gender, you need only look to how Bernardi directed his homophobic, transphobic ire at a fundraising campaign run by a South Australian primary school that just happened to coincide with run-time for the postal survey.

  Every year, Craigburn Primary hosts a ‘gold coin donation’ casual day to raise money for a nominated charity. In 2017, they decided to nominate One Girl, an organisation that assists girls in Africa to receive an education. For One Girl’s ‘Do It In A Dress’ campaign, the school administration invited students and staff to come to school wearing ‘a dress or casual clothes’, noting, ‘The main thing of course is to focus on supporting the education of girls in Africa . . . so that girls can look forward to a positive future.’ Craigburn set themselves a target of $900, an admirable goal for a small primary school and one that its students would no doubt have felt proud to achieve.

  The story might have ended with Craigburn donating that sum or thereabouts were it not for Bernardi’s attempts to conflate a simple fundraising activity with the broader marriage equality debate taking place at the same time. On 20 September, he tweeted, ‘One school in SA now has “wear a dress day”. This gender morphing is really getting absurd.’ Despite the fact that the option to ‘wear a dress (or casual clothes)’ was open to everyone, it was clear Bernardi was solely concerned with the idea of schoolboys frocking up. He was later quoted in the Adelaide Advertiser as saying: ‘In the midst of a debate about the safe school gender ideology program, the redefinition of marriage and attempts to de-genderise society it seems this school is playing into a political cause rather than an educational one.’

  Although Bernadi’s plan was clearly to exploit the philanthropic efforts of children in order to further stoke the flames of queerphobia in his bigoted supporters and thus help bolster the No campaign, it thankfully backfired. Josh Thomas, a popular actor and comedian with more than 470,000 Twitter followers, quickly exposed Bernardi’s efforts when he tweeted, ‘These kids are being bullied by Cory for trying to help underprivileged girls.’ Thomas pledged $2000 towards the school’s campaign and others eagerly followed suit. By midday the next day, less than twenty-four hours after Bernardi first sounded the Repressed Homophobic Terror Factory alarm, nearly $35,000 had been pledged by the public towards Craigburn Primary’s Do It In A Dress fundraiser.

  If this were the tale’s end, it would be heart-warming enough. But I guess there’s something about an adult man with significant political power choosing to bully morally conscious primary school-aged children that just doesn’t sit right with the public. The money kept pouring in, and not just from locals. Even people as far away as the Yukon, in Canada, heard about Bernardi’s attempts to misrepresent and shame kids, and they started donating too. Thanks in large part to Thomas’s signal boosting, by the campaign’s end more than $300,000 had been raised for Do It In A Dress, courtesy of Craigburn Primary. And although negative comments around the so-called ‘brainwashing’ of children persisted, public feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

  When I think of those enthusiastic boys targeted by Bernardi and his poison, it’s hard not to think of my son. He is all chubby thighs and waddling body now, squawking garbled words and obsessed with Emma Wiggle. But one day he’ll be moving through a schoolyard himself, absorbing cultural messages at lightning speed and learning just what kind of boy it is the world will allow him to be. It didn’t surprise me to be confronted (again) by Bernardi’s melange of bigotry. But I still feel viscerally angry about the toxic way he tried to sabotage a group of young children and their community-minded project and to do it in such a way that it might deter them from participating in such public acts of decency in the future. Despite Bernardi’s claims, no one was forcing boys to wear dresses. They were invited to, and many of them embraced the opportunity with delight and excitement. How horrendous, how cruel, how abusive to take that excitement and try to turn it into something dirty and shameful; to invite the entire country to point fingers at the ‘weird’ and ‘disgusting’ behaviour being taught to children who, up until that point, almost certainly didn’t realise there were people out there who would link their actions to perversion. How fucking dare he?!

  This is bigger than one politician’s campaign against a group of primary school children in an effort to oppress the queer community. These are the foundational lessons being taught to and about boys all over Australia, the same lessons that codify masculinity as one particular, immutable thing so that it becomes both a prison and a weapon. Boys don’t cry. Boys don’t like rainbows. Boys don’t dance. Boys don’t wear pink. Boys don’t like dresses. Boys will be boys, but not if they like any of those things. Not on my watch.

  We have a clear choice. We can choose to participate in the teaching of that shame, and bear responsibility for the damage it causes later on (and believe you me, it causes untold harm to place boys in emotional straitjackets and teach them that their masculinity is defined by their defeat of the feminine). Or we can do what so many did in response to Bernardi’s fear-mongering and not just embrace the creative expression of our children without censure or fear, but actively celebrate it—and always, not just when there’s a fundraiser involved. It is only by choosing the latter course that we can hope to breed the kind of children—boys, girls and anyone outside those two states of being—who daily exercise compassion, kindness and love for all people. This is the first step in disrupting the damage done by patriarchy.

  It takes a lot of insecurity to believe something as simple as an item of clothing, a colour, a hobby, or a love for a particular toy can wield enough power to destroy heterosexual, patriarchal civilisation as we know it. Who knew that all it takes to dismantle the systems of power that oppress us all is to wave a dress in its general direction? If only it were that easy!

  The truth is there’s no such thing as ‘boys’ clothes’ or ‘girls’ clothes’, nor are there toys that are ‘for boys’ versus toys that are ‘for girls’. There are no jobs that belong to boys, just as there are no jobs that belong to girls. You can’t learn anything about unborn children by finding out what’s between their legs, nor can you tell just by looking at them later what their gender is. The notion is as absurd as suggesting there’s air that only boys can breathe or heat that only girls can feel. A thing is a thing is a thing, no more and no less.

  There is no gender licence required to use things. A truck is for a girl as long as a girl is playing with it. A baby stroller is for a boy as long as a boy has fun pushing it around. And, hell yes, a fucking dress belongs to a boy if he chooses to wear it.

  Personally, I look forward to a future in which my son will be supported to wear what he likes without fear of being bullied, degraded or made to feel subhuman. Where the concept of boys wearing clothes commonly deemed feminine won’t even be a source of amusement or embarrassment anymore because society will have grown up enough to recognise that there is nothing embarrassing about being a girl.

  This is the future I want for my son. This is what I’m working towards for all boys. And hey—if more boys start wearing dresses, perhaps more dressmakers will start de
signing them all with pockets.

  Now that’s liberation.

  2

  A WOMAN’S PLACE

  ‘Dear Jess,’ the letter began, addressed to Jessica Rowe in her role as agony aunt for Sunday Life magazine:

  We’ve recently employed a cleaner but my husband says it’s an indulgence. Not for me! I work full time and I’m tired of being the one responsible for keeping our house tidy, doing all the cooking and getting the kids to bed. How can I deal with his snide comments about having help with cleaning?

  Rowe answered with the characteristic impartiality of a seasoned journalist, telling the anonymous writer that her investment was ‘money well spent as it means you can focus on what you enjoy doing when you’re home instead of feeling resentful’. She then advised the harried woman to ‘have a calm chat’ with her husband and tell him ‘you’d like him to help more’.

  It’s not unreasonable advice, I suppose, although mine would have probably been a bit more blunt: divorce him.

  Before you start tweeting at me, demanding my man-hating reptilian self be forced to apologise to all the men in the world who are totally happy for their wives to hire a cleaner to ‘help’ them with the housework, relax—that little thing I did just there is what we call a joke. I’m not really advocating the dissolution of a marriage and a family because one party is too lazy to do any of the work himself.