![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/533\/2018\/11\/PFLAG_of_the_Lower_Shenandoah_07_-_DC_Capital_Pride_-_2014-06-07.jpg\")
To be \u201cgender expansive\u201d?<\/p>\n
To be \u201cgender non-conforming\u201d?<\/p>\n
In August 2012, so almost exactly a decade ago, the New York Times published an article about children with these characteristics, \u201cWhat\u2019s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n These boys included Alex, age 6, who \u201chas been fairly clear that he is simply a boy who sometimes likes to dress and play in conventionally feminine ways.\u201d\u00a0 They included the unnamed son of Moriko, who enjoyed dolls and girlish clothes, initially had a therapist who encouraged his parents to push stereotypically boy behavior, but then became a part of a 20-family \u201csupport group for families looking to accept, not change, their children\u2019s gender expression.\u201d\u00a0 Now (then) in 8th grade, he dressed like his (girl) friends, black eyeliner and all, but \u201cWhen his teachers asked which pronoun they should use when referring to him, he said masculine,\u201d and he was offered but rejected puberty blockers.\u00a0 Nick was a 10 year old who played with, and designed clothes for, Barbie dolls.\u00a0 Jose, 9, enjoyed dresses and dolls as a preschooler but at the time of the story preferred Legos \u2014 and ballet.\u00a0 James, age 14, had in early elementary school years, worn \u201cfeminine clothes\u201d but \u201cBy fifth grade, though, he had abandoned most of his skirts.\u201d\u00a0 He had male and female friend groups, and with the latter still enjoyed acting \u201cgirly.\u201d\u00a0 And P.J., age 8, wore \u201cgirl clothes\u201d but the reporter relays the following conversation:<\/p>\n P. J.\u2019s favorite video game, Glory of Heracles, features an ambiguously gendered character that P.J. described as a girl who wants to be a boy.<\/p>\n \u201cDo you feel like that?\u201d I asked him one day at his house.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, I don\u2019t want to be a girl,\u201d he said, as he checked himself out in his bedroom mirror and posed, Cosmo-style. \u201cI just want to wear girl stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy do you want to be a boy and not a girl?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n He looked at me as if I were daft. \u201cBecause I want to be who I am!\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n By way of explanation, he told me about a boy in his third-grade class who is a soccer fanatic. \u201cHe comes to school every day in a soccer jersey and sweat pants,\u201d P. J. said, \u201cbut that doesn\u2019t make him a professional soccer player.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n With the exception of the unnamed eyeliner-wearing boy, there was no suggestion that these kids were anything other than \u201cboys who like stereotypically girl activities and clothing\/styles,\u201d and even with respect to Eyeliner Boy, one gets the impression that it is those around him who are more worried about finding a label for him than he is.<\/p>\n Of course, it is an indicator of just how much times have changed, how quickly Gender Ideology has created its definitions, its terminology, and its categories for the people it snares into its web, that in reporting the collective hand-wringing by Eyeliner Boy\u2019s mother and therapist, the label \u201cnonbinary\u201d doesn\u2019t appear.<\/p>\n But a decade later the very idea of \u201cboys who wear dresses\u201d has vanished.\u00a0 These boys have been \u201ctransed\u201d \u2014 that is, either their desires to wear dresses have been interpreted by those around them as meaning they are transgender, or that these kids have been deemed to be a part of the LGBTQ+ community in other ways (as the \u201c+\u201d or the Q).<\/p>\n For example, in 2012, Human Rights Campaign conducted a survey and released a report<\/a>, \u201cSupporting and Caring for our Gender Expansive Youth<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Based on a survey of 10,000 teenagers who identified as LGBT (conducted by creating a survey link and soliciting teens to take the survey), this report defines \u201cgender expansive\u201d to mean the roughly 10% of survey respondents who did not check \u201cmale\u201d or \u201cfemale\u201d but said they were either transgender or \u201cother.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Separately, they define \u201cgender-expansive\u201d as<\/a><\/p>\n A person with a wider, more flexible range of gender identity and\/or expression than typically associated with the binary gender system. Often used as an umbrella term when referring to young people still exploring the possibilities of their gender expression and\/or gender identity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cGender expression,\u201d they say, is the<\/p>\n External appearance of one\u2019s gender identity, usually expressed through behavior, clothing, body characteristics or voice, and which may or may not conform to socially defined behaviors and characteristics typically associated with being either masculine or feminine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And \u201cgender non-conforming\u201d means<\/p>\n A broad term referring to people who do not behave in a way that conforms to the traditional expectations of their gender, or whose gender expression does not fit neatly into a category. While many also identify as transgender, not all gender non-conforming people do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The terms are hard to pin down, and nowhere in the HRC\u2019s glossary do they define basic terms such as \u201cgender\u201d itself or \u201cmale\u201d or \u201cfemale,\u201d but it is simply not possible to reconcile the HRC\u2019s definitions with any belief that a boy who wants to \u201cwear girl stuff\u201d can still be a boy.\u00a0 After all, according to their definitions, one expresses one\u2019s gender identity through one\u2019s behavior, clothing, etc.\u00a0 If you behave in masculine ways, your gender identity is therefore \u201cmale.\u201d\u00a0 If you behave in feminine ways, your gender identity is \u201cfemale.\u201d<\/p>\n Put it all together, then, and children who would have been simply \u201cdifferent\u201d are now being labelled as \u201ctrans\u201d or \u201cnonbinary\u201d or some other category which labels them and puts them into a bucket and says, \u201cyou are different and you are One of Us,\u201d and it reminds me of the eagerness with which anti-racism activists label an ever growing number of people as \u201cPeople of Color\u201d (e.g., labelling as \u201cOf Color\u201d the children of mixed race\/ethnicity marriages, people of Middle Eastern origin who historically had been labelled \u201cwhite\u201d), in other words, growing the number of people with the label LGBTQ for the purpose of increasing the size, and power, of the group, and in a sense claiming ownership of these children.<\/p>\n So it\u2019s deeply unfortunate that this path of a decade ago, with children freer to express themselves as they wish, did not play out, and we ended up with the endless numbers of teens proclaiming themselves to be nonbinary, instead.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What does it mean to be \u201cgender-creative\u201d? To be \u201cgender expansive\u201d? To be \u201cgender non-conforming\u201d? In August 2012, so almost exactly a decade ago, the New York Times published an article about children with these characteristics, \u201cWhat\u2019s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?\u201d These boys included Alex, age 6, who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[149],"class_list":["post-18391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-transgender"],"yoast_head":"\n\n