Image originally published in Emma Magazine.
I saw this story by Piper Weiss on Yahoo and it is heartwarming and inspiring:
[Nils] Pickert never minded that his son liked dressing in little girl’s clothes, but when his family moved from West Berlin to a small southern town in Germany, he learned that other people did. In fact, it became a “town wide issue,” according to Pickert, whose essay was translated by Tumblr user steegeschnoeber.
A new school didn’t make life any easier for his young son. Shortly after his first day, he stopped reveling in his own tastes and Pickert worried about the damage it could wreak on his self-confidence. “I didn’t want to talk my son into not wearing dresses and skirts,” Pickert explained. “He didn’t make friends doing that in Berlin… so after a lot of contemplation I had only one option left: To broaden my shoulders for my little buddy and dress in a skirt myself.”
I really think that speaks for itself. You should go read the article.
That there is an awesome way to deconstruct traditional masculinity and its protection mandate. Gut gemacht, pal. Well done. :)
I’m kinda torn. I appreciate any dad sticking up for a child who doesn’t conform to gender stereotypes, but at the end of the day, skirts, dresses, and pants are just clothing. Since I believe that my culture places wayyyyy too much significance on superficial things like what you wear, I think parents/culture ought to send children the message that external things like clothing are just decorations, and they really aren’t that significant, and we shouldn’t judge someone by their clothing. I have a problem with adding an asterisk to that message, which says, “* Unless you are transgender or otherwise gender-nonconformist, in which case, your clothing really does symbolize who you are, and the way you decorate your body is really really important.”
In other words, it doesn’t seem like this dad is really subverting the cultural norm that clothing defines who you are. Instead, he’s buying into it, underscoring the message that you can’t be who you really are unless you dress appropriately.
Phil, I think I understand what you’re saying. However, the power of solidarity can’t be over-stated. If most boys don’t wear skirts and the boy who does becomes a target for abuse, then the father of the boy who wears a skirt has a number of choices on how to respond. Does he deny choices to his son? No. He puts on a skirt himself. This not only shows his son his (the son’s) choice is valid, but (apparently, in this case) neutralizes the judgement of the community the father and son live in. It goes better than neutralizing judgement, it sounds like. Surfaces are surfaces, but just saying that that’s what they are doesn’t suddenly make them not matter to the larger community. How would you propose making superficial differences not matter anymore? I actually think this is an excellent step in that direction.
Phil:
That is manifestly, simply, not true. I agree with you that I would rather live in a world where it were MORE true. But, in fact, clothing communicates. Among other things, it powerfully communicates membership in groups. It doesn’t matter if you intend it to – other people believe that you intend it to, and they react.
Your take seems to me to be very theoretical. The dad in this case has a real-life 5-year-old child who is hurting when people bully him for reasons he does not understand … because he’s 5, for heaven’s sake. The dad has his child’s back, and has given him tools to assert his right to make choices which should be his, by right, because they don’t hurt anyone.
If the dad is, in fact, buying into a cultural norm, he’s doing it for the best reason: individual actual real people, especially children, matter more than theories.
Grace
Yes, and the various possibilities to deal with the situation would probably be difficult. It is difficult to teach a child that clothing–no matter what that clothing is–is not a true representation of who he is inside. And it is difficult to teach a child to stand his ground when others are making fun of a choice that he has made. I’m just not certain that it is always right to throw the towel in on one of these.
In college, I knew a number of people who either fervently believed, or acted as if they believed, that they must express themselves through their clothing choices, and that these clothing choices were deeply important signifiers of their personalities and/or their very being. I’m not convinced that is the best character trait to inculcate, and the fact that this belief system is supported by billions of dollars in advertising makes me even more skeptical.
I don’t necessarily think this dad is making a bad choice. I’m just not certain that it’s the only choice a dad could have made in this situation and still be supportive of his son.
Grace: Nicely said.
Phil,
Maybe the child is transgendered, maybe not. What is stated is that the child likes wearing clothes (skirts and dresses) which are categorized as “girls’ clothes” and that harassment from others in their community was causing the child to no longer do something that the child enjoyed doing and no longer dressing how the child preferred. Within the article, the child is referred to as a boy and as a son, so there is no evidence the child is transgender or identifies as a girl except an assumption about which categories of children choose to wear skirts and dresses. It is the community (and you as reader) who are treating the clothes as signifiers, not the child or the father. Many cisgendered boy children (particularly young children) enjoy wearing skirts and dresses. Children who like fabric, children who like things that swish, children who like pretty things, all may like skirts and dresses and nail polish, regardless of their expected or actual gender.
The father also choosing to wear skirts is actually doing what you say he should have been doing, which is showing both the child and the community that clothing is clothing, rather than a static signifier: the father wearing a skirt did not signify that he was a woman, but rather signified that everyone else in the community needed to back off from harassing his child.
It is the other kids who are being taught that their clothes are their identity, and the father is teaching his son that your clothes don’t have to be determined by who you are, only by what you like. As child says, the other boys don’t wear skirts because their dads are afraid to wear skirts.
That seems like the best possible message to send to everyone involved.
This. You show that stuff, not tell it.
Also, it’s awesome example of parenting. Truly.
I probably wouldn’t encourage my kid to wear what is normally recognized as “women’s clothing” – but if I did it sure as hell wouldn’t be anyone else’s business, nor give them a right to bully him.
Of course its not the only supportive thing the dad could have done for his son.
But it was a supportive choice, and it was an awesome and brave one.
Regardless of whether we should or not, people, especially young people, look to the behavior of others to figure out what is “okay”. The more examples of people dressing in non-gender-conforming ways, the more likely a young person is to grow up thinking that a skirt is just another article of clothing.
Just reading through the comments, and everyone here has already responded to Phil in precisely the ways that I would have, but I do have a question for him.
Phil: Denise, of course, is right. There are other supportive things the father could have done, but I am wondering what you think he might have done that would have taught his son how “clothes do not make the man” in as powerful a way as what he did do.
Denise:
That’s a really good point.
Charles S.:
Agreed. I used the kind of awkward phrase “transgender or otherwise gender noncomformist” as a kind of catch-all for anyone who doesn’t conform to gender expectations. But I think that there’s an instinct among progressives (not that we’re all progressives, mind you) to back away from criticizing superficiality when gender nonconformity is involved. Maybe I’m wrong about my observation of this, or maybe it’s better that we do.
To neutralize this instinct, though, I think we could ask ourselves what a father might do if he had a daughter who really preferred wearing dresses and traditionally-girly clothes, if she were attending a school wear pants were very strongly expected, though not required. Would it be unreasonable for him to say to her, “Sometimes we wear dresses, and sometimes we wear pants”?
…which, Richard Jeffrey Newman, is probably the best answer I have to your question. I don’t think it would be a good idea to say, “You can never wear a dress,” but I’m not certain that it’s harmful to say, “Sometimes we wear pants,” especially if you’re sending a child to school where he runs the risk of being bullied or taunted by other five-year-0lds. Yes, the son in this anecdote is five, and can’t be expected to understand why people might bully him, as Grace Annam notes. But neither can we expect that of his peers.
As John Aravosis over at Americablog Gay puts it, “I’m all for breaking down silly societal norms […] But I still worry about it when 5 year olds make social statements […] being in the spotlight isn’t always easy, and it’s not for everyone.” (John’s full post is much more nuanced; I encourage you to read it–I don’t want to misrepresent him)
RonF:
Nothing, ever, gives anyone the right to bully a child. I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
This article doesn’t seem to be about a father who encourages his son to wear a dress, however. It’s about a father whose son wants to wear dresses.
Grace Annam:
The dad in this case does have a real-life child, that’s true. But I think all blog discussion threads are largely theoretical. I’m discussing ideas, with strangers, about a widely-reported news item in a country thousands and thousands of miles away from me. To say that we must curtail something as far-removed as a blog discussion because a real person is involved seems to say we should never engage in theoretical or big-picture discussions based on news stories.
and sometimes we wear swimsuits
Your example presupposes that dresses and traditionally-girly clothes would be acceptable in many places in that school, not just at home.
Wouldn’t you agree with the article comments that say “it’s fine to dress-up at home, but not in public”? I wouldn’t.
From the wiki article on skirt:
“Aside from the wearing of kilts, in the Western world skirts, dresses and similar garments are considered primarily women’s clothing. Historically, however, this was not the case”
Pants have apparently been invented for nobility and horseback-riding purposes. Not to signify not-femaleness, or something. Practically everyone in the world has worn skirts, robe, dresses, or garments that resemble any of those, in many eras.
There is NOTHING inherently female or feminine about skirted garments. Same as there isn’t a thing masculine or male about trousers, pantyhose, or other hosiery. It’s just a societal norm. An arbitrary one since the horseback deal lost its appeal.
It’s not vanity to want to wear outside-the-norm-for-your-sex clothing, and “totally normal behavior” to want to restrict yourself, 100% of the time, to socially-approved options clothing wise.
There’s something called expression. Some people paint, some people take pictures, and some people dress in clothing they like (there will always be sheep who do just whatever you tell them and have no opinion – but it’s not everyone).
And, for little kids, it’s a fairly recent one. Until at least the early 1900s, little boys wore skirts until they were at least 5 or so. One of the Anne of Green Gables books has Anne sad because her baby is growing up, which is signified by him wearing the little-kid short skirts rather than the toddler long skirts. Franklin Roosevelt, age 2 1/2: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedia/photos/?c=y&articleID=119483704 (The whole slide show there is pretty good — it really shows that the idea of gender-specific clothes for small kids is fairly recent.)
Also, boy clothes now are, in general, really boring. If you want bright colors, sparkly things, shiny things, bows, ribbons, lace, any of that, you’ll only find it in the girls section. I was recently shopping for a baby present, and the boys’ section of the baby clothes department was almost entirely neutral colors, with a bit of red, blue, and green thrown in once in a while.
Somewhere along the line, it seems that masculine clothing has become code for functional, working-class, rugged, and plain. Ergo, boring. Even suits are generally boring. You’ll be lucky to find adult-sized Spiderman or Spongebob boxers, and that’ll be it for most men.
It seems that even being refined, liking stuff like fine dining, wine, high litterature, has become coded as unmasculine (somehow associated with French men, and being gay). And we wonder where the anti-intellectualism is coming from? Half the population is being deemed “uncool” for being scholarly. For reading books, even comic books (if you reach geek levels, you’re considered uncool).
I heard that some men of color might have gotten flack for this too, being deemed “acting white”, for being scholarly for example. I’m not expert on that though.
I saw a somewhat extreme example of the “boy clothes are boring” thing this weekend. I was at a wedding where the bride was from Bangladesh, and the groom from Kentucky. There were a bunch of little kids at the wedding, and it somehow happened that all the little girls were from the Bengali side, and all the little boys were from the Kentuckian side. So, the little girls were wearing what little girls wear to Bengali weddings — brightly colored outfits with lots of sequins and gold embroidery, and with matching scarves. The little boys were wearing what little boys wear to western weddings — khaki pants and blue shirts. One of them had a tie.
When the music started and the lights went on and the little kids were dancing, those little girls were having fun with their clothes. They were playing with turning at different angle to see how the light reflected off the sequins, they were twirling around with the scarves — their clothes turned their bodies into something fun. The boys’ clothes, on the other hand, were just clothes. And even if all the kids had been in western-style clothes, the same thing would have applied. The girls would have had skirts that could swirl around when they twirled, they might have had ribbons that could swing and swish, or sequins or glitter to play with the light. Boys, just plain pants and shirts. For things like that, girl clothes are just way more fun.
There are plenty of times that boy clothes are better, too. If you;re going to climb a tree, or build something, or play soccer, then boy clothes are probably the way to go. But limiting the choice of clothes for boys and girls also limits what sort of things they can do.