We need better gender-critical trans allies

[marjaerwin]

We need allies who respect butch girls and femme boys and don't try to push anyone to give up either part of who they are. I saw this on a trans-critical and often anti-trans blog:

http://peaktrans.tumblr.com/post/27601499806/my-princess-boy

I’m sure the family and friends who gave her the book meant well. “Look! Here is another child who does things he’s not supposed to do!”…but it quite devastated my niece. Not just because getting fifteen copies of the same book would be upsetting to any six-year-old, but because of the messages that these oh-so-tolerant family and friends had written in the front. Most memorable: the grandparent who wrote -

To Our Prince Girl - You Can Grow Up to Be a Man!

This is not the message of the book! The message of the book is that you can be a boy and like pink and sparkles, and that liking pink and sparkles does not make you any less of a boy! But the way that the book was interpreted by my family and by so many others was that it was the beginning of a transition narrative.

And that narrative was put on my six-year-old niece’s very small shoulders. The small shoulders that I held later that night as she cried about how she didn’t want to be a man, she wanted to be a girl, why couldn’t she be a girl, why not? Did wearing cargo shorts mean she was going to grow a penis? I suppose to an outsider her fear would be funny, but it still turns my stomach to remember how terrified she was. She cried like I did when I came home from school realizing that liking girls that way was not okay. But I was eleven. She was six. Six, and she already knew the world wanted her to change.

I for one want a world where any faab girl or any maab girl can be a tomboy, and no one says she's less of a girl because of it. I want a world where transitioners don't have to conform to gatekeepers' sex-role stereotypes. I want a world where any tomboy can be a girl without this kind of pressure and any princess boy can be a boy.