this is probably related to how yesterday i was at a medical appointment for one of our children and the hospital had lots of pride related posters that emphasized the hospital's commitment to affirming identities, but my partner who gestated our kids kept getting called "mom" and "she" and there was no way in the hospital software for him to ask to input information that our child's parents all use he/him and two of us use names that differ from our legal names.

hospital databases need to include preferred name and pronoun fields for parents of child patients. if hospital databases had that capability, my partners and I would feel more empowered to correct doctors who call us "mom"

if i could sensorily handle having a mustache, i would absolutely decide not to shave my upper lip (after the pandemic, someday) so that strangers who see my bare face are less likely to call me she or her or miss. as it stands, facial hair is a sensory bad.

when asked, my 4 year old will describe herself (she explicitly uses she/her) as "kind of a boy and a girl," which may be due to her picking up on that her interests include traditionally girl activities (dollhouse play) and traditionally boy activities (vehicle play). but we're not going to question how she describes herself because she's never used those gender norms to restrict other people.

she is surrounded by trans and gnc people all the time. none of her parents (who all use he/him) are remotely masculine. her aunt (who is a trans woman) does woodworking and builds computers for fun. i (she calls me he/him) do all sorts of traditionally feminine crafts like sewing and crochet. none of us trans people in this child's life are living in accordance with the gender norms associated with our pronouns.

it's not a sign of Trans People Inflicting Their Rigid Gender Norms on Kids if my 4 year old seems to base her current identity on gender stereotypes. it's a sign that my 4 year old feels safe enough to experiment, and honestly i probably would have described myself the same way at age 4 if my parents had guaranteed my freedom to do so. it's not harmful to describe yourself based on gender stereotypes if you're not using those stereotypes to restrict other people or tell other people they're wrong about themselves.

tldr: 𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚏𝚜 don't understand child development or how trans people actually think about gender norms.

i love being able to tell kids early on that the pronouns we chose for them are arbitrary and they can ask us at any time to try something different for any reason. that the items in clothing stores are divided arbitrarily. that people may call them gendered words but they don't have to agree with how others gender them.

i love having the opportunity to give children complete gender freedom. including giving accurate information about puberty blocking and hormones.

i love that i have a book that accurately explains human reproduction and bodies without any gendered words like man, woman, male, female, girl, or boy.

i am so happy that my children won't have to unlearn heteronormative and cisnormative narratives of puberty, and that by the time they encounter them, they will be knowledgeable enough to challenge them.

re: my previous post revealing that my partner is pregnant and our second kid will be born very soon.

we know that the baby has a Y chromosome from some testing we had done, and we did testing because we wanted as much information as possible about potential disabilities so we could have an opportunity to learn and prepare for a child with obvious disabilities present from birth. if we were going to have a child w/ downs syndrome we wanted to know what to expect.

we also learned that our baby has a penis, and we used that information to plan and prepare for how other parents will judge us for not following the dress code of brown, gray, red, forest green, navy blue and "Daddy's little man" bullshit. our first child was assigned female so we didn't encounter as much gender bullshit about our decisions with her (she is 4 and explicitly uses she/her) as we anticipate with Child 2.

our wardrobe for child 2 includes every color, including pink and purple. we are making the same pronoun decision as for child 1: use pronouns associated with asab while communicating to the child that the decision was arbitrary and the child can choose different pronouns for any reason.

we don't use other gendered words like son/daughter or brother/sister or boy/girl for our kids unless the child explicitly wants to be called those words. (child 1 has that language and knows what all those words mean, and hasn't stated desire to be called any of them when asked.) we will call out family members who say say gendery stuff like "what a [adjective associated with masculinity] boy!" about our baby.

we anticipate a lot of bullshit about Child 2 occasionally wearing glittery clothes, pink clothes and purple clothes. we anticipate bullshit about the flower-pattern burp cloths we bought—because that bullshit actually does happen.

it's obnoxious that I've had to explain the existence of this bullshit to nontrans people who consider themselves allies—that yes, cis people really are covertly (or overtly) casually judgmental about parents who don't aggressively gender-code their kids.

her understanding of the words boy, girl, man, woman is that the person is a superhero, because that's the context she most frequently hears those words in.

she calls everyone "he" regardless of gender except for her agender dad, whom she calls "she." i think that her current understanding of gendered pronouns is "use the one that's easier to pronounce, and use the more difficult one for special occasions."

she asked us to explain the cover of a planner we have that says "gender is over. " she agrees with us that it doesn't make sense to assume that having a certain body type means preferring certain toys, clothes, hair styles, hobbies, jobs, etc.

she already knows that some people change their bodies, and that we will call her whatever name and pronouns she chooses, if she decides to be called something else. she also knows what binders are for, and how some people like having flat or flat-appearing chests and some people don't.