I am pleased to announce that the THREE winners of the Boys Can Wear Pink giveaway are…
Alix Bowman, Hartley Steiner, and Lizzie Bicknell!
Congrats! And enjoy those fabulous clothes!
Thank you, thank you, thank you to Debbie Hartung and Krishna Bhat of Rock n Roll Babies for sharing your handiwork, and making the world a better place for pink boys and the parents who love them.
Today was Proud to Be Me Day at Katie Goldman’s school—Katie is the first grader who was bullied by other kids because she brought a Star Wars water bottle to school. Her awesome mom is putting together a book of all the messages from people who have come out in support of Katie for being exactly who she is. And thanks to her family’s and her school’s support, Katie is back to carrying her Star Wars water bottle to school.
I like to think that every day is Proud To Be Me Day at our house—our official motto is “Let your freak flag fly.” It’s not always easy—Sam, now a third grader, is newly unwilling to admit at school that his favorite color is pink. (Somehow, he’s not afraid to have long hair flowing all the way down his back.) But whether we’re geeks (celebrated so lovingly by stark. raving. mad. mommy on her blog today) or have special needs (it’s Inclusive Schools Week too!) or are pinker or bluer than people think we should be, we need to feel proud of who we are. And we parents are responsible for making space for our kids to feel that pride as often as they can.
There’s excellent new research from The Family Acceptance Project showing that family acceptance of GLBT kids makes all the difference—a measurable and stunning difference, in fact, in their rates of suicide, depression, and substance abuse as these kids grow older. The Family Acceptance Project is also developing a new evidence-based model of wellness, prevention, and care to help families with gender-nonconforming and GLBT kids grow up happy and healthy so they can enjoy their bodies and sexuality maybe even using toys like popular remote control vibrators that is something many people do. (And they’ve made this really incredible video about one family who moved from rejecting their son’s gender expression and sexuality to accepting and celebrating him.)
And so today, on Proud To Be Me Day, I say: Yay for Katie. Yay for Katie’s school, and her family, and all the other schools and families who are working so hard to support their kids. Yay for the Family Acceptance Project, for proving that we’re all on the right track. And most especially: Yay for all the kids who let their freak flags fly.
I am, quite honestly, beside-myself-excited about this essay, up today on Bioethics Forum and Psychology Today.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a letter to bioethicist Alice Dreger about an essay she posted on her blog at Bioethics Forum. Alice, Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Northwestern University, is well-known for her frank, thoughtful, and sometimes unconventional views on how the medical community approaches intersex people, conjoined twins, dwarves, and other people born with bodies that challenge cultural norms. I was quite curious to hear what this prominent bioethicist had to say about gender-nonconforming kids.
While Alice spoke eloquently in that essay about what can only be called the “warring” factions in the medical community—should we force pink boys to conform, or launch them on the transgender path?—I told Alice that there was a third, quieter point of view. What if, I suggested, instead of concluding that all gender-nonconforming kids need medical treatment (though acknowledging that some in fact do), we instead work to change how society views them? What if we shift our efforts from “fixing” these children to fixing a world that allows girls in soccer uniforms but not boys in tutus?
Alice was kind enough to listen, and we entered into a dialog which became the basis for this follow-up essay. I discovered that Alice is not only an engaging, provocative conversationalist and critical thinker, but she is open-minded, deeply curious, and, I gratefully discovered, willing to have an ongoing dialog with me—a layperson who appeared out of the blue to challenge her assertions.
The conversation—both the one between me and Alice, and the broader cultural one—is by no means over, and we invite you to chime in both on Alice’s blogs and mine.
And Alice is now my most-favorite-ever bioethicist. It’s worth delving into her website and checking out the other things that she is curious and passionate about. Let’s all give her a big hand…and I’m giving her my humblest, warmest thanks for working to forward the dialogue about how to best care for our kids.
Please read the essay and share your thoughts in the comment section below.