What’s wrong with ‘being a girl’?

Ellie Jameson - 10 Sep 17

Gender.

It’s everywhere right now.  Going gender-free seems to be the new ‘thing’, like going gluten-free or sugar-free, in so much as, if you are not on-board with it, you may be ‘damaging’ yourself, or worse, your children.

But there’s something about it that makes me uncomfortable.  It’s not the idea of transgender children, bisexual adults or little boys in dresses.  I have a (probably well deserved) reputation as a lefty-snowflake-hippy-earth mother, and I’m all about the live-and-let-live. It’s more that somehow, somewhere, many of these debates and aspirational ideologies about gender have become synonymous with the idea that it’s bad to be feminine.

I should probably start by saying that, growing up, I was a tomboy.  Not just a girl who climbed the occasional tree, but the whole shebang. One of my earliest memories is of being a bridesmaid at my Aunt’s wedding. I was wearing an enormous eighties dress with a big blue sash, and a floral headdress. I wasn’t happy. In fact I was so unimpressed I posted the headdress through my grandparents letter box, as we were leaving for the wedding.  I was three and a half.  I had an older sister,who was fine with it all.  My parents had pretty traditional gender roles.  No one had taught me to be like that.  It was just who I was.

Throughout school I continued to be a tomboy. My two best friends at primary school were boys. I cut my hair short, I played football, I had a skateboard and a boys mountain bike, I had Ghostbuster dolls as opposed to Barbies.  As I grew up I got into rock music, I never wore dresses. I chose clothes from the boys section, and my parents managed to make it to the tills without becoming outraged on my behalf.  And no-one questioned it. Nobody worried about it.  Nobody even mentioned gender.  I was a girl. I was happy being a girl.  I liked boys as friends, but I also liked boys as crushes.  And later on, much later on, when I started university, and grew out my hair, and bought a mini-skirt and went clubbing and dancing and all that other stuff that other girls had been doing for years, nobody was that fussed either.

4 years later I met my husband, and 6 years after that we had a daughter.  I was determined that she wouldn’t wear pink, or frills, or dresses, or play with baby dolls or Barbies. I’d read all the articles, bought into the ideology. I didn’t want her to be held back.  She was going to run with the big boys, and take on the world.  Only she had other ideas.

She was drawn to dresses and princesses like the proverbial moth to a flame.  The ball gowns, costume jewellery and Disney films.  The fairy tales and romantic illustrations, ‘borrowing’ my shoes, growing her hair… That’s not to say she didn’t want to do ‘boys stuff’ too. She loved swimming, bike rides, running and climbing.  Her favourite programme was the Octonauts (although she still loved Dashi, the dog with hair slides and a pink skirt more than any of the others).

But princesses really captured her imagination, and dressing up became one of her favourite things to do.  My sister bought her a music and lights Elsa dress for her birthday, and it was woefully impractical (you couldn’t wash it, and it kept tripping her up) but she adored it.  And around that time I stopped worrying.  If something as harmless and innocent as dressing up as a disheveled three year old Elsa made her so happy, then maybe I should just embrace it while the going was good.

Fast forward a few more years and we now have three daughters.  They are all different, both in terms of how they look and their personalities, but one thing they all have in common is a love for dressing up.  Of course I worry that they’re putting too much value on being pretty, but isn’t it human nature to be obsessed by beauty?  So much of our lives, from the places we visit, to the art we buy, to the way we decorate our homes, is driven by a desire to surround ourselves with what we find beautiful.  Why should we expect our children to behave differently?

Because boys and girls are different.  Most of the little boys I meet will pick a stick up and pretend its a gun or a sword.  Most of the little girls won’t.  My younger brother (the only boy in a family of 3 girls) liked playing with vehicles, whereas none of us girls were remotely bothered (my mum definitely didn’t encourage him.  Playing with vehicles nearly broke her, she found it so boring).  He also hated crafting, whereas we the rest of us enjoyed it.  Having worked with children and teenagers for 10 years, I find it hard to accept that gender is purely affected by the environment.  Males and females are so different.

What this is really about is choice.  If girls want to wear shorts to school and play rugby then fine. If boys want to wear skirts or dresses then who is that hurting? But we don’t need to erradicate the idea of boys and girls altogether.  Shouldn’t we celebrate our differences? Isn’t that what makes the world interesting?  Some children will inevitably to choose to be the extreme-version of their gender, the girl who wears at tutu everywhere, the boy who eats, sleeps and breathes football.  Will that really hold them back?  And the children like me, who are more of a blurred line, will we really be damaged if things are labelled as ‘boys’ or ‘girls’?  No one ever stopped me buying something from a ‘boys’ section.  In fact I quite liked it, it felt like a small act of rebellion against society.

So has being a girly-girl held my daughter back?  l genuinely don’t think so.  She is unafraid to compete with boys. She will gladly take on a running or climbing challenge and more often than not she’ll kick the boy’s ass and walk off nonchalantly as if it is nothing.  She is not afraid to be strong, fit and sporty.  She is not afraid to push herself, be that in the ocean, on a mountain bike or up a climbing wall.   But she is also not afraid to be a girl, to dress as a princess, to raid my make-up bag, to ask for hair like Rapunzel.  Because that is all part of who she is too.

In a world of princesses, she isn’t afraid to be Batman.  She just doesn’t want to be.  And that’s fine with me.

Ellie Jameson

Hi, I'm Ellie, Wife, Mum to three little girls, part-time teacher, part-time illustrator and part-time stay at home mum (if such a thing exists!). Life is busy but good. I'm based in Cornwall, UK, which is beautiful, especially when the sun is out. We love escaping from work and having adventures in the great outdoors.

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