Dress You Up

So with things calming down I've got a bit more time for blogging I suppose - I can't believe how long it's been since I last posted. So this morning it's this, then I'll work backwards. I've started shopping for the granddaughters - we live in the Land Of Cheap Clothing so I contribute quite often. My son and his family live on an island off the coast of Washington state and the only things nearby are the NEX, an expensive boutique and Walmart. I live between Pittsburgh and Morgantown, clothes are weirdly inexpensive and most of what I buy is usually between 75 and 90% off, not bad

When I first started buying them clothes I had a little bit of a dilemma, as most people that know me I've always been a feminist so that begs the question - what do you buy? With boys it's not so hard, aside from pictures of cartoon characters let's face it - you're pretty much limited to a color palette ranging from grey to black to blue and everything is plain. As long as you know which imaginary characters are in style, you're good. But girls, that's a whole different ball game. Juicy Couture and like clothing are generally out as I have no desire to dress them like wee little bar flies, but the plain stuff? What fun is that? But maybe that's the image we're going for - strong and straightforward. Not to change the topic but I'm a huge fan of Ted Talks, where people speak on a range of topics. They had a transgender parent speaking and he said something that really cleared it up for me. He and his wife had a little girl, they struggled with the same issue and he went on to talk about how they'd discussed dressing their daughter in non gender role, no ruffles, no pink. But then he said 

"you know what the absence of feminine is? Masculine". 

And there is your answer. Because if you insist on dressing your girl like a boy the message is Girls are Worthless. Because you can dress like a girl and still be a powerful force of nature, the center of attention instead of nondescript. And gender neutral? No thanks! Because any child under the age of about 8 looks like a boy or girl to the people that know them - to the rest of the world we can tell by the clothing. There's nothing more uncomfortable than desperately guessing at junior with a 50% chance of insulting the proud parents. And clothes should be fun, if you can pull off a sparkly unicorn shirt with rainbow pants you should have no problem with the rest of your life. Years ago I had a patient that lived on a multigenerational farm. The uncles that ran the farm were also in charge of the kids too young to go to school. One of the children was a girl and she was pretty big on tutus - one morning I was there and she tromped by wearing a hoodie, sweatpants, muck boots and a large purple tutu - I asked where she was going and she yelled as she went out the door after her uncle "We're going to feed the cows!" - if you can be comfortable feeding the cows in your tutu you've obviously got no self esteem issues.