Teacher asked who chose the pink bottle....

[Caszekey]

Ok, so it's more aibu to allow / encourage this behaviour.
Fairly identifiable so here goes.
5 year olds twin boys, both have long hair like their Dad which I put up for school. Ones favourite colour is pink. Both adore Frozen so wanted the dress up dresses (Kristoff is a minor character). Last WBD they dressed as Goldilocks and Red Riding Hood (bear, wolves are minor characters). School have jokingly passed comment previously about pink bobbles etc but today I was asked, incidentally, if I chose the pink bottles or them, do I pick costumes etc.
I don't know if she's curious or implying I'm doing something wrong but it's got me second guessing

The choices are child led and I reckon they'll age out of them but I don't want to pull the "boys don't do that" line when girls have so much fun.

So aibu to allow them to pick so freely ? We've not yet encountered a request for a dress for general living, just they like to be Princesses!

We have just moved from a middle class conservative area to a much more hippy area. This would raise no eyebrows at all there. In our original place it would. I wonder if geography also plays a part.
For my part I do not give a rats arse what other peoples children dress or wear. It's not my circus not my monkeys. I'm much more likely to judge unkind behaviour (even more so if 'male' behaviour). I wish my own 5yr old would accept more girl hand me downs. Sometimes he likes unicorns, sometimes Spidey. I don't actually have enough energy to care which or why. Let your boys be themselves. (I'd be tempted to tell the teacher 'we are a gender fluid family who celebrate the individuality of all preferences ' but that's because I'm mischievous!)

First Post couldn’t get it more wrong in my view

I don't think it's the GC posters objecting to this...

you can’t ‘trans’ a child, that’s just not a thing,

i don't agree at all. It isn't true. Boys like boy things, girls like girl things. Occasionally you get a boy wanting to dress up in girls clothes - but that is out of the ordinary. I am convinced anyone with both boys and girls will tell you the same.

I've only read the OP's posts, so not sure if someone else has mentioned it, but fun fact: pink was traditionally considered a masculine colour https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/colorscope-pink-boy-girl-gender

And totally off the point, but I'm impressed your school let them wear pink bobbles, because all the schools I went to only allowed you to wear the uniform colour, and it was a giant pain! It was surprisingly hard to find purple bobbles back then...

Yes because people who have grown up as "men's men" swigging pints and playing rugby never, ever transition MtF.

Fucking hell it's a re-tread of "you'll turn him gay!" moral panic in here sometimes.

No, if the hair is important to them then that's the way it has to be, but I'd splash out on an extra £1 for a non pink water bottle.

If I listed out the favourite colours, hobbies, and hairstyles of my children and my nieces and nephews, I guarantee you wouldn't be more than 50% correct guessing their sexes.

There are no 'boy things' and 'girl things' other than what we as a society project onto them.

Girls can love cars and short hair, boys can like soft toys and have long hair - because these are just things and fashion.

Utterly mad. Long hair AND a pink water bottle? Won't somebody think of the children!

Yes i agree there is a very natural draw to certain things. It's just reinforced by society stereotypes. I work in early years and we have absolutely no gender in the classroom, neutral colours, toilets are shared. Yet boys are constantly using the buggies and prams to load bricks! Boys often play with baby dolls but are more likely to be turning them into superheros than playing Dad.

I will admit that my point of view may be shaped by spending some of my formative years in Fiji, where the male and female cops alike accessorise their automatic weapons with skirts but... can you explain what things are innately boy things, and what things are innately girl things?

What, for example, happened to the hormonal balance of Western children a century or so ago to change pink from a boy thing to a girl thing?

Are there differences in the hormone levels of children in different countries that make the girls in some countries much more attracted to STEM activities than in other cultures? Or is another physiological difference?

I'm intrigued.

My boy has long hair and gets irritated when people call him ‘young lady’ especially now he’s 10. As he’s grown older, it’s bothered him more, but only in as far as mild irritation. I wouldn’t have dressed him in ambiguous clothes, though he had some pink t shirts which came as a set. He won’t wear those now, I guess he’s streetwise enough to know to not invite bullying.
His dad had long hair and was about as masculine as it’s possible to be, so as far as my boy is concerned, long hair = warrior vibes.
He would not borrow one of his little sister’s pink or purple water bottles at school, he’d know that’s a dickhead beacon and life’s hard enough without that kind of attention.

I think it’s really hard to say. Traditionally, kids have always been encouraged towards gender appropriate stuff. Part of raising your kids was guiding them in becoming feminine or masculine.

These days, there seems be a bit of a social experiment going on, where some parents think that it’s better to not provide this direction, and wait and see which gender the child leans towards. The reality is, we don’t know what the long term consequences of this are, and whether or not it will impact gender identity further down the line.

Parents these days always think they are doing things better, and maybe they are, but at the moment, I don’t think we really know. As I say, they are conducting a social experiment with their children.

a few generalisations - Why do women like perfume and men don't, why do women like shopping and men don't, why do women shave their armpits and men don't, why do women go to beauty salons and there is no such thing for men - the list goes on. We are made differently.. men used to hunt beasts and deliver them to the women to cook. Don't ask me why - these are just things that you can't argue against?

Even if we accept that boys are generally predisposed towards "boy things" (however we are defining "boy things") it doesn't mean that ALL boys exclusively like "boy things" and need to be corrected if they deviate from what they're "supposed" to like.

I think it's common knowledge most people are right-handed but we've got past the point of thinking left handers were possessed by the devil and needed to be hit with a stick until they started using their right hand.

My son used to dress up in his sister's princess dresses (admittedly at home ) but he also wanted his toes painting and was happy to go to school with them like it . He was also about the age of your twins.

We neither encouraged or discouraged it but just let him choose.

He cringes now when I remind him / get the photos out :)

PS deffo tie the hair back - nits are notorious at that age (daughter got them regularly )

Do what makes your children happy, no one else's opinion on it should matter, pink is not for girls it's just a colour same as any other

What world do you live in where those are universal attributes? "no such thing as men's beauty salons" eh? And I should introduce you to my DH's extensive walk-in wardrobe and my pile of clothes on the back of a chair.

@Shellyash so in the Edwardian era when men wore perfume and high heels, was that biologically determined too? Men have had long hair or worn something like a skirt or dress in many times in history. Why do women shave their armpits? Many advertising campaigns and a societal expectation. Am I not a woman when I don't shave my legs for most of winter?

No, that's not it at all

There's no such thing as innate 'Gender' or Gender Identity - my boy is a boy and all that means is he's a human male child, and his fashion sense and hobbies have absolutely no bearing on that at all. I am a woman, and the fact I don't own a skirt and work as a computer programmer is utterly irrelevant to that.

Why on earth do you feel the need to impost 'masculine' and 'feminine' on children? Why would forcing him into a short back and sides be good for him? What possible reason would you have for making a girl wear a skirt simply because she's female? TBH it feels to me like the social experiment was doing all that in the first place - 'what random rules will people put up with based on their sex' (notably normally to women's detriment of course)

This thread's mental. Totally fine for boys to like pink and princesses. My slightly older one still has long hair and likes cute stuff but he has been suitably/sadly socialised out of the princess dresses and pink sparkles. He has always also liked 'boy' stuff too. If people are worried about their kids getting bullied then parents and schools need to do better. I'd be devastated if my kids were talking the piss out of someone for liking something unusual. Loads of lads into 'girly' stuff in my kids school and no one would say anything.

…except bobble kid is going to take the hit on their shoulders and to their self esteem. And kids have memories. Later in the school years, I’d be concerned about them getting taken the piss out of them for how they used to chose to dress.

I say that as someone who in the early years of primary, fashioned myself spaniel-like ears out of paper and sellotaped them to each side of my head and completed my dog ensemble with a tail made of toilet paper. That shit stayed in the memories of my peers for YEARS!!

My mum supported that entirely, and never bought me anything pink and poo pooed all the ‘girly’ stuff that turned my head -no Barbie’s, no my little pony’s, no pink clothes. My son asked for a few Barbie’s he’s liked, he brought one to see the Barbie movie with us.

It's still pink for boys and blue for girls... in Belgium. At least, it was 30 years ago when our friends lived there and were having DC.

ROFL - tell that to the Lynx-drenched teens at the bus stop, or my dad who enjoys nothing more than a trip round the bootfair every Sunday.

I don't shave my armpits or go to a beauty salon - but my ex was in the barber once a fortnight.

Men and women used to hunt - women less once they had children to look after, then they'd forage (and incidentally, provide most of the food by doing that).

In the animal kingdom everyone hunts, and it's often the males that adorn themselves - I wonder what that means? In primitive societies everyone wore jewellery/piercings/tattoos - do you really think it's an improvement to assign these behaviours to boxes and say only women should do this and only men should do that?

All of these are fashions and habits - they're not innate FFS