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!

My kids were at nursery with a little boy who enjoyed wearing an Elsa dress to nursery. He wore it a lot. It was very cute.

He’s now 11 and no longer wears dresses but he’s still known in the community as “the wee boy in the Elsa dress”

The problem is, kids can be bullied for all sorts. You can't raise bland beige kids just in the hope they'll not be noticed or bullied. And if you raise them too narrow minded, you're raising the bullies.
Currently they have a lovely group of friends and yes half of them are girls. They've not got to the point of splitting and the girls are crazier than the boys.
All I can do is raise them to be themselves, to have confidence in themselves, to cultivate the right friendships, to tell me anything and be sure in there to back them up

What a stupid post.

Have you not heard of aftershave? All women do not like shopping, that would be a stereotype, and apparently you're unaware that barbers exist. But your dumbest sexist stereotype is your belief that women are the only animals on earth that are incapable of feeding themselves and their offspring, and need a big brave man to go hunt for them - that is pure male fantasy. You better go tell all other female animals they're doing female wrong 🙄

Older brother from whom they inherited a Poppy from Trolls dress and a green tutu. The Frozen dresses and WBD costumes have been brought, just like the Iron Man and TMHT costumes. Why can't they have their own choices?
And yes, we have a wardrobe of jeans and joggers, dinosaur t-shirts and robots in blue and brown etc.

Yesterday they wore their dinosaur t-shirts to school. Today one has insisted on putting last year's Halloween witches dress on (I've got all the Halloween costumes out from last year to size check) over his boyish trousers and top. His twin is identically dressed (by choice) but without the dress. And yes he ASKED to be a witch last year. Not a wizard. A witch in a sparkly dress. His brother was a pumpkin. For world book day this year they want to be Slinky from Toy Story so a boy.

OMG, I can’t believe the replies on here. I bet half of the outraged pearl clutchers wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a girl wearing a Spiderman outfit who was wearing a blue hair bobble and drinking out of a blue water bottle.

My sister sent me some pics of my niece and nephew the other day. Nephew (3) was at a kids cafe and him and his friend were dressed up as Jasmine and Elsa. Next few pics of him covered in mud with a hoody with dinosaurs and then another dress up pic of him as a dinosaur too.

My daughter used to dress up in Spiderman and Fireman Sam outfits; she even had a male alter ego at one point. Well, not an alter ego - she told us she was “male name” for a chunk of time. She grew out of it quite quickly!

They might be different but they're all differently different. My sons friend is as stereotypically boy as you can get. Could identify cars by type at a ridiculous age. Loves football and rough and tumble. Hes always got a "girlfriend". Stands in the back of choir quietly mimbling. My eldest is the same age. Identifies cars by colour. Hates football and most team sports. Prefers to be drawing or reading. So confident standing up front and singing alone, he literally lights up on stage. The girls see him as someone to be friends with / look after.

That's nothing we've done. That's all innate. They'll both grow up to be men.

Eldest had ALL the stereotypical boy toys, we were drowning in toys cars. DH loves geeky boy stuff so always had dinosaurs and robots and superheroes. DS just wasn't ever interested.

My Mom used to swap toys with her neighbour so he could play with the dolly and my Mom could have the cars.

The world is a spectrum of grey.

'You better go tell all other female animals they're doing female wrong 🙄'

This. ⬆️
I have a tom cat and a female cat. Guess who's the mouser?
The 'innate gender identity' brigade go very quiet when it's animals.

Course you should let them dress how they want to!

The only thing that slightly jumped st me was that you said “when girls have so much fun” as though things traditionally aimed at girls are more fun, objectively, than those aimed at boys. So wondered if you were slightly passing on an unconscious bias in favour of dressing up and so forth, over other kinds of activities?

I only ask because now 17 yo dd now says I encouraged her towards the less typically
feminine stuff - pirates, Robin Hood, outdoor pursuits etc - when she was little - possibly because it seems like more fun to me!

Edit - but my DS did like dressing up dressing when he was preschool too, because, contrary to what she now suggests, DD had these and he obviously saw her enjoying them! But I wasn’t trying to push either of them in any direction, my recollection is just trying to get through each day!

The idea that keeping your head down and fitting in protects you from bullying is plain wrong (as well as depressing). What protects you from bullying is the confidence of knowing that who you are is a good person to be. That may not stop people trying to bully you -not much can unless you're the bully- but it stops you from believing the bully and accepting the role of victim. The best protection is self esteem and being allowed to make your own choices about who you want to be is part of building that.

I will concede that saying "temporarily becoming" may not the best word choice. I don't want my son to play pretend she is a girl character. Maybe that is more accurate.

You are using the term "is wrong" and implying that I support that to allow such thing (a boy dressing like a girl) is an evil or inmoral thing, which I absolutely don't. I am fully aware that a 5 year old is totally oblivious to the ongoing debates about gender and sex and just wants to have fun by dressing up like a character they like.

I am looking into this from a pragmatic perspective. The reality is that traditionally in western societies characters that are females are overwhelmingly portrayed by females. You only need to have a look to any random TV show or film. A previous poster mentioned the example of an actor who recently won an award for portraying a woman in a theatre play. Good for him, but it’s just a small anecdote compared to the majority of works of fiction.

Not only that, but men dressing up as women still conveys a certain element of being risqué and saucy. Is that the case 100% of the time? Absolutely not. But to me, society’s stance on this still feels that way.

Like I said before, maybe one day any person can play or dress up like many character in any circumstances regardless age, sex or race. But I don't see happening any time soon.

In the meantime, no girl dressing up for my boy. Thanks.

Wtf!?

You certainly shouldn't be teaching a five year old that trans women are all predators and just men dressing as women to do bad things.

You've spent too much time on FWR.

There are literally countless male role models and fictional characters boys can dress up as - why would you encourage them to dress up like women?! At the age of 5 it's absolutely the parents' and not the children's choice

It really isn't. Parents don't 'encourage' children to dress up as their favourite characters. Children decide they want to be someone and then dress as that character. DS was Father Christmas for about 3 months! he got very weird looks in March. I was told how cruel I was but he had meltdowns if he wasn't in his Father Christmas suit and I thought - he minds what he wears, I don't. So he can wear what he chooses.

I've always been intrigued by how angry some adults get about what children wear. A teacher once told me DS refused to put his coat on at the end of the day. She expected me to tell him off but I couldn't care less. I said he would ask me for it if he felt cold and she stared at me as if I was breeding an entitled monster.

What is so upsetting to you about a little boy in a bit of pink nylon netting? If a little girl wanted to wear Aladdin's costume or a Harry Potter cloak would you object?

Actually traditionally male actors played female parts because women weren't allowed to act.

Quite the reverse, I think you'll find a lot of people on Mumsnet who think people can like whatever they like, it just doesn't mean they have changed sex

Exactly. Thank you.

The distinction you draw between "not acceptable/bad" (your words) and "wrong" may seem meaningful to you - but ultimately is fairly slim and feels like you trying to explain your way out of a thoroughly illogical position. You've gone from "bad men dressing up like women to do bad things" leading to gender confusion to "I'm just being pragmatic, mostly female characters are played by females (so?) by way of some odd anecdotes about how your mother was right not to let you dress up like a mouse.

You dismiss actors who successfully play characters of the opposite sex as not the norm but you'll tell your child that to do this is bad - rather than celebrating that people increasingly have more freedom to do so.

By policing gender stereotypes so rigidly, to the point of telling your child that deviating from them is "what bad men do", you are perpetuating them. So please don't insult people by claiming to wish for anything else.

Becuase why not?

Because we don't think there's a problem when kids say "hey, that character is cool, I'd like to pretend to be them today" regardless of the sex of that character.

Because women don't suck any more than men do, and we don't think their willies will fall off if they chuck on a tiara any more than we believe women's vaginas all sealed shut when they started wearing trousers, and that it's fine if boys like characters who are women.

Because we don't think pretend play should be limited by silly arbitrary rules based on the hang ups of adults.

Not women. Girls
Not encouraged. Permitted.
They're old enough to know what their favourite book is.
They're old enough to understand the teacher said "dress up as someone from your favourite book"
Why would I ban them because it's a little girl who gets eaten by a wolf / eats the porridge not a boy ?

Nobody but the gender essentialists on this thread have argued that boys can’t be boys if they like “girl coded” things. on the contrary most of us recognize that children have likes and dislikes that should not be crammed into a gender binary, especially if it cuts boys off from respecting and even emulating girls or women as heroines who can inspire them. Why shouldn’t a little boy prefer bravely Little Red Ridinghood instead of identifying with a killer wolf or huntsman? The misogyny and contempt for women’s things is coming from inside the House at this point.

In addition There is no trans pipeline in this universe despite the 24/7 outrage mill churning this absurd propaganda out. Trans people are at most 1-2 percent of the population where it is safe to be so—there is no plague or contagion which sweeps little children into medical transition for fuck’s sake. Its hard enough to get medical care of any kind, let alone gender affirming care.

Since the boy has not asked to change sex this is not relevant to the discussion at all.

Personally I think its our job as parents to protect kids from social suicide and to make sure they know they can dress up but can’t ever change their sex.

This but also, are they exposed to a good mix of stories with aspirational male characters as well as loads of disney princesses? My friends son was like this at this age. Another friend gently pointed out that as a disney princess fan herself, what she tended to expose him to was very narrow. It was influencing how he wanted to dress up.

When he was exposed to a bigger mix of story types and characters through school his preferences got much more mixed.

Read the quote history

Parents don't 'encourage' children to dress up as their favourite characters.

Omg they really do! They put lots of their own favourite childhood films and stories on, they react to their children's choices favourably and as lots of children like to please mum or dad this really influences choices.

My little DD worships her big brother and as a preschooler chose to dress in lots of very "male" things like spiderman, because she wanted to copy and impress him and be pulled into his games. When she started school and acquired broader influences her dress up choices shifted rapidly. She has two friends who's mums are doctors and there's now a lot of medical role play, and there's a class wide obsession with unicorns which has very obviously influenced them all.