Quinn has been a useful talking point in our household, with a conversation that has continued to unfold over the last few days. For context, my 14 year old daughter plays football, loves the women's game and has recently started questioning her own gender identity again (there was a previous period last year where she did so, but then settled on "being female"). We're working through this.
I had spotted Quinn (on this thread, thanks OP!) before my daughter did and had kept quiet.
My daughter has been talking to me again recently about gender and casually told me about this "really inspiring" player in the world cup. We talked for a while and I listened to why she was so inspired. All the way through the conversation each of us accidentally misgendered Quinn - my daughter more than me. She agreed with my suggestion that it was probably because it felt very weird talking about a player in the women's world cup who didn't want to be a woman. At this point I was receptive to how inspiring my daughter found Quinn, regardless of this "minor" point that we left hanging in the air.
Part of my daughter's admiration was that Quinn hadn't felt the need for testosterone to feel so good about themself. Obviously Quinn would fall foul of sport doping rules for taking testosterone but it was still helpful as a talking point. My daughter is gradually beginning to see that taking testosterone could be regretted later but she's still on that journey of thought. The second part was that my daughter believed Quinn hadn't had top surgery.... so I assumed this was true. Then I came to this thread and opened up the conversation again, off the back of that being incorrect. We both agreed that it would be awful if Quinn regretted this surgery later. My daughter accepted that it was probably not great role-modeling that Quinn has photos of themself grinning with "top surgery" scars.
We haven't spoken about Quinn for a few days but yesterday I couldn't help smiling lots when I heard my daughter getting very cross that the commentators were talking about male footballing greats during the women's game. And also that none of the BBC notifications come up for the women's matches (I assume the England ones will 🤞)... "It's like nobody cares about women's football!!!" were her words. After a bit more conversation around this, I left the idea hanging that perhaps this helped to increase the problem that so many girls were now identifying out of being girls.
So thank you Quinn for being you 👍👍👍 You're certainly inspirational in our household.
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