Book / tv show recommendations for my boy-girl

[MiMouse]

My DD (4,5) has been expressing her desire to be a boy for nearly 2 years now. She gets extremely excited when people mistake her for a boy. She always wants her hair short. She always wants blue / dark clothes. She wants to play with cars, and dinosaurs, and anything pink or glittery is treated like it might give her scabies. I have just gone along; she likes what she likes, and that is fine.

Anyway, I am not sure where her entrenched gender ideas come from. I know it is not from us. We're not a very stereotypical family. But I do see gender stereotypes in pretty much all media she consumes, and it is so disappointing that we are still dealing with this in 2023. She mostly loves rescue team / police / fireman stuff (Mighty Express, Octonauts, Poli, Fireman Sam, Paw Patrol), and if there are any girl characters, it's often a token character with limited screen time, or she's the team's healer or whatever. So, I am looking for books or shows where girls are the strong one in the team, lifting heavy objects, or girls have short hair and play with cars... Just to show her there are a million ways to be a girl.

All the usual mighty girl book recommendations still have girls looking like obvious girls, and then she is just not interested.

Any ideas?

My son loved ‘my naughty little sister’

the narrator is a ‘good’ girl, but her sister is quite different. It gave a chance to talk about how things were in the past too

The Night Pirates (picture book) is good, it's about a gang of girl pirates who outsmart the adult men pirates. Some of the girls have long hair but they wear proper piratey clothes and are very fierce.

Someone upthread mentioned George in the Famous Five. I've heard this is having a reboot for BBC, and I'm wondering now how they will portray George's character? Simple idea of girl not wanting to do 'soft' girl / pink things, or will they go fully Mermaid with it and have shots of George quickly binding herself before nipping outside for ginger beer and picnics?

I appreciate all the responses! I am going to check all these out, and report back.

What surprises me is that she still prefers the boy in stories where the boy is definitely portrayed less competent / less tough than the girl. She seems very fixated on just the "being a boy". Lucky for her she has a gender neutral name.

Your daughter sounds very like my DD2 OP, she’s 10 now and still chooses to have short hair, wears trousers etc. By now the other girls are out of their pink & princessy phase (not a criticism, we have an older DD who did the princess thing for a while, DD2 preferred superheros), so her friends now wear jeans, joggers and hoodies too (as well as skirts/dresses) so the difference isn’t so stark IYSWIM.
Not exactly what you were looking for but “I'm a Girl!” by Yasmeen Ismail is great. A picture book for youngish kids - from the blurb: The girl in this book likes to win, she likes to be spontaneous, fast and strong, and because she also likes to dress in t-shirt and shorts, she is forever getting mistaken for a boy….a celebration of being who we are and not being pigeon-holed or restricted by gender stereotypes.
There just aren’t many books with tomboy girls in them unfortunately - these are aimed at older children but Brainfreeze by Tom Fletcher, Onjali Rauf’s brilliant books have mixed groups of boys and girls who are friends and aren’t defined by stereotypes, also Frank Cottrell Boyce. DD has mainly gone for books with lead boy characters (Tom Gates and Diary of A Wimpy kid, Harry Potter) it’s a tough one - there just aren’t many unconventional lead girl characters. Good luck though!

My daughter dressed in "boys'" clothes and shoes and wore her hair short from about the age of 3. There were about 6 months where she referred to herself by the name of a character of a boy in a film she loved, and once or twice asked why she couldn't be a boy. By about 8 or 9 she was still dressing the same (she's always loved clothes and shoes, like her dad) but didn't like it when people thought she was a boy. In Y6 she decided to try "girls'" clothes and grew her hair. She had a school skirt rather than trousers in about Y9. I just let her get on with it.

My daughter is definitely a girl and happy in her skin as a young adult. I would let your daughter be - there's more than one way to be a girl/woman. She can dress how she wants, like whatever programmes and toys and still be a girl!

Cressida Cowell's Emily Brown books are wonderful.

Emily Brown is short-haired, practical and sensible and has adventures. They're really funny and a great stopgap till she's old enough for the fabulous How To Train Your Dragon series.

She sounds exactly like me when I was that age... My mum just let me read whatever I felt like. When I got older it was Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. Science fiction! she's a bit young for that though....

Old minnie the minx was good but not the newer version