Kolya on 12/9/2012 at 08:23

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I'm not a parent (yet) but isn't a large part of the fun to rediscover the world through the wondrous eyes of your child and sharing it's open-minded approach that questions the status-quo everywhere? It's not just about supporting your child and the bond created with the child by sharing its experiences. Recovering this lost quality might also help parents on their own path to wisdom. That's what I imagine anyway. And if my child would rather play console games than questioning the status-quo, I can still wear a skirt, damnit!! :mad:

demagogue on 12/9/2012 at 09:22

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Haha, I like Jason Moyer's response... Yeah, if nothing else, it's a natural filter to connect with people who are cool about anything, and to instantly turn away exactly the kind of people that don't handle "different" things (which if you really are different, you don't want to deal with anyway). It reminds me when I was in theatre, there was lots of dressing up and costumes & taking on alt personas, that crowd was always predisposed to it, so you always got really cool personalities in theatre & it filters out the asses (though too many drama queens in a room can be its own issue).

But just for day to day life... That can looks more like trying to signal some kind of fundamental personality quirk (you want to be visibly different and let people know it, otherwise if it's just for fun you'd just do it in private) or some social message to others (might not be the intention, but that's how other people looking at it think), a similar thing you could say about people wearing overt religious paraphernalia or something strongly "ethnic" in a place where it's not common. Like, in this case, you're sending a public message (whether you intend to or not) that either you're nascent transgender & you want people to know it, or you really want to signal you hate "suburban norms & intolerance" or whatever... In that respect, I think the dad has a certain responsibility to make sure the kid understands what public crossdressing means.

It's not just that "I have a right to be myself" (perfectly true in itself) but on top of that there could be a signal like "I also have a right for everybody in a quarter-mile radius to know exactly what I am, I want you to have something stare at, and then I want you to feel ashamed for staring like I don't have a right"... Anyway that's how I sometimes think about people that wear really huge crosses or when an African American woman wears massive African looking earrings, or the kinds of flamboyant crossdressers you can see in Grenwich Village (as opposed to what we're talking about here, day to day suburban lifestyle crossdressers)... Things like the flamboyant examples I think sometimes leak from personal expression into "sending a social message" territory... I think crossdressing involves that too. (Edit: I should say, all these are perfectly valid IMO, but they should recognize what their expression means... the big cross & African jewelry example I think they understand perfectly well & want that part of it. My issue with the crossdressing kid wasn't so much whether he had a right, of course he does, but does he understood the social message of what he was doing?)

So it's not just about your personal feelings since you're also communicating yourself to the public. When one wears a small cross, one is probably just happy to have that reminder of their faith on them; when it's a huge cross it's more like "In your face I'm Christian and I want you all to have no doubt about it." If you crossdress you're communicating you're somehow transgender or you're flaunting the norm on purpose to thumb your nose at it. That's how it's interpreted & you should ask yourself, is that really what you want to be communicating, or is it better just to save your more flamboyant personal expression around close friends and not have to drag a public persona into it, or just express that side of my personality in a more tame way in public, something understated.

Or you could just not care about what the public thinks at all, a valid thing, but the catch there is you're still communicating a public message: I don't care about this stupid culture & you people are all troglydites if you do. Yeah, perfectly valid thing to communicate, but I think you should ask is that really the message you want to send in a public persona, is it worth the hassle...

So I knew two US guys that wore dresses occasionally, one in high school and one in college (not talking about culturally appropriate. About 1/3 of my guy students here wear skirts from their ethnic group & it's just a normal thing). But those two guys I thought made it work... And the reason is because they did it tastefully, they wore long cylindrical dresses that went well with their bodytypes and they were surprisingly androgynous, in the sense the colors were really drab, far from pink or flowery, designed to blend into the background & you wouldn't really notice it unless you were directly thinking, yeah but it's a dress... I think that worked better for them because it sent a message about their personalities, ok this person is comfortable being androgynous with their sexuality in their fashion, but it wasn't flaunting it like a bright poofy pink dress would, where the intention looks more like it's about pushing other people's emotional buttons than it is personal expression.

Vasquez on 12/9/2012 at 10:21

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Mmmm, chocolate...

Dema, you're right, but norms can change with time, and when something becomes more and more common, the less it's seen as a "statement". Things would stay the same forever, if some people didn't show the way, so to speak.
I agree that when the kid grows up enough to understand properly, the dad should also explain the whys behind the reactions the boy might meet for wearing a dress.

I just realised the abc news doesn't mention this, but in the Finnish version the dad told that the kid's mates had tried to tease him. The boy had smiled and replied: "You're just afraid to wear a dress, and so are your dads!" :)

I know a couple of guys who wear skirts, too. Not because they want to project something to others, but because they say skirt is about the comfiest thing you can wear. One even wears a skirt in his wedding picture :D

SubJeff on 12/9/2012 at 11:23

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Everything is cultural norms. Just get on with it. This type of thing is almost Martix-like in an "open you mind" kind of way, and most people won't get it and we can't expect them to get it because that's just life.

Sure, dresses for women in the West is just a cultural thing. I like skirts and dresses on my woman and I know it's a programmed thing but I don't care because it works for me. It is fairly benign for a male to wear a skirt though (unlike eschewing some other cultural norms) and the only people who are really bothered are those with very strict rules/closed minds. Accepting that this is most people is the first step to moulding yourself into a form that can "get away with stuff".

SubJeff on 12/9/2012 at 11:30

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Well done. You win the awkward prize. Now go choke on a pantihose.