Gendered parenting is so weird. As a little kid I was a total daddy’s girl, I was told I would always try to sneak the garage, I was always very interested in everything he was doing and would follow him around while he was working, but while my family was never the type to outright say “you can’t do that because you’re a girl”, they simply didn’t entertain the idea that I could possibly be interested in cars. Then when my little brother was born, it was just assumed he would become a mechanic like our dad because he was a boy. Even though he, unlike me, didn’t like being in the garage much and wasn’t all that interested in what dad was doing. Once he got to a certain age, dad started making him help and would drag him away from his actual interests for it, which lead to a lot of arguing and not much actual learning.
Gendered expectations sort of create doubles of children. There’s the real child with their actual personality, interests and behaviors, and then there’s the Gender Child.
My real brother hated soccer and team sports. The Gender Child that existed only the minds of the adults in his life enjoyed playing soccer because that’s what a Boy Child likes.
Growing up, I always felt like adults didn’t actually know me as a person and they weren’t interested in getting to know me. Because they felt they’d already learned everything there was to know about me when they were told “it’s a girl”.
When I talk about how I never got gifts I actually liked from my relatives (to this day I still don’t like getting gifts that aren’t something I picked out myself), it isn’t actually about the gifts themselves. I don’t even remember them. What I do remember is the feeling of being given gifts that were seemingly not bought with the real me in mind. They were for the Girl Child™️ version of me. The me that adults wanted me to be, not who I actually was.
Being gender non-conforming as a child and being neurodivergent are two very similar experiences. It’s a whole lot of failing to meet expectations and adults feeling like they have to “set you right” even if it’s against your will. Lots of yelling about parental disappointment and “why can’t you just be like normal kids”. Lots of making you doubt your own gut feeling.
It took me most of my 20s to figure out who I actually am if I’m not just trying to conform to expectations to avoid people getting mad and rejecting me. But at least I did it. Lots of people never do.
This is why I think it’s pointless when people debate whether masculinity is punished or encouraged in girl children.
Gender ideology (the actual cishet one that dominates most of our cultures) creates doppelgangers of us the moment we’re assigned a gender, thanks to ultrasound that now happens even before birth. “Oh he’s going to be a soccer player” was a common thing to say about assumed-male fetuses where I’m from. Nobody would have said that about a assumed-female fetus no matter how hard they may have kicked.
I also think this is why so many parents struggle with accepting their trans children’s real identities. Because often, you never were you to them. They never saw you for who you actually are. They saw you as Gender Child and by telling them “I’m actually not the gender you thought” you might have as well told them you killed the doppelganger they had been raising all this time and shall now replace them.
The hard to swallow pill here being that many parents would absolutely prefer to have kept the doppelganger over the real you. In fact, they might be fully convinced that you are the imposter and you killed their real child. Just like how people used to think children were stolen by fae and replaced by a changeling when they started showing autistic traits.
(This theory was inspired by the book Doppelganger by Naomi Klein that I recently finished and have been rotating in my brain ever since. It’s a good book. Read it.)