Thread | Brutkey

"So... at what age did you realise that you wanted to play with dolls and not trucks?"

Fuck that shit.
I never played with dolls, never wanted to.
I read books, I built stuff out of Lego, I solved and created puzzles. Oh, and I climbed every tree in the neighborhood at least once.
And you know what? I took exactly after my mother that way.
And my sister was even less taken with dolls and dresses than either of us.
But the gatekeepers would deny my womanhood because my childhood didn't tick enough femininity boxes for their liking.
Fuck. That. Shit.
#Transgender

Lona Theartlav
@theartlav@anarres.family

@Tattie@eldritch.cafe Ah yes. Lego, the stuff originally marketed at girls. Books, the word bookworm is tinted with femininity. Climbing trees, something the grandma had to beat out of my sister.
It's almost like all that bs is social.

Sophie
@sophiesometimes@anarres.family

@Tattie@eldritch.cafe For me, I never had the chance to decide what toys I would like to play with. I had half sisters, but they lived out of state so I didn’t really grow up with them. My friends at school were all girls, but that just determined the type of playground games we would play (foursquare and tetherball and hopscotch and jumprope), but not the toys I was exposed to.

So I ended up loving my stuffies the most, but also loving legos (pre-gendered version, I built a lot of houses for my stuffies) and space toys and Hot Wheels cars. I may have buried a few Fischer Price people in shallow graves in my backyard. 🪦

So I didn’t ever have an age where I realized I wanted one thing other than another, because the other option was never presented to me, and the social pressure to conform to gender norms in 1978 was intense.

But I DID know that my girl friends were a lot more fun to be with, and that their dresses and Mary Jane’s were a lot cuter than the clothes I was allowed to wear. 🤷‍♀️