The first time my daughter put on one of my son’s dress up costumes, he got upset. “Mommy,” he told me, “She can’t wear my tutu! Tutus are for big boys!” He was 3 at the time and in his mind, wearing a flouncy tutu wasn’t a boy thing or a girl thing: it was all about whether you were old enough to handle and appreciate the tutu, apparently.
My husband and I were big into gender neutral parenting, so while my son loved typical “boy things” like trucks and tools, he’d carry those things around in one of my old purses, which just so happened to match his beloved pink sneakers. As he got older, no one made fun of him for these things, but he nevertheless heard the unspoken message loud and clear: “pink and purses and tutus are for girls and boys shouldn’t want that for themselves.”
It was heartbreaking to see him eschew things I knew he still enjoyed, and it’s a heartbreak recently encountered by dad and TikTok creator Jordon Brown.
“This is one of my son’s water bottles,” he begins, holding up a purple and turquoise Thermos. “He picked it out himself. He likes it. He took it to school a couple of weeks ago and when I picked him up and was on the ride home, he said to me ‘Jack told me hearts are for girls.’”
Siiiiiigh. A lot of us have been here, it sucks, and it’s a double tragedy, as Brown points out.
“Jack is 5 years old,” he continues. “Jack didn’t come to that conclusion on his own: someone had to tell that to Jack. Why would you do that? Why would you do that to a 5 year old? Do you think hearts are going to make him gay, you gaslighting monster? Why do we… It’s 2025! We can’t just be like ‘Hey, do you like hearts and purple? That’s fine!’
“It makes me so unreasonably angry. What’s the worst that happens? Jack associates hearts and empathy with a thing that men can do? Oh no!”
Brown and his son agreed that Jack was wrong, but Brown recognizes this might just be the first crack in his son’s being shielded from toxic gender norms.
“There is going to come a day when Parker is bullied for having hearts or whatever,” he concludes. “But I’ll be goddamned if it happens when he’s 3.”
The message has resonated: as of press time, Brown’s post has more than half a million likes and thousands of supportive comments.
“This is NOT an unreasonable crash out,” one commenter wrote. “This is f*cking valid.”
“Hearts are a shape…are…are squares for boys only?” another muses.
A third makes another great point: “Why is something ‘for girls’ a BAD THING?”
Seriously, have your little binary if you must, but why is one (girls) inherently less valuable than another (boys)? Because while some girls might get weird remarks for liking blue or cars or pro-wrestling, I can tell you from personal experience that my daughter got way less side-eye for gender non-conforming behaviors than their brother did.
It’s frustrating that this is still a thing, but it’s nice to see parents speaking out on it.
