Is this a boy in a tutu, or a girl playing football?

I created the image above and the short video GIF below after some parents had related to me stories about non-gender conforming children. The most powerful was a boy who is an expert on the BMX bike track but insists on wearing a rainbow-coloured tutu while he rides, regardless of the impracticality of such attire.

I am a Counsellor for adults and children, and as such, I spend a lot of time discussing identity and authenticity. I don’t care what a client has in their pants. They can dress as they like, speak as they want; all I am interested in is getting to know the person on a deeper level than the superficial aspects of gender, appearance, or any label imposed from the outside.

What matters to me is how they feel about themselves when they wake up in the morning. Whether they are living in alignment with who they truly are, or whether they are exhausted from performing a version of themselves that others expect. My work is about creating space where people can take off their masks and discover that, underneath it all, they are already enough.

What is your reaction?

Do the images above make you smile or cringe? Do they bring some discomfort or a feeling of warmth?
Does your reaction surprise you? Is it in keeping with your attitudes? Is there shame, disgust, or a quiet sense of delight?

It’s worth noticing these first responses. They often arise from unconscious bias. These are quick, automatic judgments we’ve absorbed without ever choosing them. We all have them. They come from years of cultural conditioning. Stereotypes and inherited stories have taught us how boys and girls should look and behave.

The important thing isn’t to pretend these reactions don’t exist, but to get curious about them. To ask ourselves: Where did this feeling come from? Does it reflect my true values, or just the messages I was given?

When we examine our biases with honesty and compassion, we create the possibility of change. We can choose to loosen their hold and to respond to others, especially children, not with judgement, but with openness and respect for their unique expression.

Childhood Memories of Not Fitting In

As a small child, my mother worried that I cried too much. Social pressure led her to speak with her Priest.
“He cries too much, should I toughen him up?”
His reaction was immediate and firm.
“No! He could grow up to be a poet or a musician, let him be.”

From that point on, my mum was on my side, unlike most of the males in my life. Brothers felt they had to protect me or teach me how to be a proper man. Dad thought I was gay.

It was enough. There was at least one person who let me develop my creativity, my sensitive skills, piano playing, knitting, drawing and painting.

Additionally, it helped that I grew up in the 1960s, when sensitivity, peace, and love were popular ideals as a reaction against male aggression. Popular role models such as Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie inspired me to dress as flamboyantly as I liked without any sense that it was unmasculine.

In school and wider society, I felt out of place, like an alien, but at home, I could be myself, get lost in a drawing or learn all the Cat Stevens songs on the piano, be allowed to play the church organ and crack out a version of A Whiter Shade of Pale.

Culture and society create unseen pressure.

Psychologists have spoken about a Boy Code and a Girl Code, which society has passed on to children. This is beginning to break down. We are starting to appreciate the damage done to the mental health of both boys and girls by these rigid expectations.

The Boy Code teaches boys that strength means silence, that feelings are a sign of weakness, and that they must always be in control. Boys learn to wear a mask of invulnerability, to deny their softer emotions, and to measure their worth by dominance and performance.

The Girl Code is equally suffocating. Girls are taught to be pleasing, accommodating, and effortlessly perfect. They are rewarded for quiet compliance and punished, often subtly, for assertiveness, ambition, or anger. They learn early that their value is tied to how they look and how well they take care of others.

When we enforce these codes, whether consciously or not, we deny children the freedom to discover who they truly are. We push them to abandon parts of themselves that don’t fit the script.

But these scripts are only stories we’ve inherited. They aren’t truths. And they can be rewritten.

Every time we respond to a child’s authentic expression with curiosity rather than correction, we chip away at these old narratives. Every time we let them wear what they want, play how they want, and feel what they feel without shame, we make space for something freer and healthier to emerge.

We are not here to mould children into our idea of what they should be. We are here to help them unfold into who they already are.

Compliance has benefits, but it also incurs costs.

For me, Grammar School was a place I learnt to comply, but I had the benefit of a homespace where I could be myself. My first year there I was being sedated because I was hyperactive, mouthy and generally an energetic pain in the butt.

I learnt that no one was interested in my views or opinions, and creative ideas that flowed out of me didn’t fit in with the curriculum, so they were not valid.

I was a boy, so I was required to study the sciences. I was very clear that my main interest was in writing, drawing and playing music, but those were female pursuits. I was told I was too clever for that. My views were disregarded. I complied reluctantly.

The cost of that compliance was that I lost interest in all academic pursuits. I entered Grammar school as top of the class in most things. I limped out of the sixth form with a single A-level in Maths.

My compliance, however, was only partial. I survived the school system but gained very little from it. At 18, my true education began. I went to London and explored my passion for music, developing a lifelong career in creative pursuits.

Peers who complied with the system reaped the benefits of gaining university admission. The cost they often paid was that they found themselves in a career they had no interest in. All of their passions and interests had been relegated to hobbies, if they survived at all.

Looking back, I can see that compliance was never neutral; it was always a matter of perspective. It demanded that we trade parts of ourselves to fit in. For some, it was curiosity. For others, it is creativity or confidence. We learnt to measure our worth by how well we could follow the script, not by how fully we could live as ourselves.

This is why I feel so strongly that we must question the old codes, whether they come dressed as tradition, discipline, or common sense. Behind every child who “learns to behave”, there may be a young person quietly losing touch with what makes them alive.

Breaking the script

Many years ago, I worked alongside an inspired Reception class teacher. I worked in a Year 6 class. She had an outside space which I could see from my classroom. She was much more experienced than I, and one day we had a conversation about gender conformity.

I had a boy in my class who liked to wear his hair very long, all the way to his waist. He kept it beautifully combed and tied it back when necessary.

I had noticed a boy in the reception class who came out into the play space every morning wearing a beautiful Snow White dress. He stood tall in the dress and played happily with the other children.

I never saw any of their peers bat an eyelid. They were accepted. I raised it with the reception class teacher, wondering if there was anything I should do.
She said something along the lines of
“Don’t make it weird. They are both happy as they are.”

The changes in society in recent years feel to me like society is increasingly “making it weird” to express yourself in any way that moves beyond the binary stereotypes of male and female.

I go on a Couples counselling Course, and I hear an experienced Counsellor say

“Well, it’s true, in my experience, all men are like this and all women are like that.”
They don’t seem to realise how they are allowing their own and society’s expectations to walk into the room with the clients.

My experience is quite different because my expectations are different.

Our role, whether as teachers, parents, or therapists, is not to project our own discomfort or inherited ideas onto others, but to hold space for people to be exactly as they are.

When I think of that little boy in the Snow White dress, I’m reminded how unselfconscious children are until someone teaches them to feel ashamed. They don’t make it weird, we do.

Perhaps the simplest and most radical thing we can do is to stop policing the edges of what we think is acceptable, and instead learn to meet each person with curiosity rather than assumption.

When we let go of the script, we give others permission to do the same. And that, I’ve come to see, is where real belonging begins.

The golden key of acceptance.

Boys and girls suffer mentally from gender stereotyping. If you tell someone there is something wrong with them, their mental health suffers.

Their experience of themselves is not being accepted as true. It instils self-doubt and anxiety. Gender stereotyping is about control, not about caring.

The experience of belonging to a family, community, village, or school group is essential for mental well-being. True belonging does not come from compliance.

If you are masking, pretending, or hiding parts of yourself in order to fit in with your family or any other group, then you will never get a true sense of belonging.

A sense of connection comes when we are accepted exactly as we are, when we learn to accept ourselves with all our quirks and wrinkles and feel free to show our authentic selves to those around us.

“True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.”

― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

How can we liberate ourselves and our children from the gender binary?

The tyranny of gender politics is plain to see. A small minority, Queer, Intersex and Trans people are subject to cruel and oppressive treatment.

Teachers, parents, and therapists may feel constrained in fully supporting the free expression of sexuality or gender identity. They mistakenly believe they are protecting children from harm.

Yet our silence or discomfort doesn’t protect anyone; it simply reinforces the message that there is something shameful in difference. We have a responsibility to examine honestly our own fears and assumptions, to learn from those with lived experience, and to offer children the unconditional acceptance they all need to thrive.

Stop making it weird.

A boy who likes to paint his nails or wear tutus is not weird. A girl who likes her hair short and wears clunky boots is not a threat to society.

The biggest threat to a healthy society is our insistence on policing the space between gender stereotypes. This insistence threatens our own fragile sense of certainty about how the world should look.

When we cling to rigid categories, we lose our ability to see people as they truly are. We flatten their complexity into something easier to label and control. But human beings are never that simple.

If we want a healthier, more compassionate culture, we have to be willing to step into the discomfort of not knowing, of letting others define themselves in ways that may unsettle us.

Because in the end, it’s not children’s freedom that endangers us. It’s our refusal to allow it.

Let’s stop making it weird. Let’s start making it normal to accept each other exactly as we are. Our children are watching and learning from everything we do.

Further Reading

Cordelia Fine — Delusions of Gender
(Debunks myths about innate gender differences)

Lise Eliot — Pink Brain, Blue Brain
(Explores how experience and culture shape brain development)

Julia Serano — Whipping Girl
(Looks at the policing of gender expression)

Bell Hooks — Teaching to Transgress
(On liberatory education and honouring difference)

Ken Robinson — The Element
(On nurturing creativity rather than conformity)