My Princess Boy

I hesitated to comment on this because I wanted to make sure I was sufficiently sensitive and understanding of the issues at hand.

It's very easy to come across as callous and ignorant when one gives an opinion on something as delicate as gender identity and parenting.

I am fortunate to have a mother whose profession as an educator exposed her to child psychology and progressive parenting practices that her peers would not have understood at the time. Therefore my pre-tween request for a doll to play with didn't result in bruised butt cheeks and a deflated ego but a black barbie, hair clips, and wardrobe. I knew at the age of 8 that my interests in females were more sartorial than sexual and that my juvenile OCD made me want to comb her synthetic locks till they could get no straighter, then do it again.

After about a week I tired of the doll and didn't ask for another, but I know this gave my parents a shock and as much as my mother put on her best clinical performance I'm sure both my parents went through emotions I can only now begin to comprehend as in the brutally homophobic 1990s Jamaica they had their own little princess boy just beginning to grow his fairy wings.

I could never have adorned myself in my mother's jewelery, heels and frocks and sashayed into my largely working class community and expected sympathy, sensitivity, or even tolerance. That show would have to be farcical... and private, as in for my own amusement when nobody was home.

I often wonder whether my largely conservative, wall-flower-like disposition is the result of ridicule from my peers in high school for a persona that did not fit into the strict confines of a masculinity that they themselves did not understand and were at pains to define much less express. Most people can't read me and are quicker to classify me by perceived social class than in terms of sexuality. Meaning, because of how I carry myself, speak etc they are more likely to think of me in terms of the wealthy background they perceive I belong to rather than the men whose bodies I wish to envelope my own.

The questions that cannot be answered for now as it relates to Dyson the Princess Boy include whether his apparently burgeoning gender dysphoria will be part of his teenage or adult persona; whether these videos will cause him great humiliation in the years to come if this is indeed just a phase of self expression and experimentation that he is just passing through; whether his knack for all things fabulous has any relation to where he falls on the sexual continuum; and finally whether this supposed hands off attitude is truly so, and not facilitating the very confusion that so shocked his mother upon her discovery of it.

Do children need to be told what type of clothes are appropriate for their sex, or are we moving toward a genderless society?

Is there any use for gender in the modern world?

Is it homophobic to tell a boy to wear pants and a girl to wear a dress at the age when identity is imprinted?

Many things to ask, most of which cannot be answered by any one person.

Life surely is a fascinating experience.

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