my little boy loves pink

Jackson is three and a half years old -- and his favorite color is pink. He loves princesses, and he loves nail polish - pink nail polish, but he will settle for blue. He also loves cars and trucks and busses and playing in the yard and getting dirty, but those things don't cause a problem for people.
I have talked to him about the fact that in our culture, most people think that pink is a "girl" color and that only girls should wear it. He knows that boys don't usually wear nail polish (unless they are members of a band, or are in drag). I am pretty sure that he understands, but I know he doesn't care. He wants to wear it. He thinks it's pretty. He also wants to wear shirts with Hannah Montana, Cinderella, or Snow White on them. He has a pair of pink princess pajamas that he loves.
The problem with all of this, if you can call it that, is that I don't give a shit, and everyone else does. He is three and a half and he lives with two women who don't follow many gender rules. He sees us doing things that "men" do all the time. The gender boundaries in our house are a bit transparent, so it isn't surprising to me that he doesn't recognize "boy" and "girl" things in the same way that other kids do. We also haven't been the kind of parents who say, "no, honey, you can't have that because it is for girls." We bought him a princess vanity set for Christmas last year because he put it on his list for Santa. We haven't done those things because we believe that the "rules" about boy and girl things are arbitrary bullshit.

The problem, again, is that some people, some very close to us, seem to think that these rules mean something, like they are written somewhere in the universe and must not be changed, that I am doing something wrong and terrible by painting Jack's nails when he asks me to.

The thing that I wish that I could say to those "some people," the ones at the grocery store that look at us funny when he is wearing his Cinderella shirt, the ones who are close to us who say things like "that's not nice, what you are doing," as though I pull Jackson into a corner, tie him down and force him to stay still while I polish his fucking fingernails . . . what I really would like to say to them is this . . . . FUCK YOU.

First of all, he is three, and a lot of little boys like pink, and it doesn't mean anything. It's different. They don't make boy things in pink. Everything is blue or red or green. Nothing is pink, or glittery or shiny. It's a color for fuck's sake. And nail polish is paint. PAINT on FINGERNAILS. Fucking get over it.
Second of all, if it did mean something, like that he is (god forbid) GAY, so fucking what? I am not going to love him any less, or think any less of him, or the job that I did raising him, so fuck off.


----I should say here that there are a few rules that we have set up so as to avoid harassment or family fall-out. Those rules are that he cannot wear the nail polish or princess shirts to school or to an unnamed relative's house. The school thing is because he just isn't old enough or emotionally mature enough to know how to handle it when other boys make fun of him. He is still having a hard time making friends and talking to kids, and fun-making wouldn't help. The relative thing is out of respect for them. We know it bothers them and because we love and respect them we try not to upset them. We have also made it very clear that these issues are THEIR issues, not Jackson's. I am really conflicted about this, but I am basically just trying to avoid a stupid fight over nail-fucking-polish. If we are going any place else - the store, the bank, the park, he can wear whatever he wants.-----

My job is to love him and to help him be the very best Jackson that he can be. My job is to teach him self-acceptance, self-confidence, tolerance, and love. If he continues to love pink, then my job is to teach him how to be strong in that. If he continues to love princesses, then my job is to teach him how to stand in that and be who he wants to be. It is NOT my job to shame him, to guilt him, to embarrass him, to make him think that the things he likes are not good enough, are not the "right" things for him to like, that he should be somehow "other" or different from who he really is. It is not my job to beat the pink out of him. Unfortunately, society will do that soon enough. It is my job to teach him how to fight back.