Via the Advocate comes a wonderful interview with the family of a gender variant child, five-year-old Dyson. (Video below.) Dyson’s mother even wrote a book, My Princess Boy: A mom’s story about a young boy who loves to dress up
I have not yet read the book myself, but the clip below is great—not only do Dyson’s mother, father, and older brother express their support, but so do several local teachers. The school even supported Dyson, who wore a princess Halloween costume to class, by having several of the male staff dress up and perform as princesses, too (and in a respectful way, not a teasing one).
I’m not sure I agree with the wisdom of having Dyson sitting there during the interview while the adults are discussing being gender variant on a grown-up level—I can imagine it might make him even more conscious of being “different”—but his family and teachers’ love and support shine through. It’s a wonderful antidote to all of the stories we’ve heard lately about the lack of support for LGBTQ students in schools. Happy weekend!
(Some browsers seem not to support the embedded video. Here’s a link to the original.)
If you’re looking for more resources on gender variant children, see my previous post on the subject.
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As usual, thank you so much, Dana.
I went off and bought a copy of the book and hope to report back. I got extra copies of 10,000 Dresses, too, since that one seems to have disappeared off our shelves. I got a copy for the preschool, too, of course. One for me, one for the preschool, is pretty much how it goes for all the good LGBT-family diversity picture books.
PS I peer at the internet via Safari, and don’t see the embedded video. FYI. :)
Hope the book is all you expect it to be, Polly. I have no sense of it myself–I’ve seen some unfortunately dreadful (in terms of literary quality) albeit well intentioned self-published/small press books in my time. Hope this one is better. We need more on the subject, as I don’t need to tell you.
Thanks for the heads up re: the embedded video, too. I’ve added a link to the original. The problem with Internet standards is they never really are.