“he” and children’s literature

“He’s chewing on the toy!” my two-year-old exclaimed in delight, pointing at the dog.

“Nellie-Doggy is a she; she’s chewing on the toy,” my mother-in-law corrected gently.

My child obligingly repeated her words, but within a few minutes was back to referring to the dog as “he.”

This would have been amusing had it not been for what I noticed a few hours later when my husband and I were reading our son his bedtime stories. Little Blue Truck: “He.” Not Your Typical Dragon: “He.” Pete the Cat: “He.” Very Hungary Caterpillar: “He.” Where’s Walrus: “He.” What? This last book has literally no words, but every time I’ve read it I have referred to the walrus as “he.” Corduroy! Finally! I’ve never particularly liked that book, to be honest, but that night I clung to it as a lifeline. At least one major character was female, even if it wasn’t the protagonist.

It’s not news to me, of course, that children’s literature is biased overwhelmingly toward male characters, but somehow I never imagined that it would apply to us. I write feminist fiction, for heaven’s sake, and my husband is the one who proposed naming our son after a prominent feminist. Even though I know the statistics, I guess I thought that by being properly liberal in our politics we would magically avoid these pitfalls, at a minimum until the books started having people in them. Animal characters live in a world of pure fantasy; cats can wear hats, talk, and drive fantastical machines. Oughtn’t they somehow be innocent of the problems of the world of people?

That day I as I sorted through books, I felt the slow congealing in my stomach as I put my bedtime story observation together with the interaction from earlier in the day. When had my son heard an animal referred to as “she?” It must have happened, but our cat is a he, and as I looked through book after book I started to think that my child’s mistake was not random. Indeed, as I started to pay more careful attention to his linguistic trial-and-error, I noticed that he almost never erred by using “she” when he should have used “he.” The error was almost always the other way.

Often times calls for more representation in children’s literature are framed in terms of the need for the marginalized to see themselves represented. This is, of course, a vitally important need. But for my own family I am concerned about the impact on my son of growing up in a world where women have been erased. The problems created by forgetting that women exist affect everything from housing and transportation policy to the design of objects like the iPhone to medical recommendations that assume the male body is standard and fail to account for the way that females frequently metabolize medications at different rates or in different ways. Striking particularly close to home, the very week that I was feverishly sorting my son’s library, my in-laws were trying to persuade a doctor that perhaps my slight-framed mother-in-law should not be receiving the one-size-fits-all “recommended dose” of medication calibrated for a 170 pound man. Invisibility can be dangerous.

I can’t say that all of these problems trace their way back to lack of representation children’s literature, of course. But I do wonder if things would be different if my son grew up in a world where he was as likely to read about a girl animal as a boy. One solution to this, of course, is simply to acquire more books that have female characters and female animals. This fixes a lot of problems since I have no objection to having books with male characters, I simply object to having almost all books with almost all male characters. But what do I do with the library of books that I love, except for this one rather problematic aspect? The nice thing about reading to children is that those of us who are reading the books are not confined to the words that are actually on the page. This is how, in a Unitarian Universalist household, my husband reads a book of opposites as “Dinosaurs happy and dinosaurs sad. Dinosaurs good and dinosaurs-with-inherent-worth-and-dignity.” Just because a book says “he,” this does not prevent me from unilaterally changing it to “she” if I feel so inclined. As a youngster I was known to rewrite sections of books that I did not like on post-it notes and carefully cut and paste them over the original text. While in adulthood this has largely transitioned to writing my own books, the tendency remains. Books: some assembly required. 

There is something about changing the gender of characters in books, though, particularly if one person reads it one way and someone else another, that makes people uncomfortable. It seems confusing after all for a child, especially a child who is just learning about categorization and gender, to go back and forth. What’s striking to me, however, is the contrast between how much room we normally give small children for imagination and flexibility versus how rigid we insist that gender is. Surely, an anthropomorphic six-foot cat wearing a hat and bowtie who talks and drives a cleanup machine severely messes with the child’s understanding of the category “cat.” And yet we are confident that children will be perfectly capable of figuring out what a cat is across any number of more or less fantastical representations. Similarly, I suspect that my child will spend years thinking that dragons are just as real as cows and platypuses, but this is more cause for amusement than concern. Indeed, children make errors in categorization, errors in the use of “I” and “you,” all sorts of errors all the time that we benignly correct with a smile. Until it comes to gender. 

Look, for example, at imaginative play. A child can come to school for a week insisting that they are cat, and while someone will no doubt confirm that the child knows they are not actually a cat, generally it is not a big deal. Contrast this with the reaction to a little boy who decides that he is a girl for a week. Do small children really have any better of a sense of what it means to be a boy than what it means to be a cat? Certainly they don’t have a full understanding of it intricacies and implications. However, the tendency of both children and adults to insist “No, you are not a girl!” is far more intense than the tendency to correct a child who shows up as a cat. 

This is one of the places where I think feminism’s progress has been very lopsided. My sense of the matter is that little girls who wish to dress up as a male character, say a pirate, face far less resistance the little boys wish to dress up as a girl character. Some of this may simply be that because being male is unmarked in our society, little girls are choosing to dress as specific characters who happen to be male rather than dressing up as “boy.” Nonetheless, just a few years ago little boys wanting to dress up as Elsa from Frozen – and their father’s solidarity with them in doing so – was enough to spawn numerous feel-good news stories.

What are we teaching our boys by showing them that they can imagine anything, they can dress up as anything, except a girl? Imagination is normal. Dress-up is normal. Children’s blurring of reality and fantasy is normal. But gender is for some reason a hard and fast line you cannot cross. You can be a different species, but you can’t be a different gender.

Why do we make such a big deal out of this boundary? Letting children play with gender will not lead to permanent confusion any more than letting them play with any other category will. It is perfectly possible for a child to know that he is a boy yet at the same time to hold that knowledge lightly. Why is it considered so much worse to play with gender than it is to play with anything else?

There is at least one reason. The agreement that being like a girl is bad is one of the primary social mechanisms used to police boys’ behavior throughout their lives. The most obvious example of this is the way that fear of being labeled “sissy,” and the closely related fear of being labeled “gay,” is used to police the behavior of adolescent boys. Displaying so-called feminine emotions, such as affection or sadness, will be punished swiftly and brutally by implying that the speaker is either gay or trans and therefore deserving of ostracism, harassment, or violence. Boys who laugh in the face of any punishments their school or parents can devise often back down immediately at the threat of being called one of these.

Think about this for a second. Think about what the policing of masculinity in teenage boys does. The emotions that are labeled feminine, and therefore forbidden, are some of the ones that are most necessary for having a healthy and well functioning psyche and society. Affection, kindness, empathy, the ability to talk about emotions, the ability to show vulnerability. Cut off from most forms of emotional literacy, young boys who have been successfully policed are left with anger and aggression as the only acceptable outlets for their full range of normal human emotion. Is it any wonder that some absurd percentage of crimes are committed by boys and men?

What would the world be like if little boys weren’t afraid of being called girls? What would it be like if gender were just a category like any other? There are of course times when categories are important. Knowing that one is not a bird is extremely important when contemplating the enormously enticing ladder leaned up against the garage roof. Similarly, understanding that generally speaking there is a category of “girl” and I am assigned to it just as I am assigned to the category of child or person or short or whatever, this is enormously helpful for making sense of our world. However, our tendency to treat the category of gender so differently than we treat all of these other categories is damaging. Is it such a big deal if a boy insists on wearing rain boots and a helmet for an entire week solid and then the next week insists on not parting with his tu-tu? It really isn’t. Let kids be kids. Let gender be just another category to explore.