the genitalia thing wasn't a mystery to me, my mom had learned from being a pastor's daughter that being coy about sex and anatomy just led to confusion and date rape :/ so she was quite pragmatic for an evangelical
but the gender *roles* absolutely fucked me up
Conversation
god, I still feel so much pressure to hedge, to promise that I'm not a nutso in either direction, that I'm not raising my young children 100% gender neutral OR raising them to adhere to strict gender roles
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even that tweet was still hedging, so that neither my shitlord buddies nor my nonbinary friends think I'm One Of Those Assholes
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maybe it's better to just list the layers of confusion
layer 1: literal babby, what is gender, only meaningful impact of my sex is a high risk of UTIs
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layer 2: toddler. boys are a thing? they have penises, which are hilarious, and people seem to care very much about who is a boy and who is a girl. asked mom whether I was a boy or a girl bc it didn't make sense yet
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layer 3: preschool/kindergarten age. finally generalizing and figuring out how to tell the difference between adult men and women, only able to tell my peers' apart by hairstyle and whether or not I'm explicitly told their sex.
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layer 3 (cont): suddenly have a bunch of Rules to follow about how I'm supposed to behave in my awesome princess dresses (no climbing trees??), earliest memories of been excluded from fun stuff bc I'm a Girl.
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layer 3 (cont): Disney movies become very important to me and I enter that sensual phase (see pics) that preschoolers go through -- was quite the romantic and knew I was "supposed" to be with boys but still only able to tell them apart by hair and clothing styles
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the what now
i have absolutely zero memory of doing anything like this
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oh huh
I was extremely flirtatious and romance-crazy
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i mean i had a crush on a girl for the first time at age 6 but not on my *mom*