Grow up, without the labels

WE love our labels.

Boys wear blue, girls wear pink. Now girls can wear blue too and act like blokey superheroes because female empowerment is cool and acceptable (and so it should be). As for boys, don’t wear pink quite yet, unless you have a fashionable, edgy parent. Society hasn’t quite placed pink in the mainstream for boys yet. But I digress.

What I am really talking about is gender and how it can be used as yet another label. Just like hair colour, religion and so on.

When I was a young girl, I loved pink. Adored it. Of my two sisters, I decided that I was the “pink sister”. In order to claim the colour as my own, I even decided on colours for the others: yellow for my younger sister and black for the eldest (because she really liked that colour and still does).

Around the same time as my love affair with pink, my dad did karate.

I figured my familial association gave me certain abilities. If a girl had any problems with a boy, I’d go marching through Edge Hill State School to hunt him down. (I’d also run away when things got serious.)

The point is I was just an ordinary girl (I hope) with both feminine and masculine traits, which we all carry within us.

You can break down behaviours and overanalyse but I seem to keep coming back to the one main argument.

Don’t worry and just your kids be kids.