As children, we are taught boys are supposed to play with action figures and blocks, and girls are supposed to play with dolls and toy makeup. There are many things we learn as children based on what our parents tell us or what we observe in society. It's no surprise that often transgender people do not feel comfortable expressing their gender identity until later in life. Sure, if you have a little boy, you might want him to play with building blocks and action figures, but what if he reaches for his sister's doll or dress-up clothes? What do you tell him?

Parents often place gender norms upon their child before they are even born. People everywhere are eager to start genderizing a fetus as soon as they find out the sex in the second trimester of the pregnancy. I'm sure most are familiar with the popular trend of "gender reveal parties," in which parents expecting their child find a creative way to find out and tell people the sex of their child. The misconception here is the "gender" portion of the reveal party. The word gender represents a socially constructed fluid scale of how feminine or masculine a person is. For example, one can identify as a man, a woman, gender-queer, gender-fluid, transgender, etc. What people are truly revealing at these parties is the biological sex of their child. If they're having a female, the couple will cut into a pink colored cake, if it's a male, they could hit a baseball and have blue powder explode. Nonetheless, these gender norms are being introduced into the child's life before they're even introduced to the world.

When a child is a baby, they probably have no opinion on whether they'd rather be dressed in a blue or pink onesie, but the problem comes later in childhood. By the time children reach school age, they're pretty aware of gender norms, whether they realize it or not. If a little boy wants to wear a pink shirt to school, I'm sure at least one of their classmates will point out that pink is a 'girl color'. Recently the Twitter user, @thedaddyfiles, wrote a thread about his son who wore red nail polish to kindergarten, having no idea that nail polish is 'a girl thing' and was bullied for it.

Without gender norms in our society, this little boy could've gone to school with his "beautiful nails" and no one would have said anything. Why is nail polish only supposed to be worn by girls? Clearly, boys can like it too, so why do they get ridiculed when they want to express themselves? Just because this boy wants to wear nail polish does not mean that he wants to be a girl.

If little boys don't think they're allowed to wear nail polish or play with dolls and little girls think they can't dig for worms in mud or play with an action figure, how can we expect them to truly express themselves? Allowing kids to wear what they want and do things that go against their gender norm is pivotal to their personal development. As a kid, I constantly wore pink dresses and wanted sparkles on mostly everything I wore. My sister, on the other hand, always wore skateboarding shoes and cargo shorts. Both of us grew up in the same house, yet dressed in and liked things that were completely different from each other. Because my parents allowed her to express herself, she didn't care about societal norms that came along with being a girl. She eventually started wearing more and more 'girly' clothes but on her own time.

Kids today are ridiculed for doing things outside of societal gender norms, and it will damage their sense of self in the long run. If your son wants to play with his sister's doll, let him. If your daughter wants to dress up as Spiderman for Halloween, who cares? It can be scary to let your child do something outside of the norm, due to the fear they will be scrutinized, but if the next generation of kids can be progressive and understanding because of it, it will be worth it.