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Little Jessica wants to be a boy. I hadn't noticed at first, not *way* back when I first started at Herald, but one day I learnt the score. "Jessica's mom is still worried," Sue the Supervisor said offhandedly. "She won't wear any dresses. And she likes suit-ties. A lot." I laughed because nobody loves ties, especially not kindergarteners. They are an open invitation for vicious strangulation in the play room during lunchtime and they look stupid. A tie is forever a Bad Thing.

Still, Jessica's fixation with boyswear piqued my interest and I started noticing other amusing Jessica-quirks in class. She is hilarious and fucking cool.

Remember when you were a kid and you had to do some stupid group reading exercise and your teacher, in a clear-cut burst of cruelty, assigned you a cross-gendered role? Like say you were a boy named Terrance and you had to shakily read, in front of smirking classmates, some awful speech about how your tiny girlie waist just couldn't be tinified any further by a sexy lace corset. And your Greek husband Masticus was coming home to bend you over the stove right after you cooked him dinner. (I don't really think that kind of material would be appropriate for children, but seeing as I'm a teacher myself now... oooh scary. How were our teachers idly screwing with us when we were young??)

Anyway, that would royally suck, right, being A WOMAN? It would be a big deal and you would probably get punched RIGHT IN THE FUCKING FACE after class. SMAOW! It's just as bad for most girls although, for them, it seems to be more of a rabid desire to be as girlie as possible than a fear of being masculine. You should see me hand out stickers: "Teacher, teacher! Pink... pink... PINKKKKKK!!!" Any time colour comes into play, the girl who doesn't get a pink anything will inevitably weep and/or glare at me like I'm Japanese for the rest of our time together. She will draw pictures of me with vampire fangs and boobies and facial sores and a dripping penis, and she will curse me under her breath. It's pretty hardcore.

The point is that girls like being girls and boys like being boys, it's some kind of complex gender socialization and I'm not really one to mess with that nonsense.

But Jessica's different. She fights to be the boy, tooth and nail, in any dialogue and whines quite compellingly whenever I say otherwise. There are three girls and one (real) boy so her non-comformity builds an uneasy symmetry in our class activities, and I usually let her have her way (unless I feel like winding her up, which is always fun). By now Sue and Alice have stopped reminding Jessica that she is, in fact, a girl and that her objections are misplaced. They understand, in some bizarre six year old manner; they see what's going on.

Jessica always picks the truck over the doll, the tank over the shopping cart. She loves talking about her father and enthusiastically battles the alpha-male boys for schoolyard supremacy. She's on the cusp of her own gender rebellion and all I can do is smile and wonder if she really knows what she's doing, or if Intuition is as crazy as I've always hoped.

My favourite Jessica moment thus far took place at a dingy little science museum, on a field trip a few weeks back. She had a ridiculous pair of 3D goggles strapped to her head and she turned, gaping a bit, and solemnly informed me of her findings: "Teacher... this is science!" This is science. I laughed and laughed and she had no idea why and you, reader, you probably don't either but you'll have to take my word for it that the absolute passion and sincerity of this statement coming from a six year old tomboy wearing oversized goggles was a Golden Moment in my life, a reaffirmation of how marvelously strange the world can be.

And Jessica still refuses to wear dresses and I love it.

Posted by Chris at 07:59 AM >> Commentations (7)