The other day my son, who is five, announced to no one in particular but generally in my direction that he could use the pink crayon since he was home and nobody would see him. Boys, he explained, aren’t allowed to like pink. I wasn’t surprised. Despite my efforts, the Rules of Gender and Color have been shaping my son’s world since he first opened those baby blues.
Normally, I would have jumped on the opportunity to get him thinking a little deeper about the Rules of Color, but I had just watched an interview with the fabulous Laverne Cox so I decided to tackle Gender instead. “You know, some people are born with boy bodies but they are really girls on the inside. Do you think they are allowed to use pink?” “Yes,” he replied with certainty, “any kind of girl can use pink.”
