I have in my buxiban a student who looks like a girl, has long hair, and wears the kind of cute clothes, though no dresses, that little girls wear. Answers “I am a boy” to the question "are you a boy or a girl?’, which I asked to all kids because it was in the textbook. My boss told me some little girls go through a tomboy stage and that is cute enough. Yesterday he told me this child is indeed a biological male, he has talked to the parents and child is a biological boy.
Wants to be a boy, calls self boy, dresses like girl.
I have read that 1 in 2000 people are born with ambiguous genitals. In Western countries they get surgery. In Eastern countries…I don’t know. Is this common?
I have a 5th grade girl who dresses, looks, and acts like a boy except she has to wear the pink activity uniform. I just treat her like a student. All the students know she’s a girl and don’t pretend otherwise.
With your case, do you know if he has “ambiguous genitals”? If he says he wants to be a boy, maybe it is all the parents or grandparents doing. Maybe they want a girl and so try to make him look that way.
Ditto.
If it isn’t causing a disruption, just go on teaching.
[quote=“kjmillig”]I have a 5th grade girl who dresses, looks, and acts like a boy except she has to wear the pink activity uniform. I just treat her like a student. All the students know she’s a girl and don’t pretend otherwise.
With your case, do you know if he has “ambiguous genitals”? If he says he wants to be a boy, maybe it is all the parents or grandparents doing. Maybe they want a girl and so try to make him look that way.
Ditto.
If it isn’t causing a disruption, just go on teaching.[/quote]
I do just go on teaching. He/she is a nice little person.
I am just curious.
I don’t want to ask questions because I don’t want to rock the boat. No, I am just guessing at ambiguous genitals. Child is about 10.
If the kid was a third gender type and the parents wetre waiting until he/she grew up to choose his/her own surgery, I commend that. It makes me feel a lot better than the idea of parents dressing a biological boy, who calls self a boy ansd wants to be a boy,. as a girl. That’s just disturbing.
[quote=“kjmillig”]I have a 5th grade girl who dresses, looks, and acts like a boy except she has to wear the pink activity uniform. I just treat her like a student. All the students know she’s a girl and don’t pretend otherwise.
With your case, do you know if he has “ambiguous genitals”? If he says he wants to be a boy, maybe it is all the parents or grandparents doing. Maybe they want a girl and so try to make him look that way.
Ditto.
If it isn’t causing a disruption, just go on teaching.[/quote]
I do just go on teaching. He/she is a nice little person.
I am just curious.
I don’t want to ask questions because I don’t want to rock the boat. No, I am just guessing at ambiguous genitals. Child is about 10.
If the kid was a third gender type and the parents wetre waiting until he/she grew up to choose his/her own surgery, I commend that. It makes me feel a lot better than the idea of parents dressing a biological boy, who calls self a boy ansd wants to be a boy,. as a girl. That’s just disturbing.
I repeat: I am referring to child as “he” per childs wishes and behaving normally as a teacher. I’m not out to change this kid at all.
I just think Taiwan is a magical place. Folks, I just got here in February. I used to teach in Korea and never saw anything like this there. Fill me in.
Since people seem confused, here are the factas
Child looks and dresses like a girl, long hair and bows, girl shoes, etc.
Have more often seen the opposite here - tom-boyish/androgynous girls w/big emo glasses & boyish haircuts. Most seem to fall squarely in the teenage emo/Converse-wearing/crappy punk music clique & it’s so common there HAS to be some popular star who started it all. I wonder if it’s “just a phase”, if Taiwan just has lax gender roles, or if there really is a larger proportion of Gay/Bi women.
If not for the sheer numbers I probably wouldn’t have noticed - too many cute ones who actually look female to pay attention to instead :lovestruck:
In any case, the tolerance level for being “different” does seem to be much higher here than in Japan. I haven’t heard about bullying to the same extent - driving kids to suicide, etc. I’d worry more about the 10y.o. boy after his classmates hit the awkward adolescent years. Younger kids don’t care, which is good.
Really? A family would dress a boy as a girl becasue of a fortune teller?
The other kids in the class seem just fine with it thoguh, no teasing or bullying at all.
This kind of thing happens al the time?[/quote]
Not often, but yeah, it is part of the very traditional thinking.
I think we had something similar, like disguising the child so the ghosts won’t get to it and kill it.[/quote]
Sure, Bruce Lee was given a girl’s Chinese name at birth, and was dressed as a girl for something like his first 5 years or so, because the fortune teller told his folks that a demon would go after their first son.
This part’s true, the rest of the hooha in the Jason Scott Lee biopic was just Hollywood asshattery.
Anyways, most of you are applying your Western gender yardsticks to the situation.
Kids here are much more likely to get bullied for crap grades or expressing independent ideas than anything like this.
In most Asian countries, there are long histories of a niche existing in society for semi-gendered individuals, see Thailand or the PIs, where they really are tolerated as a sort of 3rd gender.
Further, there’s often a significant remove between gender identification and sexual preference.
The girl looking like a boy/ emo haircut/ boyish glasses/ baggy clothes look is certainly not particular to Asia. Over the past several years it has become increasingly popular in the US as well. A couple of my oldest son’s female friends dress like this, and are indeed homosexual. Not all who dress like this are though. I saw it more and more every year in the schools I was teaching at, starting about 6th or 7th grade.
It would help if we knew how old he was. I have a real tomboy in my class, but she has asked me to let her sit with the boys and answers that she is a boy. I have told her that she can’t say that…she can say that she identifies with boys , but physically she is still a girl. She is 12.
I have many lesbian friends who aren’t allowed to tell people they are gay, so they bind their breasts and pretend to be boys. And have you seen some Japanese bands lately? They aren’t gay, just really dress up in dresses etc…here is Dir En Grey.
and some of my friends that are girls
I have a boy in class that walks like a ballerina, designs costumes for girls (with bracelets, bags etc) and giggles so much I’m scared the windows may shatter. His parents fought it when he was 3 ( I had to keep him out of the dress-up corner and had to force him to play with cars…but soon he would take the car and say he’s driving Barbie to a ball)
so, they let him be. If kids are different, it surfaces early. It’s actually cool that parents allow their kids to do what they feel is natural…
Been there, done it, got the eyeliner
Ask Snadman what he wore to the final performance of Ziggy Stardust at the Hammersmith Odeon on July 3rd 1973.
Interesting point, though.
Dave and the “girls”, above, had practically no interest in banging boys, their whole shtick was just about how it looked, vis. the remove between gender ID and sexual preference to which I referred earlier.
And they got more trim than Frank fucking Sinatra.
Not always the case, obviously, but enough to be noteworthy.
Now, as for these little rascals:
Do they dress like this because they want to look like boys, or because they want to look like tomboys??
Cause, you know, they don’t look like boys.
Any more than Syl Sylvain looks like a chick.
OK, maybe a real fuckin ugly chick, but you get my point.
they want to look like tomboys…those particular girls. It’s sad, because I like boyish girls, but there are way too many hang-ups and strict rules when it comes to tomboys. sigh. And the Hello Kitty femme girls…one look at those fake nails with glitter and I RUN!!! :roflmao: :roflmao:
