I used to volunteer at the Royal Medieval Faire, usually working gates: taking money and welcoming people to the Faire.
One year the Faire tried giving people wristbands instead of hand stamps to let them back in. For no discernible reason,
the wristbands were pink.
One little boy worked his way up to us in the line with his parents. Dad paid the admission and we got out the
wristbands.
“You’re not putting that on my son.”
He was, we thought, unnecessarily forceful. We explained that they were meant to let people back into the park.
“I won’t have him wearing that. It’s a girl’s colour. My son isn’t a girl.”
We actually got a few people like that. None quite as aggro as the one father, but it had us shaking our heads.
Really? Parents were really willing to push their preconceived notions of gender on their kids that hard? I had to feel
sorry for the little boy. What if he turned out to be gay? Or just secretly liked flowers? I can’t imagine what it would
be like living with a father like that.
I read the
Parents Keep Child’s Gender a Secret
story and thought “Huh, I can kinda see their point.” But then I read the comments (more
on Facebook) and my heart sank. And I thought
about that little boy and realized there are a lot of people out there like his dad.
I have the start of four other posts about the current Canadian parliamentary election in my drafts folder. I’ve been
having a hard time collating my thoughts into something novel or interesting.
This election scares me and makes me profoundly sad for my country. That’s made it hard for me to get my thoughts
together. Fortunately, Canadian constitutional expert Peter Russell does a better job than I could.
I’ve got an Ubuntu release party this weekend, but I’m hoping I get pull together some sort of substantial election post
before the actual election.
Okay, technically, that was on my old, hand-coded blog, and I’m lame even after almost 4 years, I haven’t imported my
old blog into this one, but woo! 10 years!
Equally technically, I was posting something like blog posts on my old homepage, starting around 1998 or so. They
weren’t archived or anything, I’d just insert a couple paragraphs between
tags on whatever I happened to feel like
writing about at the time, replacing whatever was there before. No, not a blog, but my blog was an extension of that.
My ideas about blogging have changed quite a bit. I originally wanted a place I could write anonymously about whatever I
felt like. Then I decided that blogging anonymously was horribly pretentious and nobody actually cared. Now I’ve
got Twitter satiating most of what used to drive me to blog. That’s my current
excuse for why I don’t hang out here quite as much, anyway.