The XX Factor: What women really think.

Boys in Skirts

Ann, thank you for bringing up my Atlantic story on transgender children. When I was reporting, I felt the opposite: Culture weighed very heavily on the boys and not so much on the girls. A girl could go a long time in gym shorts and cropped hair before anyone thought she was anything but a tomboy. But a boy in a ponytail and a skirt? Totally unacceptable. The girls I talked to generally never showed up at a psychologist's office until about age 8 or 9, which is when their love of toy guns and spy gear suddenly seemed conspicuous and when puberty was looming. Boys showed up at age 4, with parents already worried that their sons played with Barbies or dressed up in tutus.

In this little slice of the world, feminists of the Hillary generation can look back and see what they have to be grateful for. In the simplistic, Free To Be You and Me view of gender relations, girls have come a long way. They can be doctors or bus drivers and they no longer do housework alone. But the boys seem stuck in a narrow retro space. William and his doll still raise a big red flag.

That said, maybe there is a stronger biological imperative for boys, as you say, because boys pay such a high price for wearing that skirt that something unstoppable must be driving them to put it on.