Who are you?

I just thought I'd direct your eyes and thoughts to something that I think is pretty great. It's a little story I found over on Tumblr about gender issues and children. 

 I am pretty jealous of these kids, because never in the time that I have been in school have any of my teachers touched upon the subject of gender boundaries. This is so unbelievably stupid that I can't really wrap my brain around how this is even possible. This teacher has the right idea, by teaching children from a young age that they can't have these 1950's idea of genders, it saves these kids a lot of self hatred and hatred from other people. 

 I personally spent most of elementary school feeling ostracized  for dressing and acting like a boy, even from my best friend. Actually I still feel that from him and it's kind of frustrating, but that is neither here nor there. It wasn't until third grade that I started to feel like I wasn't the weirdest kid in the whole school. That's when I met my friend T. She, like me, identified herself with the male gender and faced the same relentless teasing and got into twice as many fights over it. T and I spent most of our childhoods taking care of each other and making a little family for ourselves, and even today I tend to call her "Dad" and she calls me "son". Having T as a role model helped me get through things that tore other kids up inside, pretty easily. Realizing that I liked girls, for example, I didn't have any kind of huge life changing realization or anything, it just kind of clicked because my first crush was The Little Mermaid and I happened to really want to kiss this girl in my class.

 It was not as easy for other kids in this big, bad world. You always hear about kids being bullied into depression and suicide because they are homosexual, or transgendered. Even if a kid isn't pushed that far, being bullied can really harden a kid's heart, but it can also make them push overs, vulnerable kids that will do anything if they think someone will hurt them if they don't. If teachers and parents would just touch on this subject, and make it clear that there does not have to be a huge wall between the genders, it would be one less thing that kids get bullied over and one less thing that kids will beat themselves up over.