What I've decided for my paper is emotional literacy, specifically in boys, and how it might connect to the gender binary. Does assigning gender roles from birth affect how boys grow up versus girls? Since I only have sisters I can’t draw from personal experience but I think if I had a brother he would have been raised differently than we were. We know how the gender binary affects transgender people. If assigned to be a boy at birth they would grow up feeling very confused when everyone treated them as so but on the inside they feel it isn’t right. Also it isn’t just boy and girl, there is agender and gender fluid as well. Perhaps one of the questions I would raise in my paper would be, would dismantling the gender binary be better for causes like feminism and gender equality? Would removing the binary not only help the trans community but everyone in the world as well? Are labels such as male and female unnecessary in the grand scope of things? I want these questions to possibly connect back to emotional literacy and if there were no gender to differ us, would ideas like ‘men shouldn’t cry’ vanish from the world. 

I lied, I do have something from personal experience. I was talking to my sister about this who pointed out she was raised like a boy. It was always the joke that she was the son my father never had. And so she happily adopted all the son like qualities; fishing, catch, mowing the lawn. These were things I did too but they weren’t expected of me in the same way. It’s still like this today. By the end of our conversation we reached the point I actually want to talk about. She felt it was totally normal and accepted by everyone to be a ‘tom boy’ as a child. She could easily go from wearing a dress to burping in public (or whatever) and society accepted her. A boy is much less likely to learn how to sew with mom than go fishing with dad, she pointed out. 

I often tease my mother and tell her if a ever have a son I fully plan on buying pink onesies to dress him in. "Why would I do that to him?" she asks, "Just because it’s your favorite color…”. Well, it might be his favorite too! We’ve never asked him and at this point he isn’t aware of social constructs of color. This whole idea appalls my mother, and I can’t understand why. For the first 8 years of my life everything in my room was light pink. Should we be changing how we fundamentally raise our children based on the gender we assign them at birth. With something like color it sounds frivolous...but masculinity is becoming quite fragile. 

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukebailey/masculinity-is-strong-and-powerful#.smPVnDxdB 

https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/40428_Chapter2.pdf

A fun link and a serious link