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As in the Monty Python hospital, children are also subjected to efforts at imposing "gender neutrality." In a recent Puffington Host essay, Vered Benhorin, a mother and music therapist, describes coming to grips with her discovery that her 5-year-old son is boyish. He woke her up one morning wanting to play:
I dragged myself to the living room where he had set up dinosaurs. He told me the rules: "My dinosaurs have superpowers and yours don't. Mine find yours and then kill them with their power!" That woke me up.
I wondered if I should say something to him about killing--again. I tried to redirect the violence in the play by having my dinosaurs offer friendship and joint living in a cave. He didn't bite. "No! they are not friends! OK mama? OK?" "OK," I said, in resignation. Because at that moment, it felt like I had lost that battle.
What happened to my gentle little boy who would cradle his dolls if they happened to fall on the ground? Where is the boy who would never consider the possibility of intentionally hurting another? And where did this one, who pretends to shoot others, come from? "My son will never do that," I used to say.
In time she began to accept that her son's masculine style of play is normal: "On some days I allow him to defeat me with his powerful dinosaurs. . . . On other days I fight back, unable to put my own sense of powerlessness aside."
It's a sweet story, though it's reminiscent of something disturbing. At one point Benhorin recounts that her son "wanted me to cut a gun out of cardboard so he could take it to school. Mortified, I imagined his teachers' reactions when they saw it." That was a well-founded worry. Over the years this column has chronicled too many reports of little boys subjected to harsh "zero tolerance" punishments--sometimes even including arrest--for engaging in ordinary horseplay. If the aim is to teach boys to be gentle, that strategy seems especially ill-conceived."