Not long ago, I stripped Miriam of her jammies and reached for her shirt and pants combo of the day. "No," she said, waving away my hand. "Wear dress."

"No," I replied, "today we're wearing these." (It's an unfortunate but unavoidable fact that most moms refer to their children as we. Thus the inevitable stress when our children show any signs of independence. I wish I were speaking to my mother so I could apologize to her for this, but I'm not, for myriad reasons that could probably be boiled down to my need for independence from her. Gotta love that feedback loop.)

"No," Miriam growled. "Wear dress. WEAR DRESS!"

I suspected this day would come.

Despite my determined efforts to raise my daughter gender neutral, modern America accepts only two childhood colors: pink and blue. I discovered this after the birth of my first child, a son, whom I hoped to dress in tasteful yellow and green. After the nightmare of wandering the Mall of America while post-partum-depressed, I gave up and ceded control of his wardrobe to my mother-in-law. Elliott spent his infancy and toddlerhood in clothes of azure, sapphire, cerulean and indigo from the boys' department at Kohl's.

With Miriam, I thought I'd do better, and so I held my ground. "No," I repeated, "it's too cold today. We're wearing pants." To avoid a meltdown (my own), I left her bedroom for another cup of coffee. She marched out a few minutes later in the outfit I selected, rebellion forgotten.

Some time later, Miriam played with her doll-sized airplane, giving Ken and Sporty Spice a flight to warmer climes, no doubt. She placed the tail wing between her legs and began to chant: "I have a penis, I have a penis."

"No, you don't," I said while my husband cracked up. "You have an airplane."

"I HAVE A PENIS, I HAVE A PENIS," she sang happily.

Now, I support trans folks as much as any other dues-paying member of the Human Rights Campaign, but this was ridiculous. All apologies to my handsome husband and charming son, but the world needs more cool girls, not fewer. I calmly explained that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar is a toy airplane and she understood. Didn't she? It looked like it when she waddled off and started throwing Legos at her big brother's head.

These incidents troubled me, more so than I could have imagined. I searched in my heart for homo- and/or transphobia, but what I found instead was something far more frightening: childhoodphobia.

I know I'll be happy with the adult Miriam grows to be. Girl or boy, grrrl or boi, gay or straight, whatever: I'm her mom and I accept her. What I can't yet accept is the torture she will endure until she gets there. Much is written about a mother's heart beating on the outside of her body; in my case there seems to be not only heart and soul but gut, and every other physical metaphor for emotional vulnerability.

When Miriam demands a dress, I envision her blossoming into a Girly Girl, the type who plays into gender expectations little too well. This girl's rigidity makes her particularly vulnerable to the ugly side of female stereotypes, including fatal eating disorders and unquestioning support of machismo. When Miriam waggles around a fake penis, I see my baby become a Baby Butch, the tuff grrrl marching at Pride in combat boots. This type's personal experience makes her less likely to accept things at face value, but far more likely to be beaten to a bloody pulp in a vicious hate crime.

The movement for GLBT civil rights reminds us that gender and sexuality are a spectrum as lovely and fluid as a rainbow, but anxious mothers have a hard time with nuance. When we're trying to protect our kids, we see through two lenses: Bad and Very Bad. For between the rainbow's extremes are millions of soul-killing experiences that are endured as just (just!) a part of American maturation: "gay" still in use as a synonym for "stupid," Miley Cyrus pole-dancing at an awards show for young children, Teen Vogue, the unstoppable Disney Princess machine, the phrase "boys will be boys," a mother who regularly suggests that one might be happier if one acted more feminine and wore a thicker coating of makeup. Oh, I'm sorry. Were we talking about me? We weren't? Back to Miriam, then.

I want my daughter to be Who She Is without the heartbreak needed to get there. In short, I want her to be a post-therapy, fully Oprah-fied forty-year-old.
Childhood should be a time of joy and exploration, but even kindergarteners know that true freedom is not allowed. Every mother who shrieks that Legos can be enjoyed by boys and girls is undone the minute she rolls her cart into Target, where even those simple bricks have now been gender-coded. When even the usually sensible Danes fold to American consumer pressures, you know our kids are in trouble.

Stereotyping hurts everyone, not only the girls who die in emulation of high fashion models, or the boys like Lawrence King, fatally shot in his classroom by another boy who feared his romantic advances. Someday when my 12-year-old daughter cries herself to sleep in her bedroom, it won't make the news. What would is a concerted effort to stop gender programming entirely, starting in the layette aisle. I should have picketed the Mall of America back in the day, my wailing infant on my hip, chanting: "PINK AND BLUE, WON'T DO! DON'T BE MEAN, BUY YELLOW AND GREEN!" (I worry, though, that this approach would have only confused my audience, as Minnesota harbors many Wisconsin émigrés, all of whom remain unnaturally obsessed with the Green Bay Packers.)

In the mood for nostalgia, not regret, Miriam and I flipped through a book of family photographs. She pointed to a old bathtub shot of her big brother. "Look," she said, as matter-of-fact as ever. "I have a penis."

"That's not you, sweetheart," I corrected. "That's Elliott when he was little."

"My penis," she repeated.

I decided not to argue with her. Hell, maybe this stubbornness is the very thing she needs to inoculate her against what lies ahead. "Sure, honey," I sighed. "You're right. It is your penis. And you can do whatever you want with it." This made her happy, and she hugged me.
Postscript, several weeks later: Miriam tripped over the Hanna Andersson clogs handed down from an older friend Antonia and landed squarely on her still-cushioned baby butt. She grinned. "I fell on my penis," she snickered.

I checked that she wasn't hurt, then asked: "Did you really?"

"Yep."

I thought I might as well follow up. "Do you even have a penis, Miriam?"

"No," she laughed. "I don't have a penis. I'm a girl, you silly." She picked herself up and announced, "I fell on my nutsack." Then she clogged away.

Shannon Drury is a Minneapolis-based writer, parent, and activist. She writes a regular column for the Minnesota Women's Press, with additional work appearing in AlterNet, HipMama, and Skirt. She blogs at http://www.shannondrury.blogspot.com.