How Baby

See also: my double-take when people in pregnancy spaces refer to themselves as ‘FTM’, leading me to greatly overestimate the number of AFAB trans guys in 2013 getting pregnant and referring to themselves with outdated acronyms.

‘Boymom’, if you haven’t come across it yet, is an identifier used by moms who have sons. Yes, to refer to themselves. Yes, as someone with a loosey-goosey attachment to gender, especially their own and everything people assume comes with it, I find it just as confusing as you might imagine.

I see the term used to evoke images of houses in chaos, of lone women surrounded by the masculine energy of their husbands and sons, desperately trying to keep their rowdiness under control, and I find it… well, worrying, that it relies so much on this idea that boys and men are spiritually different than women and girls. From there, it’s a short assumption that it is the responsibility of the feminine to provide a stable domesticity to the men in their lives, that men are inherently obstacles to order.  That raising daughters, somehow, would be easier. That, oh, because these women have no daughters, no one is on their ‘team’ in the house. It rankles me, and kind of makes me sad, to see this benign sexism perpetuated almost without question, that raising boys is a suffering because, gosh, boys will be boys, won’t they? It’s different, you see, to raise boys.

But the word is really cute! Boymom! What a cute word! Where are my other gender-nonconforming moms?! Why did you sleep on calling yourselves boymoms?! WE COULD HAVE HAD THIS ONE!