Growing Up Gender-Neutral: Playing Dolls House To Dirt-Riding, It Was Never A Big Deal For Girls

Double-batting was something that I believed was my birthright while playing cricket as an eight-year-old. When a new boy in the cantonment denied me my double-batting, I decided to teach the team a lesson. I took off with the bat and the wickets. I ran into the house and I asked bhaiya to latch the gate. On seeing this, my dad, then an Army Major, who was reading the newspaper in the lawn asked what the hullabaloo was all about. I told tell him that they were here to beat me as I had taken off with the bat and the wickets. My father told me to return the bat and the wickets, and also not come home with 'my tail between my legs', and get one of them at least. I went out... sized every single one of them... zeroing in on the smallest of the bunch, I got him and beat the daylights out of him while the rest beat the daylights out of me. This all happened under the watchful eye of the bhaiya by the gate who was smiling at the time.

You wouldn't expect to see this happen in today's day and age, where over-wrought parents get protective even in children's fights and on top of it, you sure as hell do not expect a father to say this, when the eight-year-old in question is a girl trying to outrun a cricket team of 8 to 10-year-old boys. This was back in the Eighties, a time when being a child, as well as a parent, was different than today. Today, this might be the furthermost thing from the standard definition of ‘Parenting 101’ and could even be seen as trying to toughen a kid, but for me, this was the first lesson in gender-neutrality that my parents inculcated within my conscious mind. This instance helped shaped one of the ways that I tend to look at things – everyone’s equal and everyone’s the same.

In 1974, some Lego building blocks were reportedly accompanied with letters to parents encouraging gender-neutrality in toy selection where the advertisement pamphlet suggested that the urge to create was equally strong in all children. Lego believed that it was imagination and not skill that counted and added, “a lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They’re more exciting than dolls houses.” As the chances of my father being inspired by the Lego advertisement were low it would be safe to say that perhaps the concept of gender-neutrality was a more natural thing in the Seventies and the Eighties.

Perhaps, being in the Army gave both my parents as many more fauji parents a wonderful perspective to adopt an unbiased approach from a gender point of view while bringing up children. Collectively labelled 'bachcha party', kids back then would usually be left to their own devices without the watchful eyes of the now omnipresent nannies. More often than not, the eldest amongst the kids would be entrusted with the responsibility to ensure there was no trouble and someone would play the latest kiddie film on the VCR in a bid to keep them hypnotised through the course of the evening, or the afternoon, while the folks went about their business. In a classic example of leading by delegation, the eldest kid would assign the task to the one younger than them in age and they, in turn, would pass on to the next in line and so forth till there was just one or two left in the lot who would have to be kept out of trouble.

As these situations would often occur at someone's home, so depending on whose house it was – boy or girl – the toys and games were the ones they liked. Perhaps, this is the reason why Army girls had no trouble shifting gears between playing Scrabble or cricket or playing house with dolls and planning a mission with letting G.I. Joe or assuming the identity of He-Man as he along with Battle Cat took on the evil forces led by Skeletor. Even when it came to rummaging through the comic stash, everything right from Tintin to Asterix to Barbie to The Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew were devoured with the same enthusiasm.

Back when I was growing up, I merrily put my doll to sleep every night with the same joy as jumping over the wall to get to my friend's home or playing cricket. But that didn't stop me from using my being a girl to my advantage – I would fight to be included in the cricket team with the boys and later demand special privileges sometimes (read 'one-tip-one-hand out' while I was fielding or double batting when they got me out) on account of being the girl. At times this led me to learn a lesson in equality – remember my own team chasing me – but all this came naturally to me and it was never a big deal.

It is not like gender-specific toys or books were not there back in the Eighties or the Nineties that the drive to raise children gender-neutral today ought to be hailed as a great achievement. The reason, perhaps, parents, or the world at large, gets into gender-specification at an early stage in childhood is probably to make children aware that there is a difference between boys and girls and the way they look at things. When the time came, these hard truths weren't brushed aside by my father and just as matter of factly as he had told me to 'get one of the at least', he told me that I could take on any boy up until 12 or 13, post which bodily changes would make them physically stronger. Later when I was leaving for boarding school he also forewarned me that boys would tell me that they liked me and ask me out but in school, such actions are largely a result of peer pressure or trying to look cool as opposed to someone really liking you.

Maybe that is why I could be friends with boys through high school and college without the thought of tags such as 'boyfriend' or girlfriend' even crossing my mind. Some would think that parents back then weren't 'cool' enough to be okay with things such as dating or being told about the 'relationship' you shared with someone. But, maybe, they truly were cooler than parents today who pose questions like ‘Oh, what a cute boy, is he your ‘boyfriend?’ to toddlers and somewhere thrust relationships upon children without them being capable enough to actually understand what it meant.

Come to think of it somewhere the idea of gender-neutrality as a thought was far more organic and inherent back then despite what many would like to believe. My first tryst with being a girl came when I hurt myself while playing a game of ‘dark room’ with friends and cousins. We used to aim a shoe or something at a suspicious shadow to make it blurt something following which the person would be called out and in the course of the game my boy cousin, who still had his football spikes on took it off and threw it at what seemed to be someone hiding. It turned out to be me and the spike got me square in my eye and I let out the loudest cry. Somebody ran to put the lights on and seeing blood flow from my eyebrow spooked my best friend, who ran and told my mother how she had warned us not to play ‘dark room’ but they didn’t listen and now ‘Tiny’s eye’s bleeding!’ My mother marched us ‘bachcha party’ to the Army MI Room (Medical Inspection) for first aid. Once there, I was more worried about keeping a brave face instead of showing pain or fear as all the boys were sure that I being a girl wouldn’t be able to hold back my tears during the stitches. Their eyes were glued on to me, but I didn’t even blink lest a tear roll out.

Much like the environment at home, in school, too, there existed an environment where both genders could be seen as different at times, but on no occasion treated differently, be it reporting for drill at the crack of dawn or front-rolling for punishment. Later in college, I could be hanging out with the boys without thinking of them as different or them seeing us girls as the 'other' lot. It is because of this that in Law school my friend could challenge me to a drag race between his bike, a Yamaha 350 CC, and my car, a 1000 CC Zen Classic, but I knew that I couldn’t beat his Yamaha in my car in this short sprint. So, I asked him to make the race fair by giving me his bike. Needless to say, the Yamaha and I triumphed, of course, but not before a full-throttle ride into the bush as amazingly enough, we were neck to neck until the last few seconds where I outran him and he braked before the bush and I went in. More astoundingly, all this transpired under the watchful eye of my Constitutional Law professor, who smiled, and didn’t report me to the chairman of Department of Laws.

Today, I come across adults who are shocked at my father telling me to 'get one at least', which, I must add, I did manage to. Similarly, the thought of a girl playing cricket or dirt-riding her bicycle with the boys is nearly an alien thought for the mind might jump from thinking of her as a tomboy to pondering over her orientation in a jiffy. Is the world too eager to highlight gender-neutrality by not letting things be organic or natural? Maybe the problem with out of the box thinking now is that perhaps we are too worried about the box than what to think.