Dad in a skirt

Despite reading a lot about gender recently, especially the very scholarly and interesting articles by Professor Sylvia Walby, UNESCO Chair of Gender Research, about how different types of gender regime have developed in Europe and have influenced ways we think about gender, and why 'gender mainstreaming' is so European (lots of her articles are available here:http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/profiles/34 ), I've been too mentally fuzzy to draw many conclusions. This bodes ill for the draft of a gender policy for the NGO I work for.

So your gender tidbit for this week is something I spotted while at the local children's farm in the Westerpark area of Amsterdam with my 2 year old son this afternoon. There was a couple with a kid of about my son's age, but there was something about the father that made you look twice: he was about 6'4'' and well-built, wearing a plain black jacket, long biker-style hair, and: a denim knee length skirt, 60 denier brown tights and brown leather knee-length boots. He was cross-dressed, but not ostentatiously, really it was only the skirt that led one's gaze downwards to the boots. His wife was dressed in the normal Dutch anorak mumsy look which I was sporting myself. I wondered about the story behind it; would he have liked to look more feminine but restricted himself, or was he just making a statement? In any event the effect was very surprising, as the other parents there did the same double-take,  just because it so strongly confounded people's visual expectations of a father out with a toddler for the day. 

Next week: children's clothes.