A few weeks ago Squirrel (2.5) was playing at a local playground. Somewhere between the Big Slide and the Wobbly Bridge, she ran across a temporarily-abandoned plastic toy sword. She had an instant Sword-in-the-Stone moment, grasping it by the pommel and hoisting it aloft:

The first thought that went through my mind when I saw this was, naturally enough for an Xennial,”She-Ra!”. I wish I’d managed to get a photo, but having your arms full of wailing 10-week-old while your toddler is literally running amok with a sword will push “capture the Kodak moment” right to the bottom of your agenda, unfortunately.

I looked around for the true owner of the blade, and after asking several groups of kids, found that it belonged to a group of masculine-presenting kids* playing on the other side of the playground. They very kindly agreed that Squirrel could play with their sword, “as long as he gives it back and doesn’t break it“.

* Interesting that I in turn made my assumptions about those kids’ gender, and didn’t think to question them until just now.

Now Squirrel, it has to be said, is currently a dead toddler ringer for very early-70s-era David Bowie. Medium-height, slight kid with a shoulder-length mop of honey-blonde hair that somehow magically unbrushes itself whenever her mum’s back is turned for five minutes.

She’s usually dressed in a lot of dark denim, blues and reds because I am a deeply lazy human being who hates doing laundy and whose kids are attracted to mud like Boris Johnson is attracted to dodgy dinner parties. And to those kids in the park that day, clearly she didn’t read as “She-Ra”. Instead, she was King Arthur, pulling the sword out of the stone.

It’s definitely not the first time she has been mistaken for a boy, and it doesn’t offend me in the slightest. In fact, having people call Squirrel and/or Otter “him”, or the nice older woman who complimented me on my “lovely little boys”, always makes me vaguely happy, and that is an odd set of feelings in itself. There’s probably some internalised misogyny in there — the part of me that thinks high femme and frills is less-than, weak and pointless and silly, the part of me that spent an entire afternoon as an 8-year-old sitting with my best friend melting the pink crayons out of her crayon box with a magnifying glass so that we could prove we were “proper tomboys” (in retrospect, how fucked-up is that?).

And yet I can’t help but wonder if her current gender presentation makes a difference to the way she experiences the world, and whether that will change as she grows older — if she decides for herself at some point that she wants to wear skirts and sparkles, how will the world feel different to her?

I remember her being very tiny, in between the lockdowns last year, only just starting to walk. One day she stole a football belonging to some nice teenagers in another local park. They grinned at one another and said “Aww, let him have a kick”, and she charged happily around their ankles for a few minutes. Would they have done that if she’d been wearing powder-pink and kittens instead of a navy blue coverall? There’s no way to know.

What doors close and open for a child based on how strangers perceive their gender?

Similarly, on the few occasions that Squirrel had interacted with babysitters and nursery workers (who obviously have known her assigned gender) I’ve noticed subtle, probably unconscious, attempts to direct her play — for example, seeing her scrabbling in a sandpit and encouraging her to pretend she’s making a cake, rather than building an earthwork or digging for pirate gold. Such tiny, unimportant interactions, yet they all add up. We might think that kids have no concept of gender yet, that all these worries and concepts are above their heads, but actually they’re thinking and puzzling and trying to make sense of it all the time.

Of course when Squirrel and Otter get to the ages where they can express a preference for themselves about these things we’ll honour those preferences (as far as possible without physically hampering them, at least — in my past life volunteering with children I’ve cared for girls who were unable to run and play properly because of flimsy, slippy-slidey sandals or constricting skirts, and it’s not what I want for my kids). In many ways I’ll be grateful when their preferences start to be expressed, because if they’re the ones choosing either femme or masculine presentation, I’ll at least know they’re actually getting what they want. But in the meantime it’s terrifying — I was prepared for the responsibility of choosing a name for a whole other person, picking their reading material and the things they would have opportunities to do for the first few years, but nobody warned me that at least until they’re able to express their own preferences, you’re in charge of choosing someone else’s gender identity too!

It’s almost certainly one of the things I’m getting at least slightly wrong, so I guess all I can do is approach it in a spirit of humility and prepare to adjust course as needed. In the meantime, my daughter is running amok on the playground with a borrowed plastic sword, full of the power of Greyskull and a toddler’s outsize joy. I wish she could always have this much freedom.