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This is a great article, I forwarded it to a ton of my teacher friends earlier today. I can't wait to buy some of the books they discussed for my son.

@PawPrints: Aww that's a bummer. Thankfully at my school lessons like that were encouraged.

Sounds like a good teacher.
I had a couple issues though. It sounds like she did a great lesson on how boys and girls can like the same thing but then at the end of the article she calls allie, who is a girl and wants to be referred to as a girl, as gender variant. That seems to go back on what the whole article was about, there's nothing gender variant about her just because she likes to wear her hair in corn rows and doesn't want to wear tight clothes in elementary school.
The other thing is I feel this is more a boy issue. I can put my daughter in pink and frills one day and blue and brown the next day and no one thinks twice when I say she's a little girl. However if a mommy of a boy put their little boy in pink and frills then people would think she's quite weird.

I actually like the idea of the article, but think the teacher is kind of going overboard. I know when I was little it would have made me VERY uncomfortable if the teacher was singling me out and writing entire lesson plans clearly, though not overtly, about me.

But in general, the lesson is a fun way to make kids think of different things. I remember "William Wants a Doll" from Free to Be You and Me, which had several songs about girls and boys both being able to do the same things, and that's from the 70s. So, it's not necessarily a new idea.

However, I think it's important to remember that kids compartmentalize information in different ways. It's not just what is expressly told to them that they process, it's how they view society as a whole. I remember when my youngest sister was little, she was shocked when she saw a woman smoking. She thought only men smoke because up until that point, she had only seen men smoke. A lot of children will attribute certain behavior to men or women based on what they see in their own home, not necessarily because the world or media has conditioned them to think that way.

@Mrsbells: I'm with you

I wore dresses EVERY DAY until well into the first grade. They were just more comfortable. But I also wore shorts underneath them so I could go climb trees and would regularly wear my "work boots" (Timberlands - what my dad wore to work). I mainly played with boys, because all my neighbors were boys, but I still played with dolls and did ballet. The first time my Mom let me "decorate" my own bedroom I picked out a comforter with green dinosaurs on it AND a princess mirror.

If you don't MAKE it a big deal, then children won't perceive it to be a big deal.