Why I Didn't Want My Son to Wear a Dress

When Matt Cheplic’s 4-year-old son announced his desire to dress up as Snow White for Halloween, Cheplic was troubled. “But why?” he wonders on Salon, insisting that he didn’t see the dress “as a threat to my legacy, an insult to generations of men who fought wars and presided over propane grills” or as a sign of a future “same-sex, vegan wedding.” Rather, his fear—later confirmed—was “children who mock other children.”

Indeed, Luke soon finds that his female classmates don’t like his proposed costume, and his parents convince him to be Barney at school, saving Snow White for the evening’s trick-or-treating. But when Cheplic catches up with his trick-or-treating son, he’s “in civilian clothes, his listless body slumped in a stroller. He looked sapped, the apparent victim of a common cold—though I suspected a different, more insidious pathogen,” he writes. At just four, “my son had learned the value of muffling what he truly wanted to be.”
(More childhood stories.)