Guest post by "z" @Tyler: I'm non-binary as well, so I want to put my take on this as another non-binary person.
These are CHILDREN. Play is WHAT THEY DO. When I was a child- I pretended to be disney characters. Our local librarian honestly thought my parents had named me "Cinderella", I'd pretend to be Tinkerbell and call my parents Peter Pan and Wendy, I had to be coaxed out of the Alice in Wonderland costume I wore CONSTANTLY. so they could wash it. Are you uncomfortable with a child who doesn't actually plan on being a parent playing daddy to a baby doll? Are you uncomfortable with a child who professes to want to be a ballerina building with blocks? It's the same thing.
Children play. It's what they do. It's how they learn, it's how they understand the world. Playing different roles develops empathy and understanding of others. Playing with gender like this is no different than pretending to be a doctor or teacher or stay at home parent or astronaut or dinosaur. People forget that- both you and cis parents who want to "set their kids straight" (pun intended). Sometimes it's underlying of a true desire (some kids who play doctor grow up to have a passion for medicine, some kids who play with gender grow up to be transgender), sometimes it's just for fun.
Most adults don't fully understand gender. Do you know how many adult trans people go through different stages of "playing" with gender before coming to realize who they actually are? "I'm just a straight woman like I'm supposed to be", "I'm a butch lesbian", "I'm a drag king" lg, "I'm genderqueer", "I'm a boi", "I'm a man"- lather, rinse, repeat. Sure, some people know from when they're 2- other people just feel a sense of "not right" and have to try on many identities to find the right one, other people know but try to run from it and bury it and so it takes that many stages to come to accept it.
Irma and Sarah have talked about this, when Irma was part-boy/part-girl for awhile. http://the-princess.funonthe.net/index.php?action=comics&cid=117 Sarah may still be upset by it, but it's not like there's no precedence for Irma/Irving doing these things.
And, really, think about what you are saying. You are saying that unless a child is proven to be transgender, children do not deserve to present differently than to their assigned sex. You are saying that Sarah's mother was right for trying to squelch a child's gender just because an adult didn't believe it's who she truly was. You are saying that if a child needs to play with gender to figure out who they are, that child does not deserve to figure out their own gender because it might hurt the kids who are fortunate enough to know who they are from the start. You are saying that cis kids need to be taught that gender and presentation are immutable rules, further othering and setting as "Different" trans kids.
