Comments

  1. says

    Wait a minute…. Just because it is at SkepChickCon, and the child has long hair and cute face, should we be assuming the female gender?

  2. chigau (違う) says

    I didn’t think it was a ‘girly’ fist.
    Most kids in my karate class tuck their thumbs inside their fist, until we tell them not to.
    This person has their thumb in the correct place.
    Also, I think I see a bruise, so they may have been striking or blocking.

  3. Randomfactor says

    May she grow up to be a spaceship mechanic. Or whaterver her dreams are.

  4. Akira MacKenzie says

    That dude in the back…was this picture shot on the Galactica? (i.e. Ron Moore “what-the-fuck” version as opposed to the original “Ancient Mormon Disco Astronauts” version.)

  5. echidna says

    Chigau,

    You’ve fallen for the ‘girly’=’weak/wrong’ assumption. We can reject that association. Why can’t the correct fist (as in the fist that doesn’t break your thumb) be the ‘girly’ fist?

  6. twas brillig (stevem) says

    “Why isn’t there a male version of ‘girly’? What would it be anyway ‘boily’?”
    Nope, there’s only, “manly” vs. “girly”, exact opposites, dontchaknow.

  7. leftwingfox says

    echidna: I think you’re conflating Carol Sperling’s judgement of “girly” with Chiagu’s original use of “proper”, which they clarified as proper for martial arts.

  8. carlie says

    If the shot was taken one second later, and the middle finger came up, we would be having a totally different conversation.

    *sigh*. I can’t link to it, because even just the url is tripping the spam filter, but there used to be a feminist academician’s blog whose masthead photo was a little girl doing exactly that.

  9. Squid says

    If this is the girl I think it was, I was sitting next to her at the owl pellet dissecting table on Thursday. She said she was “very squee about owls” and seemed to be having a blast finding all the little bones in them.

    This girl is going places.

  10. says

    Kidlet’s Mom here, with some clarification points, just for fun:
    1. Kidlet in question is allowed to tell us at the beginning of each day which gender she is. (I use “she” because she’s a girl today.) We pronoun accordingly. Her boy name is the name she would have been given had she been born XY. Her current ratio of girl/boy days is roughly 20 to 1, but boy days happen. She is being raised around people who are quite happy to support this, including multiple trans* folk.
    2. She does in fact find owls to be squee. A couple of CONvergences back the Raptor Center’s photographer got a great shot of her in her Spidergirl costume, face to face with a teeny owl. It remains one of my favorite pics of her in her life.
    3. She and her bestest friend had a great time in the Skepchick room and dissecting the owl pellets. At first we were teaming up with the kids to dissect, but then they wanted and got their own to look into. Great stuff!
    4. She has no idea what she wants to be when she gets older. I sincerely doubt she will ever “grow up,” although I think she’ll be a great responsible adult.
    5. I can’t register for Skepchick, but I want to thank FTB and SkepchickCon for making Con even more fantastic. You rock!