A mum has sparked a huge debate online after she shared a photoshoot where her son posed in girls’ clothes.
While the trend is towards gender-neutral clothing, a mother caused a scandal on Tiktok by announcing that her son had posed for a photo shoot with clothes from the girl department of a children’s fashion brand. Ebony, is known online as @ebony_andthreeboysx, during the 24 second video she shares several snaps from the day, where her son, all smiles, wears an array of rompers and liberty outfits and a bow in his hair. Her son is adorable and seems delighted with this activity. Aware that the sequence was going to make people react, she adds under the video: “The haters will hate. It was not planned but the little girl was not available so he took over”.
“He knows what he is. It was a modeling shoot, not his everyday outfit!”
Ebony’s video garnered over 377,600 likes and 3.7 million views. Some of the comments are scathing and accuse the mother of playing with her child’s gender identity. To which she retorts that her son knows very well that he is a boy and that there is no debate to be had on it. Other subscribers, on the other hand, support the mother. “I don’t see why everyone is freaking out. He doesn’t care what he wears and knows he’s cute.”
We can congratulate ourselves on the sincere approach of the mother who has shown that she freed herself from stereotypes, except that at the same time she reinforced them. Already, it starts with this sentence which can question: “When your son is so pretty he can participate in a girls’ clothing shoot”. To consider that because a baby is beautiful he looks like a girl is already a gender stereotype, is to consider that beauty is first and foremost a feminine attribute. Then, we can only regret that the outfits are very gendered: knots, small ruffles and pink of course. We would have preferred a shoot with more mixed clothes and models of both sexes.