Challenging My Belief System

This may seem trivial, but as a seven-year-old child, my bunny being a girl was something I believed for close to two years, something that influenced naming the bunny. When I went to the vet with my bunny for the first time, finding out that it was a boy was hard news. I made the vet double check and triple check to make sure that my bunny was indeed a boy, and not, as the pet store had told me, a girl. When I finally accepted that my bunny was indeed a male, the next crisis came up; his name was Violet, which to me was a girl’s name. I sat there thinking about how to change it (and honestly, how I was going to break the news to my bunny that it had a new name?), because a boy could never be named violet in my seven year old brain. My mother told me that it was ok to leave it, that my male bunny could have whatever name I wanted and he could in fact be named Violet. This was weird to me because as a child I was always told, this is for boys and this is for girls, if not directly, by the media I was exposed to and the subtle nuances that invaded my life. At this point, I was confused; this challenged the idea that there were boy names and girl names and extended to the divide between girls and boys in every other aspect. I thought about this idea of having a boy bunny named Violet, breaking the gendered name barrier, and by the end I figured that it was still the same bunny, he was still a bunny, and like a human, did not deserve to be renamed part way through his life. I decided that he would be Violet the boy rabbit and he would rock it! After this, I became quite the advocate for breaking down these male-female barriers with my peers, getting into arguments about the idea that there is no such thing as a boy color or a girl color. This has continued into my life now because it allows me to let people be who they want to be, without judging them because they don’t follow the script that has been laid out for them based on who they are, where they are from, their gender, etc. My old beliefs are still minutely present in certain situations, but it situations where they are wrong, I am able to easily recognize this. Although this was a hard thing to accept, as a seven year old, in the past 13 years it has helped to shape my beliefs on gender roles.