At a play group we attended recently for queer families with little kids, we were asked to fill out a new form for participant tracking by the host organization. Beyond some basic demographic questions you've probably been asked before, one question asked: how does your child describe their gender?

For the new baby, we simply wrote: baby. But, we have never thought to ask our three year old this, so we went ahead and did that. Her other mom asked her: "Do you feel like a boy, a girl, or not a boy or a girl?" And our adorable kid said: "I am not a boy and not a girl. I am [her first name]. I am a big sister!"

I've been thinking a lot about this and I really like Big Sister as a possible gender identity. And it honestly fits our kid very well at this point! She has not yet developed a firm grasp on traditional notions of gender. She currently uses "him" as the third-person singular pronoun for pretty much everyone, in every place you'd stick a pronoun in a sentence. ("What is him doing? Him is reading a book to him's mama.") I have seen no indication that she has much of an idea of what might make someone a boy or someone else a girl, or what it would mean for her to be either one of those. I don't expect this to last forever or even much longer at this point; I've read that kids form a gender self-identity pretty young, as well as beginning to recognize gender stereotypes, even despite the efforts of their parents to de-emphasize stereotypical gender norms. But regardless, for now, the idea of being a boy or being a girl doesn't seem to hold much weight for my kid.

It's also pretty recent that my kid has become interested in self-identifying as anything other than her first name. When she would pretend to be Spider Man, if asked directly, "are you Spider Man?", she would say "No, I am [first name]!" This week she was pretending to be a kitty and I asked if she was a kitty: she said yes! It felt like a big cognitive milestone in pretend play.

When she says she is a big sister though, it feels very different than when she said she was a kitty. She knows a decent bit about what it means to be a big sister, even if she does not yet grasp that traditionally "sister" is a term used only for girls, and that it refers to the relationship between siblings. (She sometimes says that she and her toddler besties are "sisters together", and also sometimes that they are married, all of which she seems to think mean basically that they are good friends.) But, we read books while I was pregnant about being a big sister, and about what it might be like to have a new sibling join the family.

She knows from "I am a Big Sister" by Caroline Ann Church that big sisters are helpful. They can grab fresh diapers and find pacifiers. They play quietly when the baby is sleeping, and dangle toys near the baby. From our conversations, she knows that she will be able to help her baby sibling learn stuff. She likes watching Olympic highlight videos; she told us confidently months ago, "when my baby brother is here, I will teach him about the Olympics." She has also promised to teach him about football, a sport which I am pretty sure she knows absolutely nothing but she heard me say on the phone once.

She is clearly taking her helpful role very seriously. She doesn't limit herself to finding pacifiers; she would very much like to be the one to stick it in his mouth. She shouts "it's okay!!" and comes running from across the house when she hears him cry. When he got his little baby nails trimmed for the first time, she sang "have no fear, do do do do" to the tune of the Baby Shark song. (We have since realized she picked up "have no fear" from the Cat in the Hat book.) At dinner one evening, my mom wondered aloud if the overhead light was bothering the baby. Big Sister jumped down from her seat, ran to fetch her stepstool, and turned the light off. I asked her to leave it on so we could see our food and she was adamant: "No! My baby brother needs this off."

So back to gender: Big Sister is clearly a category that my toddler understands to be defined by certain behaviors and best practices, in addition to a particular social role she plays in relation to others (the little sibling being the most key relationship, of course). It is a category she was placed into by circumstances outside her control (the arrival of a sibling), but which she has very clearly chosen to embrace. She could also have chosen not to take on the mantle of Helpful Big Sister (which we might consider as gender norms/assumptions of what makes one "good" at expressing the gender). And other people still might have called her a Big Sister because of that situation outside her control, but she might have resisted having it define her, insisting that she be recognized more as her own self or without regard to that sibling relationship, or in some other way instead. Just like how people sometimes resist gender norms while continuing to identify as the gender they've been assigned at birth by others, or how some people end up identifying in a different way and may or may not uphold gender norms alongside that identification.