Shiloh Jolie-Pitt's "Boy" Phase is Our Problem, Not Hers

No one ever said life is easy for the offspring of the rich, famous, and ridiculously beautiful. Shiloh Jolie-Pitt may be blessed with an intact family, devoted parents who need no naming, and a dearth of material cares, but the price she'll pay is media scrutiny of every public move she'll ever make. And as of late, the tabloid buzz is that the 4-year-old is having something of a gender identity crisis.

In March, a Life & Style cover paired a photo of Shiloh with a cute bob and one of her with an even cuter pixie under the accusatory headline "Why is Angelina Turning Shiloh into a Boy?" setting off a flurry of transphobic chatter we covered extensively here. This week the tongue-wagging picked up anew when Angelina herself touched on the topic in a new Vanity Fair cover story, nonchalantly explaining that Shiloh "likes tracksuits, she likes [regular] suits. She likes to dress like a boy. She wants to be a boy. So we had to cut her hair. She likes to wear boys' everything. She thinks she's one of the brothers."

Never mind that the mother of six also gushed that her son Maddox is "a real intellectual," (now there's a real titillating headline: "Child of Hollywood Chooses Life of Academia!") or that she goes on to describe Shiloh as "goofy and verbal, the early signs of a performer." If you relied on headlines for your news all you'd hear this week is the endless echo that Shiloh "wants to be a boy."

Aside from the obvious point that if adults were defined by their toddler-era tastes, we'd be a world of vegetablephobes who color for a living, the underlying notion here is that gender expression can be done wrong or it can be done right. That we are still gawking and gossiping about Shiloh's haircut and pants-preference is just an expression of our cultural discomfort with the idea that an individual — even a formative-stage one with a flair for performance — must at some level be held responsible for keeping their gender cards in order. And that's the truly freaky thing.

Photo credit: (be-holder)