Disney just announced that they are going to be adding male fairies to their popular online community PixieHollow. Well, actually, they're going to call the male fairies something else, but still. And why are they adding them, you ask? Because the little girls and boys on the website figured out that if you make a fairy tall enough with short enough hair and a gender neutral enough name, that fairy can pass as a boy. That's right folks, our children have been creating transgender avatars for themselves!We often think of little kids as the most gender rigid of us all. While they may be obsessed with figuring out the gender of everyone they meet and asserting their own gender, that doesn't mean they can't get all fuzzy with the boundaries when they want to. Boys like pink and play with dolls and girls like blue and play with trucks all by themselves. It's when they get into a society that says these things are wrong that they start to shift their preferences - all to fit in. As Salon so brilliantly put it:

But maybe the most compelling reason for sneaking boys into fairyland is that despite our biological differences and the sex role expectations that start the moment we're wriggled into pink or blue booties, gender is a remarkably pliable thing. That's why little boys don't yet know there's anything unusual or transgressive about being single ladies and why little girls don't really need Burger King to throw in a necklace to enjoy an Iron Man Meal. No matter how depressingly divided the toy aisle may remain, children rarely tend to see the world and their place in it as being quite so limited.