Have you played with cross gender toys before?

[Shelley]

I was always an outdooors kid who spent a lot of time escaping into my own world. Toys were never really abig part of my life.

Shelley

[jan c]

toys were not a big factor, if at all. I had a sort of toy snare drum, or a very very cheap one; i always used the pots and pans etc to make a kit of drums, eventually was provided with a real one around 10 years of age. Then i got a guitar.

[Sarah Louise]

Toys were a luxury, something I didn't get very often and when I did, it was something my parents wanted me to have, not something I wanted.

Sarah L.

[Andre]

we have a courtyard in front of the house so..most often play(ed)-still have moments<blush> with pets(prefer cats)...and with other kids: hunting(one-trapper..others-animals), cowboys&Indians (used arch&arrow), puzzels, chemistry games(ruined all my better shirts), Barbie dolls with friends yeah..I was man doll Ken..and had plenty of girlfriends..those were days LOL ...
also marbles...lego...I loved to play with flame and shadows..create animals by hands...also loved to make different stuffs from paper....draw...paint..mask...act..

my favorite game is still TinkerBell and Peter Pan 

[Owen]

Well I had my matchbox cars and trainsets plastic model cars too. But I also played with my sisters barbie doll's when she wasnt around. I loved to dress her up in different outfits.


Owen
love being female

[Lori]

We have two girls living in this house, one is 10 and the other 7. You couldn't get the 10 year old to touch a barbie doll ever since she was a baby. It was all bugs, and dirt and she is about as girly as the boy next door. The seven year old loves clothes, and shoes, and pantyhose, getting her hair curled and being a girl. She loves her ear rings and her ears are pierced. If you tried to pierce the 10 year olds ears, she would need psychotherapy. She will wear a skirt now and then and her hair is long, but that is about all she does for being girly.

I suppose there is a huge difference in TG's as well on how girly some are and some are not. I'm a jeans and blouse gal. Or capris....skorts, shorts. They have such cute jeans out now anyhow.

[stephanie_craxford]

I suppose there is a huge difference in TG's as well on how girly some are and some are not. I'm a jeans and blouse gal. Or capris....skorts, shorts. They have such cute jeans out now anyhow.

Don't forget that there is a big difference in TG's that some are male and some are female and some are both...

Steph

[umop ap!sdn]

Hmmm, let's see... I had "stuffedy" animals (i.e. plush toys, but you'd never have caught me referring to them as toys - nope, to me they were real animals, LOL), Glo Friends (anyone else remember those?), Smurfs, Mr. Potato Head, Hot Wheels, various board games, but probably what I spent the most time playing with were Lego blocks (especially the outer space series) and those Radio Shack electronic experimenter kits with the spring terminals. Yep, I was a science buff from an early age.

Boys that I knew had their Transformers and GI Joe and basketball and to me that was all just yeah whatever. "Different kind of kid" wow that's exactly how I felt around boys! Around girls I just sorta felt like I fit in.

[Melissa]

and those Radio Shack electronic experimenter kits with the spring terminals. Yep, I was a science buff from an early age.

I had 2 of those. I started when I was 8.  My teenage years were very focused on electronics and I built and invented a number of projects including small telephones sytem, an alarm system, and a programmable robotic arm that I designed.  I've always been a tech girl.  In fact I recently threw together a better alarm system (using a PIC chip, LCD display and keypad) and a digital counter that could be reset with a password.  That's something I'll probably play around with again once I get a better handle on my GID.

Melissa

[umop ap!sdn]

Wow you did a lot more than I ever could! But I think my ambitions were too high. Wanted to build a whole computer and a six legged automaton. Not sure if the biggest obstacle would have been getting a darkroom set up or programing the UVEPROM. 

[Melissa]

That's what's great about PIC chips.  They are cheap and easy to program. No dark room required. They contain a processor ram and an eeprom all in one package.  I built a programmer for them that attaches to my computer from a design I found on the internet.

As for building a computer from scratch, well, that may be a bit too ambitious.  It would probably be cheaper overall to just go out and buy one.

However, the six-legged automaton might be a fun project.

Melissa

[Kimberly]

That's what's great about PIC chips.  They are cheap and easy to program. No dark room required. They contain a processor ram and an eeprom all in one package.  I built a programmer for them that attaches to my computer from a design I found on the internet.
...

^{*ears twitch*}
Really? Last I looked into such things the programmer things were multiple thousands of dollars.

Interesting!

I still want to make a custom countdown timer but I find electronics are like automobiles for me, I can be told a thousand times and I'll still have to ask again. ^*sigh*

[Melissa]

I think the parts for my programmer altogether were maybe $50 and the software was free.  I'm a little surprised that you find electronics difficult Kimberly, seeing how you are a programmer like myself.

Anyhow, here's the link to the design:
http://www.bobblick.com/techref/projects/picprog/picprog.html

And a link to the free software:
http://people.freenet.de/dl4yhf/winpicpr.html

In case the admins delete these links, both of these can be found by googling "classic pic programmer" and "winpic" and clicking on the first result.

Melissa

[deneece]

most of my play mates were girls when I was small.... so I did play with dolls a fair bit....  my folks bought me boy toys.. but I never did like playing with guns or cowboys an indians... i liked light bright and spirograph

[Kate]

However, I was heavily into 'Action Man' (UK equivalent of GI Joe), so much so that I think it annoyed my father, and I can clearly remember one instance of him giving me a hard time over 'playing with dolls' about it...

LOL, ah the memories... I had a huge collection of "Action Jackson" dolls (I believe that was the name - wonder if it's the same?). Sort of a petite, smaller, metrosexual GI Joe. Far less oriented around killing anything that moved, and more into rescues and firefighting and exploring. I loved creating "homes" for him out of boxes and cases, and arranging all his "stuff" around it to make it comfy and cozy. His buddies were always visiting.

And yes, I had the insane stuffed animal collection. I had so many I'd make a pile in just flop into them. Snakes, bears, rabbits, tigers, monkeys... I held on to them as long as I could until mother started hiding them on me. I'll never forgive her for taking away my comfort blanket.

TONS of army men. I loved those little guys. I'd spend days arranging them. Oddly, they never fought any battles. I just loved setting them up, deciding who belonged to which groups, where to put them, who liked who, and so on.

The rest of the years were filled with model building, tinker toys, then legos. I never thought of these as "girlish," but curiously, I recently read an article were somone suggested that model building is the closest TSs (m2f) can get to the "doting" behaviour girls show their dolls.

No actual girlie dolls or EasyBakes though. I've always enjoyed my male toys, though I seem to fit them into a feminine context. Even now I love playing Halo (shoot 'em up video game), but I feel GUILTY killing anyone, lol. I watch the score and make sure no one is losing by too much, try to help people doing bad, and so on.

[Gabrielle]

I have younger sisters so we always played together, they wanted to play house a lot and it gave me an excuse to play with other girls and not get in trouble.

[Nero]

I always received stuff like action figures, legos, castles, forts, toy soldiers, etc. My father would actually join in and play with me. That's one of my favorite memories and I cherish it, because I have no chance of acceptance from him. Oh, and he built me this fantastic race track for my hot wheels.
But I also received dolls. Sometimes I even asked for them in the hope that I could convince the girls to play with me. This did not work. I got a baby doll for Christmas one year and went over to where the girls had set up "house" complete with cribs and strollers. I held up my doll, and asked if I could play. I had a doll now too, how could they refuse me? No, a doll was not enough for admission to the girls' club. You had to have something else, something all girls have, some inborn knowledge they possess, some secret code. I was never able to decipher this mysterious code, this ancient language of women. Girls wouldn't let me get close enough to figure it out.

Nero

[Rana]

To my shame a memory surfaced.  I think that the civilized part of my brain had buried it

There was an instance of my playing with cross gender toys - if you could call it that, and its not an indication of some dark impulses?

Once a friend and I, used his sisters dolls as enemy soldiers, lined them up in rows, and then massacred them with our slug guns

"Die Japanese, North Korean, German soldiers, your human wave tactics will prove useless to you now, That will teach you for daring to mess with the Australian army"

I think, and hope that my friends sister had that many dolls that she did not miss the dozen or so we used
actually I feel a bit bad about this.  Young boys have the capacity to be evil little rats

Rana

[HelenW]

A local gun club had a "Barbie Shoot" night to attract female gun enthusiasts - they were invited to bring their old Barbie dolls and use them for target practice at the gun club's range!  >

I guess that's one way to protest the unrealistic body image that Barbie dolls promote!

helen

[Kate]

I remember my parents taking me to a carnival when I was very young. I won at one the games, and was given the chance to pick my prize from a collection of toys and things on the counter. Hiding amoungst the cars and army men was a beautifully colored girl's hair clip. I couldn't help myself, it was just so pretty, and I picked it up, hoping maybe somehow it'd magically give me the hair to wear it too.

Before I could even look at it, the guy running the booth and my mother were both saying, "no, no... that's not for you..." and pulling it from my hands. Even now I remember how embarassed they were, and how ashamed I felt for not realizing it was so "wrong" to do.