I don’t know if it was like this for you all, but when I was a kid, so many of the ads for girls were about playing out motherhood

Take your kid to the grocery store, get everything the family needs, all sorts of really specific stuff. They got really elaborate in the 90s, like you could have a bottle where the baby looks like its drinking the milk, and then it’d cry and you’d burp it, which would restore the milk somehow.

Lots of people look at this as indoctrination probably, and I mean, it is, but also I still like that it offers a possible future for girls to imagine for themselves. I couldn’t even imagine that trans existence was possible for me back then, so I’d just imagine myself in the most outlandish and impossible boy-coded futures. But I wasn’t even imagining myself in them, I wasn’t there, it was just sort of happening.

I think I could’ve been present for a boring domestic future, it would’ve been nice to have that to imagine. I’ve been able to sort of get there in my real life, though I don’t know if I’ll ever be responsible for life more intelligent than a cat. But that’s not too shabby, cats are great!!

I still wish that I’d had the chance to be a normal, boring mom. I would’ve been so good at it.