Opinion

I'm waiting for the first lesbian Disney Princess!

Friday 22nd of November 2013  |  Category: Opinion  |  Written by: Sharon Pickles

My little girl was singing ‘I kissed a girl, and I liked it’ by Katy Perry earlier this week.  She loves pop music and sings her heart out in the car when the radio’s playing; on this occasion she began to think about the words of the song she was singing. 

Her: ‘Is a girl singing this song, mummy?’

Me: ‘Yes’.

Her: ‘That’s really weird!’

You could hear the mechanisms of her brain whirring as she began to interpret the lyrics for herself, coming to the conclusion that a girl kissing another girl was weird.   Despite all our previous conversations, where I’ve assured her that it is absolutely right and normal for men and women to love and marry someone of the same sex, she is not convinced.  But then again, she's not keen on the idea of having to kiss boys either and informs me that although she would like babies, she doesn't want a husband!  

She is growing up seeing the conventional scenario of women marrying men within our wider family and friends and hasn’t seen another example to confirm my assurances that people have other choices about who they love.   Her little mind has been informed by stories, films and CBBC, where boys and girls fall in love and live happily ever after.  We don’t have any story books about how Prince Fred rescues Prince George from a dragon and marries him, but maybe we should.   I’ve never seen anything like this in Waterstones and confess it has never occurred to me before that our library of children’s literature was a bit one sided in its portrayal of family life. 

We have recently had a big family wedding where my little girl met a gay couple who are friends of her big brother and she was fascinated by the idea of how a same sex wedding would work.  She was curious about how a gay or lesbian couple sort out who gets to wear the wedding dress and although this was funny to us, it was a genuine puzzle to her in sorting out the logistics of same sex relationships.

Mumsnet are working with Stonewall to challenge the use of homophobic language in schools  e.g. ‘You’re so gay’ is a casual phrase that is used in jest but it can cause serious offence.  The campaign aims to educate schools and you can find a link to the campaign on Mumsnet, here.  Stonewall have a list of books for children that focus on same sex families and I wonder if I can find any of the books listed in Waterstones or WH Smiths?  Will there ever see a Disney princess falling in love with another girl and riding off together on a white horse into the sunset?  I look forward to the day when same sex relationships and families are a normal feature of children’s films and stories, not something to be made a special issue of.  In the meantime, it looks like it’s down to me to continue to try to educate my daughter whilst I wait for the first lesbian Disney princess to make an appearance. 


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