A few days ago, in Recife’s airport, my daughter felt what we always feel, at times: the urge to use the toilet. As it also happens not so infrequently, her mentioning it was contagious, and so I walked with her to the nearest ones.

As expected, at least for the time being, there were two doors and two signs, one on each door: a little woman and a little man.

In view of current events, such as the approval of a law that allows children to decide, at school, which toilet or changing room they want to use, I couldn’t resist a little act.

I stopped my daughter right in front of the two doors and simply asked her where she wanted to go, which one she preferred. She was puzzled, to say the least, looking at me as if I had asked her a rather idiotic question.

– I’m a girl, daddy.

I told her I knew, of course she was, but that I didn’t want to be accused of abuse. That it was important that she didn’t feel at all coerced into any particular choice. That it might be the case that somebody could consider it a violation of her rights. That, in fact, I should have asked that very question a long time ago. That I probably shouldn’t even have taught her concepts such as boy and girl. That many people thinks that this is a matter of feeling and choice.

She was finding it all hilarious. Honestly. And she has a very powerful laughter.

– Daddy, I’ve got my little lady bits! You’ve got you boy bits. I go there and you go there.

I insisted that that meant nothing. That what mattered was what’s inside her head. She laughed even harder.

– Daddy, girls are girls and boys are boys!

I started giving up. Then I realised that there was a man close to us, walking into his societily, not biologically, appointed toilet. He was looking at us smiling and threw me a thumbs up.

I finally asked her whether I was forcing her into a choice. She said no, reluctantly believing that I was actually being serious.

I felt relieved. How many social points would I lose in China for failing in doing so? How many names such as tyrant, nazi, bigot, medieval, conservative, child abuser, totalitarian, traditionalist, maybe somehow even racist, who knows, would be thrown at me had I not done so? What about her? Wouldn’t it be better to go into a boys toilet just to show how tolerant and unprejudiced she is? Oh, I forgot the words intolerant and prejudiced in the aforementioned list. I’m glad there was still time! And what about me? I’d gain as well by her choice. It would allow everybody to see that I’m nothing like those zealots fathers that abound everywhere. That is actually what I should be more concerned about, am I right?

I should have walked into the girl’s toilet, which would have no repercussions on the grounds of said tolerance and fear of ugliness charges, and forced my daughter to go into the other one.

She might have objected, she might have felt that she was doing what she didn’t want to, that I was imposing on her an ideology that had nothing to do with her little lady bits, that I was, in fact, disrespecting all that is natural, logic, biological, visible, but she is just a child, what does she know of things?

If only I could go back in time and punch an x, or non binary, or n/a gender in her birth certificate so that no conditioning whatsoever of any ideological kind – it’s so hard to write this without pointing out the absurdity, the idiocy, the incoherence, the intelectual dishonesty that gender ideology encompasses – thus shouting to the world that I’m a modern parent – not father, naturally, for I don’t want to tarry in stereotypes!