My daughter is five. She loves Disney princesses and magic girls, and her favourite colour is pink. However, one of her first words was “Spider-Man” (well, “Pie-Man”), and she’s loved robots since she was a baby. She collects unicorns, particularly ones that don’t have horse bodies, and she really resents that there is no toy of the Jessica Cruz Green Lantern from DC Super Hero Girls. At least none in my price range. Frankly, she seems in all this like a fairly typical girl of her generation, with interests all over the place.

We’ve encouraged her in all of them. When she and her brother wanted to dress up as Mario and Princess Peach for Halloween two years ago, I sewed them costumes. Likewise last year when she wanted to be Zatanna. For weekend after next, I’m sewing her a purple princess dress for the Renaissance faire, because that’s what she wants. (Well, she wanted pink and purple, but I chose two purples that looked really good together.) She is allowed to like whatever she wants, and we encourage her in her “girly” interests just as much as her geeky ones.

However, we also know that she’s going to face issues that her brother won’t with liking superheroes and robots and video games. (He’ll face issues because he is fabulous and can sew, but we’ll help him with those, too.) Her interests are genuine, of course. She’s too young to act interested in things that bore her, even if her idolized older brother is interested in them. That she could say “dookie-he-oh” before she was two isn’t something she should have to explain to every boy at her junior high who doesn’t believe that, yes, she really does know Clark Kent’s Kryptonian name.

My kids watch all kinds of things together, and funnily enough, I think Sandy’s more interested in superhero stuff than he is. I wouldn’t be surprised to know she’s going to encounter a few boys in kindergarten who assume that she’s watching these shows because her big brother likes them, and he insists he doesn’t like Super Hero Girls until we’re watching it and he can’t tear his eyes away. There are some things he legitimately likes better than she does on the geek spectrum, but not a lot.

Gatekeeping is a problem. A long-lasting problem. Sandy will encounter it over and over again. And before you can tell me it’s not actually an issue, understand that I once had someone tell me that I couldn’t not like Doctor Who because I hadn’t seen a specific episode, which is a bit much. Sandy already knows several variations on the Spider-Man theme. She knows all the characters from Big Hero Six, even though she’s bad at names and doesn’t always remember them. (She told me she loves “the one with the yellow and brown hair,” meaning Bumblebee.) She’s allowed, and we’ll make sure she always knows that.

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