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A few weeks back, I was at a picnic with a bunch of married types who were passing around iPhones, showing "beat this" pictures of their adorable kids. There was a little bit of one-upmanship happening (pulled out the big guns -- panda jammies), and I guess it inspired this one guy to show us all a photo of his toddler son in full drag.

It's hard to cast a pall over a spring someone picnic, especially with a bunch of liberal Brooklynite parents, but the silence that followed was only broken when another dad finally chuckled, "Uh, what's happening in this picture?"

The father of the little boy in the photo rattled off some half-heard story about how his son's older sister probably wished he'd been a girl, because the two of them sometimes teamed up to dress him like a girl.

"Is this a routine thing?" asked a mom, and an awkward, abridged discussion about childhood "gender experimentation" ensued.

I felt like I should have weighed in. Being Single Childless Boyfriendless™, I didn't feel qualified for the earlier stuff. However, on the topic of children cross-dressing, I'm something of an expert.

Now, as I sit here at my job at a women's website where we talk about rompers and florals and diets other super-hetero girl things, I'm wearing a skirt and heels and my hair smells like whatever papaya stuff I very femininely smeared on it this morning. But growing up, I was the Shiloh Jolie-Pitt of my family. I dressed, as Angelina put it so aptly in a recent interview with Vanity Fair, "like a little dude."
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My Own "Montenegro Style"
I didn't necessarily act like a boy (I was the stripe of tomboy with no athletic skill -- more of the Pippi Longstocking, tree-climbing type than the "able to hold a basketball without sustaining a critical injury" type). I hated having to dress up -- particularly pleats, bows, skirts, and tights. I regarded girls who favored pink and purple the same way I now regard grown women who read the "Twilight" books in public. I had equal amounts of friends of both genders, and preferred drawing or playing with Ninja Turtles to dolls. When I play-acted with other kids, I always assumed the role of a boy -- mostly because of the close-cropped, early–Matt LeBlanc hairstyle I favored. In high school, I wore men's jeans and shoes and occasionally shaved my head. I was mistaken for a boy pretty much up until I grew breasts.

After the VF article dropped, I asked my mom if this extended boyish phase had wigged her out at all. "You were different," she said diplomatically. "You definitely weren't a feminine little girl. But little kids all have favorite outfits and like to wear what they like to wear. Your sister liked pretty things and dresses, and you liked sweatpants and overalls. I mean, I hope you don't wear those things out of the house now."

Shiloh's mom was a little nicer, describing her look as "Montenegro style ... She likes tracksuits, she likes suits. She likes to dress like a boy. She wants to be a boy. So we had to cut her hair. She likes to wear boys' everything. She thinks she's one of the brothers." Read: little kids like to wear what they like to wear. You may have loved a magenta turtleneck patterned in teddy bears eating watermelons growing up. It doesn't mean you're going to wear that to your job as the assistant D.A.

Just to be super-safe, I emailed Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist and columnist, and asked him if we should all be flipping over vans in the streets because the dude from "Meet Joe Black" has a little girl who likes Rocawear.

"It's age-appropriate for Shiloh to take on and explore other identities as she's likely striving to be like her brothers," he wrote back. "If indeed she picks out her own clothes, then that's healthy, as she's learning to make choices and think independently."

Also -- come on. Shiloh is one of six children. If I had six kids and one of them decided that she identified as a "mid-century-Mexican stereotype" and wanted to wear a sombrero and a fake bandito stache, I would probably let her because she's not hurting anybody and oh my God, I'm so tired, I have six kids.

Is It Just a Phase? Who the Hell Cares?
Why is the fact that a little girl wants to be a little boy such a huge deal? After everybody had a collective wig-out over the VF quotes, Salon's Broadsheet blog wondered why the "notion of a child so steadfast in her refusal to conform to traditional gender roles, so very young, is such a goddamn novelty ... [a]nd that a parent so comfortable and casual with it is even rarer?"

OK, yeah, we all know that cliché movie moment where the gay character talks about how his family knew he was "different" when they found him clomping around in his mom's high heels. But the fact is, most gay men don't cross-dress as kids. We've known since PRETTY MUCH FOREVER that transvestism does not equal gay. (I mean, they say as much in "Psycho" for God's sake, and that movie was made when people thought centaurs were real.) And for the percentage of the population of kids who cross-dress and do end up being gay, I ask you: What's the big damn deal with being gay?

I never really grew out of my tomboy phase. (I still won't wear anything pink or cross my legs on the subway, and I can't, for the life of me, understand lip gloss or reality TV.) I'm also one of those people who could really care less about clothing. But otherwise, I pretty much dress like every other girl who's cruelly forced to Not Wear Sweatpants to work. And as for liking dudes? Uh ... yeah. Definitely. Some might even say too much.

Look, if you're one of the people who's upset by Shiloh, I can almost guarantee you that you have bigger things to worry about than the gender identity of a stranger's child. Go read a book or worry about the f**king oil spill.

Julieanne Smolinski is an editor for Lemondrop. She likes weapons, motorcycles, baseball and consensual heterosexual sex.