The Law of Unintended Consequences

As I have mentioned in passing before, my children are developmentally behind, technically speaking, in their correct use of gendered pronouns. We've been working gently but slowly at bringing them into line with a genderqueer-friendly version of standard English usage. But April in particular lags behind her peers and tends to use "he" and "her" as default.

Today on the playground my daughters were accused by an older child of calling names:

"She called me a 'he'!"

I was a bit abashed to try to explain to the older kid's caretaker how, in fact, my child was not intending to be mean by that usage.