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How To Mainstream Something

Heartwarming tale of spunky gender-fluid football tyke
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Says the reader who forwarded this story to me, “Oh my, it’s over”:

When Abby Scott of Monaca was 2, she told her parents she was a boy. As she grew, she disdained playing with Barbie and learned to play football.

For the past two years, the 8-year-old has refused to wear dresses or to let her mother do her long, curly hair, which has now been cut short. When a family member mentioned getting married someday, she said she would be wearing a tuxedo.

“She doesn’t want to do anything girly,” said her mother, Sara Markustic.

And that’s just fine by Ms. Markustic and Abby’s father, James Scott, who, like the rest of Abby’s family, and mostly all of her classmates, teachers, teammates, friends and neighbors respect that Abby is a gender-fluid child, who identifies most of the time with being a boy. And when Abby is identifying as a boy — such as when she plays football or is wrestling — she prefers to be known as Adam.

Abby’s gender-fluid story will be featured tonight at 10 on “Friday Night Tykes: Steel Country,” Esquire Network’s reality series about football in Beaver County. Adam is a lineman for the Monaca Little Indians, playing in a league with boys who are years older.

This world.

The reader, who lives in western Pennsylvania,  writes:

Helps to understand where this area is. One of the towns on this show is Aliquippa, one of the hardest of the hard scrabble mill towns, and the basis of the 1983 Tom Cruise football movie, All the Right Moves:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Right_Moves_(film)

In 1983, football in Aliquippa was a stand in for manliness in a way that was probably to hard headed and dysfunctional.

But now, in this same area… This.

Decline and fall.

Any bets on where this is going next? Friend of mine’s kid goes to a high school where there’s a senior girl who insists that she’s a wolf, and demands that everyone treat her as a wolf. Because it would be bigoted not to, I guess.

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