When I was younger, a lot of the books I read were about boys. Certainly, I also read a lot of novels centered around women (think Laura Ingalls Wilder), but a good chunk of my bookshelf was dedicated to boyhood adventures. It was an odd imbalance when I look back on it: most of the fantasy and adventure novels focused on boys, while most of the historical fiction was about girls.

Perhaps that imbalance is why, in the fifth grade, I remember talking to a male classmate and agreeing that “boy books are just better.” I don’t think we were both raging sexists at the age of eleven–rather, I think we were each acknowledging something more complex than we could recognize.

We had noticed that children’s books about boys and children’s books about girls often covered different themes. The books about boys were focused on adventure.  They were about sneaking around, being a rebel, and taking risks. The girls books were more in the realm of realistic, often historical, fiction–talking about relationships, school, and things of that nature.

Even when the books weren’t fiction, they retained this quality. I owned a copy of “The Dangerous Book for Girls,” but frequently snuck into my brothers room and stole the “The Dangerous Book for Boys” off his bookshelf and leafed through its pages.  Both books had essentially the same title, and yet different content.

They contained a lot of very similar activities, and yet somehow they were still gendered. When I was more interested in reading about how to craft the perfect paper airplane than how to fold an origami swan, I had to turn to the boy’s book.

It was a personal preference, not connected to my gender, and yet the books had gendered it for me.

It’s not that there was a disparity in quality between the boys and girls novels.  There was a disparity in topic.  And so, for girls like me, who desired a story about fighting monsters and wielding weapons just as much as I wanted a story about best friends, I lacked female characters to read about, which is what led me to say, “Boy books are just better.”

I took pieces of evidence and put the puzzle together wrong. I had connected “Books about boys have adventure” and “I like to read about adventure” to create “I like to read books about boys,” rather than “Authors write adventure books about boys instead of girls.”

We’ve come a long way since I was in fifth grade, with the rising popularity of books like “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent,” but we have farther to go.  When books like “The Dangerous Book for Boys” contain separate content from “The Dangerous Book for Girls,” we do more than just unnecessarily gender things–we make people feel out of place.

I felt like I was breaking some rule by looking through my brother’s book. I would do it in secret, stealing it when no one was around and quickly reading a couple pages before shoving it back on the shelf and running away.

I was never told not to read “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” and my parents certainly would not have objected or even cared at all. It was not a rule that was explicitly imposed, in other words, but it was subtly pushed onto me.

I didn’t know where the rule “Don’t read a book for boys” came from.  All I knew was that I had to follow it. And so I felt like the content of the book was somehow off limits too–I never made that paper airplane or attempted to tie that complicated knot.

These children’s books didn’t just gender themselves, they gendered the world that they existed itn.  They made knot tying and hair braiding into gendered activities when they had not been that way to me before. They sorted the world into boy’s and girl’s things, and so built walls around what I could and couldn’t do.  They made me feel out of place for wanting to fold paper one way instead of another. And so, if we want to abolish the idea of gender roles, we need to start with the children’s books we read to the next generation.

And so, if we want to abolish the idea of gender roles, we need to start with the children’s books we give to the next generation.