9-year-old boy bullied for wearing lipstick. Here’s what the cousins did.
In today’s world where people tend to stand for gender neutrality, a 9-year-old Allahabad boy was bullied because he wore red lipstick. While he was awarded a derogatory term, his elder cousins came out in support by wearing the same lipstick and making him feel comfortable in his own skin.
In a thread of tweets, the boy’s cousin Diksha shared that her cousin, whom she preferred to call Little Cuz in the tweets, is "the most 'effeminate' in the house." She revealed that he loves to paint his nails and do household chores, for which he often becomes the target of mean jokes and derogatory comments.
She said, “My cousin, 9, is the most “effeminate” in the house. Let’s call him Little Cuz. Loves to paint nails, wear lip colour, learn home science! But in this stereotypical alpha male-centric household he’s often the pivot of jokes. Today he applied lip colour & got called a “chakka” (1/n)”
Diksha revealed that as the result of these homophobic comments, "he(Little Cuz) hid behind the curtain & under the bed, shielding his lip coloured face from the camera & from his mom.” So, in order to make him feel accepted, the elder cousins decided to wear the same lip-color and get clicked. This gave Little Cuz confidence to face the camera and he came out smiling seeing that his elder brother is also wearing the lipstick.
Such brave act from the cousin's side definitely made the little boy feel empowered. Diksha wrote, “In such a house it takes constant work as elder cousins to undo the conditioned gender binary, normalize gender neutral acts which are deemed feminine. So we all wore lip color to make him comfortable & accepted. He felt a specially empowered when he saw my brother wearing it(3/n)”
This heroic incident made the boy and cousin Diksha go viral on the internet. The picture which shows Diksha and her siblings wearing lipstick has gone viral with over 4,000 likes and hundreds of retweets. More than that, Diksha felt happy for Little Cuz because he gained the confidence of facing people who tell them that it is not normal to choose pink because he is a boy.
Diksha also shared another incident in which Little Cuz reprimanded the ones who tried to make him feel ashamed of his choices and self.
The story of the little boy getting empowered and his cousins received much love and praise from the Twitterati. They applauded Diksha and said, “The world needs more sisters like you”. One Twitter user also came in support of Little Cuz by posting a picture wearing lipstick.
