A four-year-old girl who wants to be Spider-Man inspired a gender-free superhero parade in NYC.
It’s easy to get cynical if you view the world through the lens of social media.
But sometimes humanity can still surprise us. Such was the case this weekend, when a NYC neighborhood pulled together to march in a superhero-themed parade, all because of one little girl’s desire to be Spider-Man.
Four-year-old Ellie Evangelista had been suffering from a gender identity crisis of sorts when she learned that her superhero aspirations had been squashed because she was a girl.
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“She started coming home and talking about not wanting to be a girl anymore,” Ellie’s mother Margaret told The Daily Beast, “because some boys at school were telling her she couldn’t be Spider-Man because she was a girl.”
“It’s engrained in our culture,” Margaret explained. “[Children] just have to turn on the TV or see billboards that perpetuate this dichotomy.”
In order to compensate for the apparent limitations of her gender, Ellie began pretending she was a boy while she was at school — all so she could justify her desire to be Spider-Man.
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Margaret, at a loss for how to proceed, reached out to local parents for help, and the community’s response was amazing: Together, a group of parents managed to arrange the first ever Uptown Superheroes March through a Manhattan neighborhood.
The Uptown Superheroes March was, in the words of one parent, “A super hero parade, not a super man parade.”
The march not only allowed both boys and girls to be superheroes, but the gender-neutral celebration encouraged girls to dress up like male superheroes, and boys to dress up like female superheroes.
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The Daily Beast called the march, “more diverse than the Justice League.”
“So many parents responded to it,” Margaret said. “Whether they had little girls going through the same thing or had heard their own little boys saying similar things to girls.”
Inspiringly, another participating parent (whose six-year-old daughter was dressed like Superman) said, “Whatever you want to be, you should be able to be. I think that’s the world we’re trying to get to, and I hope that’s the world my daughter lives in at this moment.”
Check out this beautiful video from the event, courtesy of The Daily Beast: