To the Editor:

When I read Jennifer Finney Boylan’s beautiful Op-Ed “‘Rudolph,’ the Queerest Holiday Special” (nytimes.com, Dec. 11), I felt the same sensation that I experienced as a child watching “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in the late ’60s and early ’70s. As we now say in the 21st century, I felt “seen” reading Ms. Boylan’s piece, my heart racing again with an odd but familiar combination of comfort and shame.

For me, “Rudolph” was the only television show of my childhood that expressed a truth I knew in my heart but never heard validated around me. Masculinity tests, whether reindeer games or forcing boys into sports to toughen them up, were wrong and cruel — especially to boys who feel destined, as I always did, to fail them.

The TV movie’s message of self-acceptance — and the triumph of the misfits at the end — made me feel better for the hour I watched it, even as I kept my close identification with the characters a secret. Then the next day I’d go back to school, Christmastown again a fantasy land.

Gender, skin color, body size, disability, the “wrong” kinds of feelings — these are still too often the stuff of shame for kids in 2019. Watching and talking about this 55-year-old TV movie is probably one of the greatest gifts a parent could give a child.