I’m about four years late for the party, but I recently got in touch with my inner five-year-old girl and watched every single episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.

Four years ago, when this cartoon first aired, a few critics and parents, along with a large subpopulation of the internet–unexpectedly, most of them adolescent to adult males–sat up and took notice. Here was something new and different in children’s television. This wasn’t just a pink saccharine girls’ show. This was a (yes, often pink and always saccharine) show about how there are, in the words of the creator, “lots of different ways to be a girl.” For the most part (with only a very few flubs), it’s been hugely successful at that mission, depicting unique female characters with different strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, conflicts, and solutions.

But, strangely enough, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic can also say quite a bit about what it means to be a boy. Most of the time this message comes not directly from the show itself, but through the show’s male fans. In March, a 9-year-old boy, Grayson Bruce, made national headlines when, after being bullied for his My Little Pony backpack, the school addressed the issue by telling him to leave the backpack at home. (After the incredible outcry about this victim-blaming, the school reversed its position, and took the opportunity to change its approach on bullying–a happy ending!)

There’s not always a happy ending, though. I first learned of Michael Morones, an 11-year-old fan of My Little Pony who attempted suicide in January, from Epbot.com, a blog I read religiously. At the bottom of the blog post on Epbot, there’s a compilation picture of kids who are “Epbot Exemplars,” or “geeks who know what they love and show it with pride.” As you can see, these are often girls who like “boy things.” That’s something our culture has become much more accepting of (even if we still have a long way to go). But boys who like “girl things”? Or children who reject the gender binary altogether? Now that’s a pony of a different color!

But these children are here. They’re speaking up. They’re telling us that they’ve seen the social constructions they’re inheriting from us, and they do not accept them. We need a new vocabulary. These children–and adults–are not necessarily transgender–that term has to do with your gender identity, or a person’s internal sense of their gender (which, by the way, has nothing at all to do with sexual orientation). Rather, we need terms to deal with gender expression–a person’s external projection of masculinity, femininity, everything in between, and/or something else altogether. Another of my favorite blogs, Raising My Rainbow, has taught me several words in this new vocabulary. Gender non-conforming, gender fluid, and gender creative are all terms that apply to people who don’t fit neatly and completely into the boxes of “male” or “female,” “boy” or “girl.”

Enter Seabreeze, a character on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic who is, I would hazard to guess, the first male character in mainstream children’s television to be openly and unapolagetically fluid when it comes to his gender expression.

Seabreeze appears in the episode “It Ain’t Easy Being Breezies,” and he is not a pony, but a small “adorable fairy creature” called a breezy. I’ve read nothing that indicates the show’s creators intentionally crafted Seabreeze as a gender-fluid character, but I like to think that by the fourth season of the show, they’ve noticed the positive ripples their show has been making, and created Seabreeze as a nod to their gender-fluid fans.

I think this reading is not unlikely, because there have been episodes in earlier seasons which seem to be supportive of their fans who are “boys who like girl things.” In the second season episode “Dragon Quest,” Spike, who is a baby-dragon sidekick to one of the ‘mane’ characters, goes off to try to make friends with other dragons (read: boys), but comes to realize that he’s much happier sticking with his friends who are ponies (read: girls) and the interests he shares with them. He learns that “who I am is not the same as what I am,” ie, he might be a dragon, but he can still have characteristics much more closely associated with ponies than with dragons.

Ultimately, though, “Dragon Quest” doesn’t even begin to break down the gender binary. The dragons still (mostly) stick with dragons, and the ponies still (mostly) stick with ponies, and there isn’t any true fluidity between the two.

When it comes to Seabreeze, despite the pink hair, there are some reasons it might be a bit bold for me to claim he’s gender-fluid. Although, like ponies, the breezies are equestrian creatures (who, you know, also have antenna and wings), we really don’t know very much about them–and perhaps more importantly, there aren’t really any clear traits that signal gender differentiation at all for the breezies. For ponies in the show, females typically have longer eyelashes than males, but all of the breezies seem to have long eyelashes. Male ponies don’t tend to have manes that are long & flowing, or big & poofy, like some females do, but all of the breezies have either long & flowing or big & poofy manes.

We also don’t know anything about Seabreeze’s interests. We don’t know what his hobbies are, or what he does for fun. We don’t know whether he likes what are, traditionally, “girls’ things” or “boys’ things.” We do know that he is, at least for the moment, in somewhat of a leadership position among the breezies. We know he wears a gender-neutral black one-piece outfit, with a bit of white fur-like trim that adds some pizzazz to the outfit. (We do not have any other breezy clothing to compare this to. Ponies tend to wear clothing for special occasions, or to denote their roles in a group–here, the outfit could just be an indication of his leadership status.)

But Seabreeze is the only breezy who is able to talk with the ponies, and the only breezy who gets any character development at all. So the fact is inescapable that here is a character with a blue body and long pink hair, who prefers male pronouns but has long eyelashes, who is voiced by a male actor but with the pitch raised due to his small size. Here is a character who does not fit neatly or completely into any of our gender boxes.

Seabreeze’s character development over the course of the episode doesn’t appear, at first glance, to have anything to do with gender. The breezies are knocked off course during their migration, and Fluttershy, one of the mane characters, takes them into her home to care for them until they can get going again. Seabreeze initially seems overly harsh and, in fact, downright mean: he tries to get the rest of the breezies moving again, but they don’t listen. He yells at them and calls them names–he calls them losers and wimps; he says they’re not too bright and calls them incompetent. Meanwhile, the rest of the breezies take advantage of Fluttershy’s overly-kind nature, and convince her to keep pampering them and to continue letting them stay in her home instead of going back to work, even though there’s a time limit on how long the portal to their own world will stay open, making their delay particularly dangerous.

For a character who, I’m arguing, is meant to be a positive portrayal of a gender-fluid individual, Seabreeze sure doesn’t seem very likable at first. To fully understand the undercurrents of gender in this plot, it’s helpful to look back at another episode from the second season, “Putting Your Hoof Down,” which also centers around Fluttershy. Out of all the mane characters, Fluttershy is one that tends to have traditionally feminine characteristics. She represents the virtue of Kindness, and is gentle, soft-spoken, good with animals, and an excellent care-giver. “Putting Your Hoof Down” (an episode which resonates very strongly with me!) explores the downsides to those characteristics when it shows how Fluttershy can sometimes be overshadowed, overlooked, and treated as a doormat as a result of other ponies taking advantage of her timid behavior.

Several of her friends, who are strong, assertive women, try to teach Fluttershy to stand up for herself, but nothing seems to work for her. At least, not until she enrolls in Iron Will’s Assertiveness Training.

Unfortunately, Iron Will (who happens to be a super-macho, hyper-masculine Minotaur) teaches Fluttershy to be aggressive rather than assertive. It’s not the kind of assertiveness that Fluttershy needs in order to stand up for herself, but rather the sort of “assertiveness” that results from an innate sense of male privilege, where you walk over everybody because you haven’t bothered to look down to see them.

When I watched this episode, I was at first rather nervous at the direction the plot was going in. I was worried that in showing that the result of the gentle, feminine Fluttershy taking on the more masculine trait of assertiveness is her turning into a character that is mean, “bossy,” or a “b****,” the episode would only further perpetrate the negative stereotypes associated with assertive females. However, the ending rescues the episode. Fluttershy learns to find a balance between her innate gentleness and her new-found strength, and she stands up to Iron Will himself when he comes to collect the course fee, not by yelling and being aggressive, but by telling him gently (but assertively!), “No means no.”

In this way, Fluttershy affirms that she will no longer tolerate being a doormat–but also that hyper-masculine displays of strength are not appropriate methods for standing up for yourself. Taken by itself, I still think “Putting Your Hoof Down” is somewhat problematic, showing too much of the negative side of assertiveness when it’s taken too far and not enough of the positive ways one can find that balance between gentleness and strength. But in the wider context of the show, with plenty of other episodes (including “It Ain’t Easy Being Breezies”) giving Fluttershy opportunities to use her quiet resolve, for the good of herself and her friends, these issues diminish.

Fluttershy’s character arc in “It Ain’t Easy Being Breezies” is that she must realize that, although she thinks she is helping the breezies, by allowing them to take advantage of her, she’s gone back to being a doormat. Once she realizes just how dangerous it is to let the breezies stay, and that the only way to really help them is to use what she previously learned and tell them (gently but assertively), “No means no,” the plot is resolved, and the breezies are on their way back home.

Seabreeze, on the other hand, has almost the entirely opposite arc. In the beginning, he’s trying to get the breezies to get going (for their own good) by using Iron Will’s style of aggression. But unlike Iron Will, Seabreeze is not super-macho and hyper-masculine. He’s in fact rather feminine, and Iron Will’s tactics don’t work for him. They backfire.

However, it is only when Fluttershy understands that Seabreeze is trying (unsuccessfully) to be assertive rather than aggressive that she understands what must be done. Seabreeze is making the same mistake she’d made in “Putting Your Hoof Down,” but Fluttershy is able to demonstrate a gentler, more feminine form of assertiveness. Where Seabreeze’s aggressiveness had failed, Fluttershy’s quiet assertiveness succeeds.

The effect that observing Fluttershy’s style of assertiveness has on Seabreeze is immediate and dramatic. His demeanor changes to be more like Fluttershy’s–he’s helpful and gentle. And it seems so much more natural for him to be that way.

By the end of the episode, both Fluttershy and Seabreeze have found a balance between their feminine gentleness and their masculine strength. And they are both better for it, and are now finally able to work together to help their friends get home.

And then–oh, then!–we see Seabreeze return home. And greet his wife and newborn child.

And in a heartbeat, Seabreeze is not only made into a much more complex character–who wouldn’t get mean if you might be indefinitely separated from your loved ones?!–but a further message is communicated to the viewer, that gender expression has nothing at all to do with sexuality, and gender expression has nothing at all to do with an individual’s ability to be a part of a loving, whole, family. This male who has many very feminine traits is a loving husband and father who works hard for his family, and is also a successful community leader.

And there’s absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t be.