Here’s my dilemma

Presentation isn’t the same as identity and I’m perfectly comfortable raising a boy who prefers doing things that are stereotypically female. To give an extreme example, I will gladly spend the rest of my life correcting people who refer to him as “she” because he wears dresses, has long hair, etc. If he’s a boy he’s a boy.

However, I don’t get a choice in whether or not he learns what society expects of the different genders. I don’t want to go on for too long telling him “it’s okay for boys to do this” when the issue is fundamentally about the gender rather than the behavior.

My wife and I are both cis and lean a little androgynous in our presentation, but are still pretty binary. So when it came time for my older daughter to do some gender experimentation, I showed her a bunch of trans transition timelines, taught her about non-binary people (“you know how we call Uncle ____ they instead of he? They’re non-binary”). It was simplified but she was young. And she ultimately became significantly more girly than either of us were experienced with. Her biggest hangup was wanting short hair even though it was “boy hair”.

So now my son is only playing pretend as girl characters. He’s correcting us if we use his name while he’s pretending, too. He’s wanting hairbands and leggings and he’s also seemingly mixing up the pronouns. Like he put a crown on my head and said “she’s a queen” and then put it on my wife’s head and said “he’s a king”. Every morning we ask him what his name is today and he always says a girl character from a show that he watches.

In my brain this is screaming he’s a girl, but I also don’t want to push my gender brainworms on him. And I don’t know how much of this experimentation is common in cis children. Hell, I don’t know if I would believe the research if I could find it just with how suppressed trans identities are. As much as the whole “it’s just a phase” thing is usually transphobic cope, I don’t want to entirely dismiss the idea that it’s a phase. I guess what I mean by that is I’d like to facilitate him experimenting more before drawing any conclusions. If his gender ends up as a collection of caveats, even better. I’ll do my job of explaining that to people as needed.

So wat do? I think we’re going to take him clothes shopping and see what he likes. Maybe start helping him pick his own clothes in the morning. I have no idea how to approach pronouns or if I should wait. Right now he’s exclusively wearing dinosaur pajamas and a cat ear headband.

What common mistakes should I avoid? If you’re trans, what would you have preferred your parents to do? Is there anything your parents did right that you think more parents should do?

Edit: also if this is some cis fragility stuff in some way I’m not seeing and I’m overthinking the whole “let him pick out his clothes and pronouns” thing, feel free to let me know