Transgender (as conventionally understood, i.e., male-to-female or female-to-male) is not the only variant from being gendered in an orthodox way. Not everyone who opts not to transition is cisgender or has necessarily “ceased to feel transgender” in the broader sense.
Also, according to Shodan’s own link, the minority of kids who persist in identifying as transgender is quite a sizable minority, somewhere between over one-third and nearly one-half.
Transgender identification doesn’t belong in the category of “things some kids do for a while but almost all give up eventually”, like, say, giving noogies or dotting your i’s with little hearts. Children identifying as transgender can’t be dismissed or disregarded as an insignificant or transitory phenomenon, even if a simple but far from overwhelming majority of them ultimately do not persist in it.
About stuff like how much beer to drink, or whether to speed on a highway? No.
About stuff like whether to wear a dress or blue jeans, or whether to play with dolls or trucks, or whether to identify as a boy or a girl? Who gives a crap?
We don’t trust kids to decide what to eat, where to live, whether or not to go to school, or even what time to go to bed.
Why would you trust them to decide their own gender?
I do let my kids decide what to eat, sometimes, within limits: all the choices must be healthy and safe choices. I don’t let them decide without limits because a poor choice has potentially dire consequences if they choose poorly.
I don’t let my kids decide where to live, because that’s a major decision that affects me and has a lot of potentially dire consequences if they choose poorly.
I don’t let my kids decide whether to go to school because a poor choice has potentially dire consequences if they choose poorly.
I don’t let my kids decide when to go to bed because because a poor choice has potentially dire consequences if they choose poorly.
There are no potentially dire consequences to a poor choice about gender identity, because there’s no poor choice there.
Well, for the same reason we trust them to decide their own sexual orientation: because it’s something that’s fundamentally about who they intrinsically are, rather than about how we choose to raise them. It’s not a choice that parents get to make for their kids.
Mind you, I don’t advocate trying to keep kids in ignorance about the basic biological and social facts related to gender. A kid should be honestly and non-judgementally told, for example, “That body part you peepee with is called a penis. Most people who have penises are boys. Most girls have vaginas instead of penises.”
But there’s nothing about that honesty that requires us to say to the kid, “Because you have a penis, you are a boy. If you feel that you’re really a girl or that you ought to have a vagina instead of a penis, you are wrong.” You get to tell your child what time they have to go to bed, but you don’t get to tell them what their innate feelings of gender identity are.
Or then there’s cases like my nephew. When he was about three years old, he told people that he wanted to be a girl when he grew up. He was the youngest of three, and he was always seeing his older sisters getting to go places and do things that he couldn’t, and he figured that they were able to do those things because they were girls, and so that’s what he wanted to be. It didn’t occur to him that they got to do those things because they were older. And if people had responded by calling him “she” and so on, he wouldn’t have been at all satisfied, because he would still have been left out of things because of his age.
:dubious: Yeah, I don’t think anybody’s advocating that we shouldn’t explain to kids things like the relative importance of gender and age category in their effects on closeness of parental supervision.
Like I said, this issue isn’t about just callously leaving kids in ignorance of fundamental facts.
Well, I actually read the article, and I’m a parent myself, so here is why I think this is a bad idea.
Basically, it requires a level of isolation and policing by the parents of their child that is I think unhealthy.
It is similar to those parents who try to isolate or special-rule their children because they belong to some sort of exclusive religious sect; these parents require everyone around them - the (admittedly expensive) daycares, other parents, everyone - to conform to their specialized rules.
Why does this suck? Because of the likely impact on the kid. Not on their “gender”, I doubt severely it will make the slightest difference on that - but far more importantly, in their socialization and interaction with everyone around them.
Everyone else gets to use one set of terms for themselves and others. They must use another, whose meanings are, according to the article, assigned randomly just to mix things up.
For example:
The problem with this is that it is going to be inherently confusing; deliberately refusing to address the very simple categories young children think in. I can’t see this as ever being a good idea, no matter what: children need to know at least the existence of these basic categories, because the society of the outside world is in large part based on them, and that’s where this kid is, eventually, going to have to live.
This concern, that inventing a special set of rules for your kids may be “isolating”, is mentioned in the article:
What the parent in the article is describing is how it is “isolating” for them, the parent. They seem not to consider how isolating it will be for the kid, which is of far greater concern, I would have thought. Even at a very young age, kids still interact and socialize; and this is doing them no good in that respect.
For very little benefit, it seems these parents are subjecting their kids to a very real downside–of making them isolated, out of sync with their peers who are not raised the same way.
Of course parents are free to raise their kids as they wish, within limits, and this hardly rises to those limits. But I still think it is a bad idea.
Another point: assuming for the sake of argument that it is true that kids get their gender identity as a “social construct”, presumably from the surrounding society they grow up in, the parents deliberately removing all the cues of gender from their own discourse - and that of those who follow their rules - simply delegates the task of determining that “social construct” to those parts of society they can’t control.
The kids won’t stay “genderless” forever, and when they choose, what else could it be based on?
- nods * That one ran through my head several times in the course of reading this thread.
I would say that back then it was part and parcel of feminism’s attempt to uproot gendered (read: sexist) expectations of people and how the process of sex role socialization (or “gendering” if you prefer) curtails people from the full range of human possibilities.
The terminologies have changed, and feminism (and feminist theory) was more structured as a political critique of a social system on behalf of all people (yeah, men too) whereas the LGBTQIA folks structure theirs more as identity politics (individual rights-based / social awareness with less structural analysis). But they aren’t unconnected. It’s the same lack of freedom that’s being highlighted as something that needs to change.
Sounds like one massive prolonged gaslighting project by the parents.
I think parricide is on the horizon.
Kids who act outside of societal gender norms don’t ever get beat up (or worse) because of it? Those are dire consequences.
No, they don’t. Some kids are assholes and find excuses to bully other kids. It’s not because of sexuality, or gender identity, or liking computers, or whatever excuse the bully wants to use. It’s because some kids are bullying assholes.
Wait–so you’re saying we need to encourage our kids to conformity because that’s the way to avoid bullying? Do you also discourage kids from academic achievement so they won’t get beat up for being nerds?
How about we encourage kids to recognize many ways to maintain gender identities to keep our own kids from beating other kids up? Again, dire consequence: avoided!
Probably when Zoomer is driven crazy by being asked for the five hundredth time “Who’s your daddy?”
Or at least when he/she/ze/they hit the teenage rebellious phase, voting Republican.
Regards,
Shodan
I think the parents are in need of psychiatric help and shouldn’t be allowed near their kids. What they are doing is, in effect, child abuse and their kids are gonna pay a horrible price for it.
Yeah? What’s yer diagnosis, doc?
It happens a lot more subtly than people realize or notice.
anecdote: My cousin and his wife tend to the progressive side. They both will say that women and girls shouldn’t be constrained by gender. She has an advanced degree (and works) in STEM. They have a boy and a girl, for whom they have bought both non-gender specific and gender specific toys and about whom they’ll say (if asked) they’ll be happy no matter what they become when they grow up, so long as the kids are happy and productive. And I do believe they truly mean that.
However, when their son was an infant & toddler (the age before he could reliably stand up), if he showed any interest at all in a ball or a truck or a typical “boy’s” toy, they reacted positively. (“Ben is so strong.” “He just loves any thing with wheels. I wonder if he’ll design cars someday.”). They did not do this with their daughter when she happened to crawl in the general direction of a Tonka. They didn’t discourage her, but it wasn’t the level of affirmation that their son received. Ben, from before he could even understand the words, knew that he got positive attention and noises from his parents when he did “boy” things. So when they say that Ben just naturally gravitated toward boy things in a way that Sally didn’t - I wonder how much of that was truly “nature” and how much of that was subtle influence by parents, other adults, and peers who are themselves influenced by a gendered society. After I noticed it with them, I started to notice similar things with other of my friends & their kids. I expect it is hard to not let gendered stereotypes get through unless you are really intentional about it (like the people in he article); there’s just so much else to do.