So, what you think parents should be preventing is not only kids making their own decisions about their gender identity, but also kids simply failing to conform to societal gender norms?
Even if little Pat-with-a-penis accepts the dictum that he is a boy and “boy” is his gender identity, he shouldn’t be allowed or trusted to choose any toys or clothes that don’t conform to society’s “boy” stereotypes? His parents have to instruct him not only in his gender identity but his gender conformity as well?
You’re not really sounding like someone who genuinely has the best interests of children at heart here.
I see a solution in search of a problem. I mean, okay, they want to be open and accepting of their kid choosing his or her gender identity. But the vast majority of us tend to go with our biological sex. If the kid doesn’t do so, I would think there’s plenty of time to deal with it then.
Plus insisting that the pre-schools refer to the kid as “they” when the kid hasn’t even chosen that – I think that shows they’re already choosing for the kid. Just let things happen as they happen.
You can’t raise a child in a vaccuum. And being gender-variant under even the most ideal conditions doesn’t and shouldn’t mean being raised without an awareness that you’re an exception to the general rule. If there is indeed a genuine general rule.
I have more than a little sympathy for the notion that maybe gender differences as we know them are entirely socially constructed and if not exposed to our socially shared notions, our kids wouldn’t internalize them at all. Not “yeah that’s how it is” but more like “Yeah maybe”. But you aren’t going to get there this way. This is a pie in the sky shortcut, it’s not at all practical. The paving of the road to such a possibility lies with creating tolerance for the exceptions. Not by trying to erase all connections with the existing culture, or with its beliefs and notions about gender, which are really central and important to it.
Exactly!
Like, if it comes up – like say the kid does run into a trans person, you can explain, “hey, sometimes nature doesn’t go the way it usually does,” or whatever explanation would make most sense to a kid. (Perhaps you could say sometimes a boy brain ends up in a girl’s body)*
But really, how much more likely would it be that the kid would ask, “I’m a girl, but I want to play sports?” My little cousin is a very girly girl, but she loves hockey. Her mother told her simply that hockey is for boys and girls. Simple as that.
*MY first encounter, if you’d call it that, with transgenderism was reading one of my mother’s magazines when I was about 7 or 8. (Probably Women’s World or one of those types) It had an article about a woman who had been born a man, and her story about how she realized she was trans, and left her husband, and her life now, blah blah blah. My reaction was basically, “That can happen? Huh.” And that’s it. Sometimes parents make more of a big deal about things that they need to be. Unless little Chris or little Jamie is intersex, I predict things will run their course just fine.
This reminded me of the play Baby With The Bathwater, which (while I was in college) I somehow managed to see performed twice at two different theaters by two different production companies, despite having no prior interest in the particular play.
The play opens with two new parents discussing their new baby. They realize they don’t know whether it’s a boy or girl, and they decide not to invade its privacy. Eventually they name the baby “Daisy”, although later it’s clear the baby is male, and Daisy has what you might call “a difficult time with things.” The part I remember best is Daisy in therapy in later life singing “Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built For Two)” and sticking on the line that starts, “I’m half crazy…”
Gender exists for a reason, largely a biological one. I know that the sexual revolution really, desperately wanted to deny that and pretend that sex and sexuality are all about choices and fun and enjoying one’s body and what not, but it is what it is. Sex and sexuality are hormonal tricks that our bodies play in order to increase the population and everything else we associate with it is in our heads. Male driven traits and female driven traits are much more a result of hormones than they are social pressures. Across societies, men are risk takers and die earlier. Not just that though, infant girls are hardier than infant boys due partly to the fact that estrogen enhances immune responses. The reality is that biologically women are more valuable and they have evolved to be hardier. They have fat deposits and lower metabolisms that protect them during famine and stronger immune systems that protect them during epidemics. In line with that, society is a largely biological process. Social conventions largely exist because it behooves a given society to have those conventions. Societies with poor social strategies tend to drive themselves to extinction or subsumation. I guess that you could try and pretend that we’re post-societal, but it’s not true. Biology is destiny. Our current gender roles likely exist because human societies are largely warlike and protecting your most valuable resources (breeding age women) while being willing to sacrifice less valuable resources (men) is an extremely successful strategy for reasons obvious to anyone who has played real-time strategy games can attest. Here in a few hundred years, biology will win out and taking gender neutral progressive stances will either be shown to be more successful than patriarchal societies, or less successful. Based on the birth rates in both societies, I think the writing is on the wall, but you can always gamble on being pleasantly surprised. I think that we can all agree though that whatever societal cues developed East Asia is using we should probably stay well away from.
I don’t get how this is going to work. Genders exist. They aren’t Santa Claus. Unless they take extreme measures to shelter these kids, they will find out from other people, while possibly simultaneously being told their parents are whack jobs. I don’t see how this will be beneficial to them in the long run.
Depends what exactly you mean by “male driven traits” and “female driven traits”. Women having a higher pain threshold than men on average is mostly an innate biological phenomenon. Girls being more likely than boys to wear pink clothing is not.
Over human history, life expectancy gender differentials have been different in different societies. It was only within the past 20 years, for example, that reductions in female death rates have raised the average life expectancy of women in India above that of men.
And the idea of men being more likely to be “risk takers” than women only holds water if we just ignore the serious risks that marriage and childbearing have exposed women to throughout most of human history.
Probably that does have a lot to do with how traditional gender roles originally developed, along with the fact that societies are prone not only to inter-societal violence (i.e., war) but also to intra-societal violence, and thus it was often considered at least as important to protect brood women from men in your own group as to protect them from men in whatever group you were at war with.
Now that in the modern world no society is in any real danger of running out of its brood-women “resources”, though, it is less obvious what purpose it serves to keep on insisting on the enforcement of traditional gender roles.
Is there any particular reason that you think this comparison has to wait a few hundred years, other than that you don’t like the answer you’d get if you did the comparison now? Less patriarchal societies are already more successful than more patriarchal ones in terms of economic development, health and life expectancy, and pretty much all other metrics.
I don’t claim that it’s increased gender neutrality that causes societal success, of course: it’s probably the other way around. We have already seen over and over again that as societies (and groups of migrants assimilating from one society into another) become wealthier, their birthrates tend to go down and their gender rules tend to become more egalitarian.
I don’t think anybody’s denying that genders exist, or advocating hiding from children the fact that genders exist. As the OP’s linked article says (directly contradicting the OP’s thread title, btw):
I’m sure the kids who grow up in this environment will be fine, or if they’re not, it won’t be because of their genderless infancy, which they will barely remember. The parent’s themselves say that the kids will grow into a gender by age three or four. If they don’t I suspect the parents will grow tired of this game soon after and will treat their daughters like girls and their sons like boys, which will be fine 99.X% of the time. Years later Zoomer and Scout and Storm will be amusing their friends with tales of their uber-progressive parents as they all huddle in their arcology’s shelter, eating their meager insect derived protein rations while riding out the latest hypercane.
But what gets me about this is it doesn’t seem to be about the kids at all. It doesn’t seem to be about raising healthy kids, but rather a “look at me and how progressive I am” stunt. I mean “Theybe”? really? Come on. And not letting the doctor/midwife refer to the baby as a boy or girl? Stop it. The newborn can’t even understand English. And apparently “gender neutral” isn’t special enough for them. “Oh, I’m sorry, we’ve moved beyond ‘gender neutral,’ we’re gender creative. Perhaps someday you’ll learn how to be as progressive and special as us. Wait, where are you going?” Somewhere else.
Yes, of course we should teach our kids not to beat up other kids. Duh.
OTOH, a parent’s primary responsibility is to keep his kids safe. So if a parent buys little Johnny a dress to wear to the 4th grade, and the kid gets beat up, the parent didn’t do his part in regards to safety.
Those responsible for beating up kids are those that beat up kids. Not a kid who chooses to wear a dress, or their parents who allow them to. Undoubtedly the first black kids to desegregate some schools faced increased danger of violence due to their incredibly brave actions (and those of their parents). If they did experience any violence, that was entirely the fault of those that were violent, not the child or their parents.
No one of these parents is sending little Johnny to 4th grade in a dress. As anyone who READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE would know, the expectation is that the child will grow into a gender by age 4.
Kids are often obsessed with fairness, which is an abstract concept. Some kids harbor ideas about social equality, including a critical analysis of the institution of childhood, which is more abstract thinking than a lot of adults do on the subject.
Just as if a parent supports her child’s academic pursuits, and the child gets beat up for being a nerd, the parent failed to protect her child’s safety, right? Or, more on point, if a parent prevents Johnny from wearing a dress or otherwise identifying as female, and Johnny turns into one of the devastating numbers of teen trans suicides, the parent failed to protect her child’s safety? (I’ll agree with you on this last one, so you can take that victory!)
It doesn’t have to be a false dichotomy. One can say that “classmates ought not to be bullies” while at the same time warning a dress-wearing boy that he *is *likely to face bullying.
It doesn’t have to be abstract. It’s just “I’m a boy!” or “I’m a girl!” In almost all cases this will align to what you would have expected at birth. As far as studies go, the article–which we have all read–notes that there simply haven’t been enough children raised in this style to predict what will happen. I suspect that if the children don’t figure out what they are, the parents will make some accommodation with the child’s needs, whatever those might be.
The whole thing is silly, but I don’t see any necessary long term harm arising from it, provided the parents have their child’s well being in mind.
Except for the fact that it’s kind of unethical to raise a child as a science experiment. We don’t do things with kids “to see what develops”, you know?
You might be interested in JY Yang’s Tensorate series, which takes place in a society that does just that. IIRC one of the protagonists does choose to remain genderless.