As noted, you did. I’m glad you’re walking that ridiculousness back. As for “child abuse,” that’s equally ridiculous.
Others have raised very reasonable points about how this might isolate a child unnecessarily–but only to the degree that other measures such as homeschooling or homesteading do. It’s no more “child abuse” than it’s child abuse to live in an isolated farmhouse.
And, as noted earlier, you’ve advocated for strong corporal punishment before, recommending texts even more extreme than The Strong Willed Child. Without getting personal, your definition of child abuse is wildly out of whack with what other folks mean by the term.
Not at all. Let’s come live in the real world, which these parents apparently don’t, and see what happens.
Parent studiously raise their kid to be all genderless and shit.
Kid goes to school.
Kid gets his ass kicked because of the weird bullshit his parents laid on him.
Kid (hopefully) winds up in therapy rather than showing back up at school with a gun.
Parents never accept responsibility for their actions and blame everyone else.
It’s child abuse. They may not be beating the kid with a stick, but they are definitely acting in a manner that will cause harm to the kid in the future.
In my experience, kids today are much, much more understanding and tolerant of LGBTQ kids than they used to be. Further, if any kids to bully or physically attack a child for having a different gender identity, that’s the fault of the bully or attacker (and maybe their parents, if they encouraged or allowed that or didn’t teach tolerance), not the child attacked or their parents, as well as the school if they don’t put a stop to it.
I don’t know if the parenting strategy presented in this thread is the best way to parent, but the chance that the kid might be bullied is pretty low on the reasons why or why not. I imagine the first black kids to integrate into white schools were more likely to be bullied; that doesn’t mean their bullying was the fault of their parents.
If you had read the article, you would know that the reality actually plays out more like this:
Parents studiously treat their infant/toddler as gender-neutrally as they can manage, including using gender-neutral pronouns, and talk to the child about other people in a way that de-emphasizes gender where possible.
Parents do not try to conceal from the child ordinary facts about biological sex, genitals, etc., or about the general social norms of gender.
Child goes to daycare, pre-K, etc., and picks up more information about social gender norms, and thinks about child’s own gender. No ass-kicking takes place, partly because early-childhood educators don’t put up with that shit, and partly because very young children are much less invested in enforcing social norms than vicious packs of middle-schoolers are.
At some point in early development, child (in most cases) settles into identification as a particular gender. Parents accept child’s gender identification and henceforth refer to him/her by his/her preferred pronouns, etc.
Most people who interact with child in elementary school and beyond probably don’t even know that he/she was raised gender-neutral in infancy.
So, Clothahump, I think you can untwist your panties about this particular experiment in child-rearing. Save your ire against child abuse for the parents who, you know, actually abuse their children. There are plenty of those parents to be mad at, unfortunately.
I did you a favor and highlighted the part in your scenario where the child abuse happened. See if you can find it!
I’ll give you a hint: you used a variant of the passive voice, a favorite tool of authors who want to obscure agency. In this case, you obscure the actual child abuser. If you change that sentence to the active voice, you’ll see who the real child abuser is.
Your suggestion–that a parent who allows their child to express themselves in a way different from prevailing cultural norms is abusive–is repellent.
That’s about the most craven, cowardly, stupid attempt to shift blame from violent bullies onto loving parents that I’ve ever seen.
By your reasoning, Jewish parents who raise their child Jewish in a school district containing some antisemitic bullies are guilty of child abuse, because antisemitic bullies will target their child for being Jewish. And since I occasionally got my ass kicked for being a “nerd” and “teacher’s pet” because I did well in school, that makes my parents guilty of child abuse for bringing me up to love books and learning.
Now, if you raise your child to be a criminal or an unsocialized savage who’s constantly getting punished by the authorities for their transgressions, I could see calling that child abuse. But raising your child lovingly in accordance with your own law-abiding principles does not somehow become child abuse just because later on some vicious aggressors decide they don’t like his/her “weirdness”.
Sex diferences are innate. You see them in six-month old children and their toy choices.
You see them in one-day-olds with a preference for objects (boys) or faces (girls).
Heck, you see them in chimps and Rhesus monkeys. It’s, to say the least, a horrible disservice to your child not to acknowledge their sex and the scientific realities that come with them. OF course, don’t freak out if Sabrina plays with her brother’s Max Steel toys.
It all smacks to “I don’t care about science and reality” almost to the anti-vaxer level of negligence. Maybe similar to child beauty pageants but like the anti matter version.
But not all gender-norm differences are innate sex differences. It is still very far from clear how much of our society’s gender norms are innate. But in any case, if sex differences are so natural and innate, why are you so worried about parents’ somehow needing to enforce and impose them on their children via assigned gender identity?
:dubious: If you’re referring to this study that observed 44 male neonates and 58 female ones, it found that 25% of the males seemed to prefer looking at a face and 43% looking at a mobile, with 31% showing no preference. The proportions for the female neonates were 36%, 17% and 47%, respectively.
In other words, for nearly half the girl neonates and nearly one-third of the boys, their behavior would convey no information at all about whether they were a girl or a boy. Doesn’t sound like a very definitive “innate sex difference” to me.
:rolleyes: Again with the not-reading-the-article. Of course the parents in question are not in any way trying to conceal from their children the biological realities of their anatomy or the social realities of gender norms and other people’s assumptions about gender.
“Theyby” parents aren’t neglecting to tell their children, for instance, “this is how you wash your penis”, or “make sure you wipe your vagina from front to back after pee-pee”, or “most people with vaginas are called girls”, or “Grandpa doesn’t like it when you play with dolls because you have a penis, and when he was growing up it was considered bad for kids with penises to play with dolls”.
They are not denying their children any knowledge of the biological and social realities around sex and gender. All they’re doing is refraining from imposing particular assumptions about the child’s own gender identity until the child volunteers it.
Exactly. These parents are simply taking the “not freaking out” response to the level of not freaking out that the child’s gender isn’t officially identified or imposed until/unless the child voluntarily expresses their own gender identity.
Just as nowadays we don’t freak out that children’s sexual orientation isn’t officially identified or imposed until the child voluntarily expresses it.
A ridiculously hysterical overreaction. There is nothing about gender-neutral parenting that in any way denies science or reality.
All this pearl-clutching about “but how will the poor child know whether they’re a boy or a girl unless the parents are constantly telling them” reminds me of the homophobic hysteria about “letting your toddler son wear nail polish will turn him gay” and so on.
Children can figure out most things about their innate identities for themselves when the time is right. It is not “abusive” or “negligent” or “anti-science” to calm down and let them get on with it, without obsessing over whether they’re placing themselves in the “right” category.
The project will end long before the child starts school. Very few toddlers are bringing guns into daycare.
I do think this has more to do with self aggrandizement than child rearing. The parents are the subject of lifestyle articles and acquire Instagram likes. The benefits to the child are obscure. But the child probably isn’t being harmed by this either.
If any actual harm could be shown, I’d be a lot more critical of the parents, especially if they persisted after the harm was shown. But no one has come up with anything. Again, the schoolyard bullying is a red herring, since the project ends before school begins.
To do that to a kid would be to doom him to a living Hell, and then an eternal Hell. To me it is a form of hatred to try to raise a kid without an identifiable sex. And it takes a a fool to try it.
I’ll leave out of the discussion the “eternal Hell” issue, which I take to be a reference to a personal religious belief that is completely irrelevant to the topic of gender-neutral parenting for anyone who doesn’t happen to share that religious belief.
I will point out, though, once again for the benefit of you surprisingly numerous non-article-reading commenters, that none of this is about trying to “raise a kid without an identifiable sex”.
This is simply a matter of letting children articulate their own gender identity according to their own perception of it when they’re ready to do so, just as now we let children articulate their own sexual orientation according to their own perception of it when they’re ready to do so. (Although I imagine your new bedfellow Mister Mills might have some criticisms of that approach as well.)
Children don´t “grow into” a sex/gender, they are it. That’s it (except for extremely rare cases)
Saying “he will find his gender” is interfering with his normal development. Parents are supposed to help their children reinforce their normal nature.
Sure, just as children don’t “grow into” a sexual orientation or being left-handed or right-handed. They just are what they are.
But for all those characteristics, children spend varying amounts of time early in their development being largely unaware of and unconcerned with which particular category of that characteristic they fall into. There is no reason that adults need to insist on attaching a category label to the child before the child’s own awareness of their category develops naturally, as it almost certainly will.
Cite? What makes you think that children need to have their natural, inborn gender identity explicitly insisted upon by the adults around them from the moment of their birth in order to develop “normally”?
What on earth does that even mean? Parents are supposed to help their children learn social behavior, among other things, and develop maturity and courage and honesty and kindness and all sorts of other good qualities. But in what way do children need parents to “reinforce their normal nature” when it comes to, say, gender identity? Are you claiming that children won’t know what gender they are if their loving parents use “they/them” pronouns for them while they’re little?
Moreover, I’d like to know what all these pearl-clutching gender-enforcers think about child development in cultures with languages that are naturally more gender-neutral than modern English.
Many languages, for example, use the same third-person pronoun to mean both “he” and “she”. Do you imagine that, say, Malay- or Finnish- or Hungarian-speaking children are more confused about their gender identity than English-speaking children are, because their parents haven’t been constantly “reinforcing their normal nature” from birth with gender-specific pronouns?
How do you know this? Do you know people who raise their kids like this in real life? Do you personally know the couple profiled in the article?
I’d say treating their genitals and by extension, their biological sex like a shameful secret very much sounds like taking the “freaking out” approach to gender. Rewriting established characters who have been given binary gender identities to be genderless (they insist on using gender neutral pronouns to refer to Harry Potter when reading the books to them kids, even though Harry is unambiguously gendered by his author) sounds like they’re freaking out over the existence of gender. Using the word “theybies” to describe their children because “baby” isn’t overtly gender neutral enough all smacks of either a profound, paranoid fear of gender or a pathetically desperate show of performative allyship.
If gender-neutral parenting looks like anything described in the article, I beg to differ. These people describe gender as a purely social construct. Which implies that gender identity is inculcated as opposed to a naturally occurring phenomenon.
I am dubious about this experiment. While the parents may want to remove gender norms and expectations from their children’s world, the parents themselves are products of a gendered society. They can’t erase their own years of socialization, which will inevitably inform interactions with their children. They may genuinely believe that they treat the children entirely neutrally, without any regard for biology. But I doubt that they actually achieve that.
I think it’s vital to examine stereotypes and I certainly object to rigid gender distinctions WRT children’s behavior, clothing, toys, etc. But the attempt to be gender creative seems to place a heightened emphasis on gender distinctions, rather than rejecting or challenging them. I recently watched a short documentary about a family in Sweden that was attempting something similar (though not quite to the extent of the parents in the article). One of the parents asked the older child which pronoun the child preferred for that day: he, she, or hen (Swedish gender neutral pronoun, apparently). The child seemed uncomfortable and said, “Why do you always have to ask that?” The child didn’t actually choose a pronoun for the day. The issue seemed of much greater significance for the parent than for the child. It was an interesting example of a family for whom gender was at the forefront of the parents’ child-raising philosophy.
:dubious: Less melodramatically, it sounds to me like a convenient shorthand for “babies whose parents are using gender-neutral pronouns for them”. Somehow I doubt that anybody was concerned that the word “baby” isn’t sufficiently gender-neutral.
Well yeah, but, I mean, come on. How exactly does this benefit the child? Assuming the kid isn’t intersex or something, why not treat them as what you would expect from their presentation? If that turns into an issue down the road, deal with it then. (It won’t in the overwhelming amount of cases) The whole thing reeks of attention seeking. Performative allyship is exactly the right phrase for it. Hell they even got a thread started about themselves on an obscure message board.
I mean surely you can see the pretentious absurdity of the whole thing.