In this article, author Christin Milloy argues that doctors should not assign “gender” to infants at birth, because gendering infants is potentially harmful to the percentage who grow up to have a gender identity different from their assigned gender. Please note, that this article is not about assigning gender to intersex infants, but purports that no gender should be assigned to any infant.
The comments section of the article has an overwhelming consensus that this is the stupidest article ever to appear on Slate. However, I’ve heard even more extreme perspectives than the one espoused in this article, such as the idea that one should not assume anyone to be of any particular gender.
Sounds weird to me. My youngest brother started showing signs of being gay at about 5 years old when he insisted he was going to be a mommy when he grew up, but to not state which plumbing a baby had would be absurd.
Look, I’m all for people being able to identify as whatever they need to identify as in order to feel right with the universe, and for other people to assist in that correct identification as much as humanly possible with corrected pronouns, hormones, and surgery.
But I really just don’t think articles like this will help. Humans care deeply about gender. It’s a deep and personal part of life. Avoiding a physically-based gender in infancy doesn’t solve anything - it just sidesteps the basic issue that sometimes the wiring doesn’t match the exterior. Even if the hospital didn’t gender your infant, you’d do it the first time you changed their diaper! Even if you really consciously tried to not impose a gender identity (a couple somewhere did this with their kid) it’s still going to come up at some point, and what are you going to do then? What if whenever you finally approached the topic was a bit too early for one particular child, and they still had to transition - what then?
Instead of writing silly hypothetical panicked articles, I think effort would be better spent informing the public on how gender actually works, and how it’s really a spectrum, rather than two simple poles.
I don’t really agree with the article, but I do feel there is merit to the idea that genderization of infants is a tad excessive. The insistence on dressing them in little sports adorned pyjamas, or pink footies based on gender, getting mad that someone got your baby’s gender wrong (“she’s so cute” “HE”).
I don’t think assigning a physical sex at birth (to a non-intersex kid) is wrong, but I do think it’s valid to say we go, perhaps, a little too far with ingraining a kid with a traditional gender role at an early age – even ignoring the cis/trans/nonbinary issues involved.
It’s dumb. There’s nothing wrong with identifying a part as “male” or “female” if they clearly look one way or the other. When there is ambiguity, sure, withhold judgment. But most cases are not ambiguous.
Pressuring kids to conform to gender roles and behaviors is the problem. Not what we call their genitalia. Having a penis doesn’t mean you can’t like pink or dolls or wearing a dress. Having a vagina doesn’t mean you can’t like wrestling, getting dirty, or wearing pants. If a little boy from an early age expresses a desire to swap out his penis for a vagina, then that’s a great cue to get him/her evaluated. But it seems to me that it’s a lot easier to release children from the pressure of gender conformity than pretending we can’t confidently predict what their gender is based on their genitalia. That’s just silly.
“genderization” “Non-binary issues” “Intersex” all part of the BS of this recent generation. It is the dream of all those who want some bone to argue over infinitely for which no answer will ever be nearly satisfactory. Just another feature of the absolute stupidification of the population which the PC lemmings totally, absolutely, just awesomely want to be a part of.
You can have your opinion on gender and all the non-binary stuff, but you do know that intersex is, like, an actual thing, right? Like, an actual medical diagnosis? Where people have ambiguous genitalia, an abnormal lack of certain sex hormones, and everything? And has been for a while?
The article is so over the top, it blots out any reasonable point the author might have. Calling it “a treatment,” claiming it’s always done without parental consent, “the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion.”
The point is (which some people seem to get) that sex can and should be determined by the doctor, or even the child’s own damn parents, using the following formula:
if penis then
…sex = male
elseif vagina then
…sex = female
else
…conduct further tests.
end if
Certain conditions that don’t fit the binary can and should be diagnosed as they may be associated health risks.
If you want to assign gender, that comes later, and isn’t ever something that’s a medical doctor’s job!
It reads like some Colbert type character. Damn doctors/scientists and their condescending ways! I bet they’ll tell you that vaccines are good for your child! Also, stigmatizing heteronormativity is bad, but it’s not discriminatory to assume X if it is the case 99.9% of the time.
How about “Don’t force your child into traditional gender roles they don’t want to accept.” as a general rule for not harming your child?
I know, It sounds like one of them crazy progressive ideas but it just might work.
Granted, but the notion that identifying a newborn infant’s sex is tantamount to assigning a gender role strikes me as kinda batshit.* The only roles the infant is going to be occupying for the first several months are poop-generator, weird smells-emitter, sleep-interrupter, and milk-ingester.**
*Is that the thesis of the article? I really don’t feel like actually reading it.
**Other duties, related to giggling, cooing, and melting the hearts of grumpy adults may also arise from time to time.
slight coder nitpick - that’s always going to assign intersex kids to male by default, isn’t it? Better to do
if penis and !vagina then…
As to the article: I can kinda-sorta get what the author’s beef is, but it’s a silly, shrill solution that doesn’t actually address the problems of intersexuality or excessive gender socialization.
Not gendering a baby seems like overdoing it. However, I -do- think nearly everybody makes too much of a big deal about assigning gender roles. Last week I talked to a mom who had her kid’s ears pierced because otherwise people might think it was a boy. THE HORROR.
Biological sex, for most babies, is a fact. It isn’t a problem, and there’s nothing to be gained by trying to pretend it doesn’t exist.
The problem is society’s associations with that sex - ‘She’s a girl, so she should like dolls/should never be aggressive/must be assessed primarily in terms of her looks/etc’ or ‘He’s a boy, so he shouldn’t like dolls/shouldn’t cry/should like rough-and-tumble games/etc’. Those moronic associations are what are reductive and limiting and what we should be fighting, not the underlying fact of biological sex.
If you try to fight gender stereotyping by pretending sex doesn’t exist, then you’re actually legitimising the idea that having a sex necessarily leads to the imposition of stereotypes. Which is the whole problem.