What I agreed with Dewey (and perhaps Snoopy Fan, in part, about, is that gender roles do unquestionably exist, and one’s behavior is judged by a fair chunk of society by how one conforms to them. That I personally object strenuously to the latter is immaterial to the fact that I recognize their existence.
And, as was pointed out in the threads on transsexuals, there are things about what it is like to be a little girl, a girl in her early teens, a woman, that I will never know. The best evocative writing in the world and my gift of empathy will not allow me to cross that gap and feel like a little girl feels.
I would like to think that I would make an excellent role model for a child – a man unafraid to show compassion, non-threatening and usually non-confrontational, but with the chutzpah to stand firm for what he believes is right and face down those who would defend hatred. But there is no way in heaven, earth, or hell that I would ever be able to show a little girl how to be a woman. That takes someone who is one, or at minimum feels like one in her inmost self. And a little boy learns something of how a woman reacts from his mother, his aunts, his grandmother, his family’s woman friends. And the same holds true in reverse: no woman can give a little boy a model of how to be a man, nor let her daughter pick up how a man reacts in various situations from how she herself reacts.
Such role modeling is essential to healthy maturization – even if the child ends up deciding to choose another way to be human, to rebel against the modeling his or her parents have done. The adolescent needs to know the deafult to make a valid inner choice not to abide by it.
But, as Dewey and I said against SnoopyFan’s stance, this is not a valid argument against gay couples adopting. Some single women are able very successfully to fill both mother and father roles – Barb’s lifelong friend Norma raised two little girls to healthy adult womanhood by being exceptional at almost all aspects of parenting. There were men in their lives – me, the “Thatcher boys” (sons of another friend ranging from puberty to young adulthood at the time the girls were children), their grandfather. Similarly, some men are able to be the nurturing, compassionate person who enacts the mother stereotype. And their mothers, sisters, women friends will fill the womanly role model for their children.
I’ve gone into this at length because I feel it is a valid component of developmental psychology which is (a) denied or given too short shrift by the pro-gay-adoption side, and (b) incorrectly used as an argument against gay adoption by the other side.
Further, and this is very important: for a lot of people, this is not merely a theoretical question, but key to their lives. It is all well and good to speculate and theorize and call for ideal solutions – but I know of two gay couples, each having a partner who is a member of this board, who are well qualified financially and emotionally/spiritually to adopt and nurture a child and who want to do so. And, while I don’t have a cite at my fingertips to back up the statement, I’m confident that there are a large number of 8, 9, and 10 year old boys and girls whose foster parents are in it for the money, who get strict discipline and no affection from them, and are forming the opinion that they are unloved and unloveable.
So, dear lady, while you live in a fantasy world in which beagles fly World War I fighter airplanes and there’s a Pleasantville out there where thousands of childless Ward and June Cleavers stand ready to open their homes, the rest of us are dealing with a reality where there are people hurting who could fill each others’ needs if they were not barred from it by the attitudes of folks like you.