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What are your thoughts on parents keeping their child's gender a secret?
Shanadeus
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So in addition to that Swedish couple that did this some time ago, a Toronto couple are doing the very same thing:
Parents keep child’s gender under wraps
I personally applaud them for what they're trying to achieve and would do the same thing if I ever got a child - every little thing counts if one wishes to challenge the current gender views.
Your thoughts?
Parents keep child’s gender under wraps
When many couples have a baby, they send out an email to family and friends that fills them in on the key details: name, gender, birth weight, that sort of thing. (You know the drill: "Both Mom and little Ethan are doing great!")
But the email sent recently by Kathy Witterick and David Stocker of Toronto, Canada to announce the birth of their baby, Storm, was missing one important piece of information. "We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now--a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place? ...)," it said.
That's right. They're not saying whether Storm is a boy or a girl.
There's nothing ambiguous about the baby's genitals. But as Stocker puts it: "If you really want to get to know someone, you don't ask what's between their legs." So only the parents, their two other children (both boys), a close friend, and the two midwives who helped deliver the now 4-month-old baby know its gender. Even the grandparents have been left in the dark.
Stocker and Witterick say the decision gives Storm the freedom to choose who he or she wants to be. "What we noticed is that parents make so many choices for their children. It's obnoxious," adds Stocker, a teacher at an alternative school.
They say that kids receive messages from society that encourage them to fit into existing boxes, including with regard to gender. "We thought that if we delayed sharing that information, in this case hopefully, we might knock off a couple million of those messages by the time that Storm decides Storm would like to share," says Witterick.
"In fact, in not telling the gender of my precious baby, I am saying to the world, 'Please can you just let Storm discover for him/herself what s (he) wants to be?!." she wrote in an email.
How did Stocker and Witterick decide to keep Storm's gender under wraps? During Witterick's pregnancy, her son Jazz was having "intense" experiences with his own gender. "I was feeling like I needed some good parenting skills to support him through that," Witterick said.
Stocker came across a book from 1978, titled X: A Fabulous Child's Story by Lois Gould. X is raised as neither a boy or girl, and grows up to be a happy and well-adjusted child.
I personally applaud them for what they're trying to achieve and would do the same thing if I ever got a child - every little thing counts if one wishes to challenge the current gender views.
Your thoughts?
Shanadeus on
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If you don't want your kid growing up into the boxes of gender expectations teach them that they get to make those decisions themselves, not that they're a sexless unperson.
I think this pretty much sealed it, IMO:
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
And seriously a parent making choices for their child is parenting.
Why make choices, when you can use them to send a political message instead.
Not in a future where kids are named all sort of, to us, crazy stuff.
Experiments like this only work in an extremely controlled environment. If the parents restrict the kid's social involvement to people who agree to play along with their little game, I'd have to say that's pretty sick.
This was a silly sentiment last year and it's still silly.
If I believe that {x} is bad for my child, I will probably want to shield them from {x}. I will probably also make political statements about {x}. These are not mutually incompatible behaviors. In this case, x = early-life gender roles.
The implication that it's wrong to raise your child in any politically controversial way means that only hypocrites can be parents.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The kids are 'unschooled'; it is a particular method of homeschooling. The kids are not presented with a structured curriculum to follow but instead are taught according to the child's particular interests and curiosities. The child is expected to acquire knowledge by experience and whatnot. Personally I think this will mess up the kids more than the gender-neutral parenting. Because maybe the kid just wants to watch cartoons all day.
Also, Storm is totally a girl name! How can anyone think otherwise?
But I look at this and think it looks like a little boy
I'm still pissed that Yael is more commonly a boy's name in the US.
Looks like a doll imo. The eyes are beads of glass that roll around depending on how you hold it.
But man they better hope their kid wants to learn math and spelling. And if that kid wants to learn anatomy they are totally fucked.
what about x=vaccines?
also read the whole artical.
Ohh good the kid is unable to attend school, but thats okay he's fighting against the tyranny of assigned gender. And how can an education compete with that.
Also naming your kid(by the picture a boy) after a female comic book character probably not the most ungendered thing you can do.
IDK when did Canada stop being a western country.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0W7Jbc_Vhw
There. It's been posted.
Let's move on.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Have they made any choices on vaccination?
That said, their efforts will probably help the house not fill up with pink frilly bullshit.
Parents want to protect their kid from early-life gender roles they feel to be potential harmful for whatever reason. What about protecting their kid from social experiment they never volunteered for?
Children need structure and guidance from their parents when they're young. They need their parents to make choices for them because they're still figuring out the world; choosing to not make a choice is dangerous and completely irresponsible. If the kid is a boy, identify it as a boy, but by all means teach it to be a progressive thinker and help them understand that if he chooses to identify as a girl later on down the road, that they'll love and support him.
This is essentially like watching how a lab rat will develop in a controlled environment with as little outside influence as possible. It's not responsible parenting.
Where is that quote from, cause if they are doing that with the baby the kid should be taken away right fucking now.
I don't give a shit if vaccinating (or not vaccinating) your child is "political;" I support vaccination out of a risk-benefits assessment. If we want to do that here, great, I'm all for it. We just have to put aside hand-wringing about this being a "political message" because the political nature of this decision isn't immediately relevant.
In fact, I'll start:
Now, do you have evidence that androgyny is harmful to children?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
i think it's pretty tough to deal with the fact that gender roles can hurt your kid early on and make them feel bad or force them not to do things or be what they want to be, and the whole gender issue is just way over a kid's head so you can't really sit down and explain it properly in a helpful fashion (i don't think).
but a kid who is gender-ambiguous - about stupid things like clothes and hair, which are completely arbitrary indicators of gender - will get bullied really severely and may encounter all sorts of formative difficulties, retreat from having friends or developing social skills, etc. the kid doesn't want to go to school because he's already encountered this kind of thing. even though it's stupid, it's deeply ingrained.
like it or not, our identities are still largely constructed from our ideas of gender, and i don't think there's any easy way out of it. you can chop out a lot of the shit parents do that casually forces their children into gender boxes - some parents will yell at their tiny children for picking the wrong-gendered clothing, or refuse to let them play with the toys they like if they're "gender-inappropriate" - but trying to take them out of the gender box completely just ends up creating a whole separate series of gender-based issues for the kid to deal with.
that or gender identity from non-parental sources will overwhelm any parental latitude, which is entirely possible, i think.
I'll second this. You don't combat gender bullshit by hiding from it any more than you combat racism by just staying away from people who don't like brown folk - you combat it by recongnizing it, and then speaking up and saying it's unnacceptable. There's tons of shit out there that's potentially bad for your kids. Your job as a parent isn't to shelter them from it all, because that's fucking impossible. Your job is to prepare them for it and help them learn to deal with it.
I suspect that this is going to be the ultimate result.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The kid said that he liked dressing as a girl, it's not as if the parents are forcing him to dress as a girl as some form of political statement.
The former needs to be supported.
That's the thing though, they don't want to make the choice of being a boy or a girl for him as they're against the whole notion of neatly categorizing people into those two boxes.
As a post-genderist I agree with them.
Yes! In fact, it indicates latent transphobia on your part.
"That's for you to decide, dear."
LATER....
"Teacher! There's a DINOSAUR between my legs! My mommy and daddy said it could be anything I wanted!"
"DID they now."
I think this as well. Probably around the teen years? Maybe because they want to impress a cute classmate or something :P
Kids aren't stupid. If you go shopping for overalls and hold up a few different options the kid will probably pick up on which one you want it to wear just by your body language.
I don't see any of their kids turning into serial killers. They're more likely to go turn feral.
twitch.tv/Taramoor
@TaramoorPlays
Taramoor on Youtube
So better to act like a responsible parent provide them some frame work for identity so they're not completely bewildered like the eldest seems to be.
TBH, I'm more annoyed by their stupid fucking education system. Only teaching them what they want to learn seems like a good way to get a kid who only knows the names of every pokemon.
To be fair though, it didn't say they were keeping the child's sex a secret from them ;-)
Or else the very first time he encounters another child, because after the age of three or four, children start classifying everybody in terms of gender, and most kids will want to know immediately "are you a girl or a boy?" and will keep talking about it until a conclusion is reached.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.