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What are your thoughts on parents keeping their child's gender a secret?
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If you're talking about the six year old boy, I don't see how he qualifies as "genderqueer" since he actively and vocally affirms his gender as being male. There are certain aspects of his behavior that are read as feminine (by others, not the kid himself) but that doesn't even come close to having him self-identify as being outside of the gender binary.
How about I propose another method which is like 1000x more responsible:
What gender is your child? A boy? Ok then he's a boy and will be raised as such from birth. HOWEVER, using your awesome parenting skillz, if after appropriate observation you notice certain gender identity issues coming across as the kid develops, you make a decision about how to best guide your "boy" whilst they figure out their true gender???? How fucking hard is that people?
A 1 year old has no concept of gender, but in all likelihood will identify with their biological gender, so obviously that is the most logical starting point. The point for a parent is to GUIDE their child and make decisions that they cannot make themselves... but you do so in a way that is best for them and is gender neutral to the extent it CAN be gender neutral - if your baby has a wang then its a dude until sexual development begins, at which point you play close attention and guide your child as best you can.
I know, right?
It's like finding out the doctor giving you a flu shot would never in a million years dream of recommending the same inoculation to someone he actually knew personally. Why not? Are you laboring under the assumption that you're injecting me with rat poison?
Well the term gender queer covers a lot of ground without being offensive. Maybe I should have said cross-dresser. But you would have complained about that too.
Well I don't know, Fuzzy. Maybe it's because (from what the article tells us) these fruitcakes think that gender stereotypes are so damaging that being deprived of a decent education is not too strong a price to pay.
Or maybe the schoolteacher and his wife legitimately don't see a problem with only instructing a child when and on what interests the child at that moment.
Either case qualifies for The Onion on the grounds that it's really fucking stupid.
I'm uninterested in debating appropriate labels to be honest, just consider yourself as having won the argument.
My point was simply that it's an extra challenge in this kids life.
Just that. Not judging. Not applying values one way or the other.
Any time you deviate from the herd it's a challenge. Everyone has their challenges in life. However, I question parents who seem to want to create extra challenges for their kids. Whether it is by neglectful lack of parenting, or motivated over-parenting.
Everything about this article screams to me that this is precisely what the parents are doing.
There's nothing inherently wrong with creating extra challenges for your children.
It depends entirely on what those challenges are.
I am curious as to how enforcing gender stereotypes on your kids isn't also creating an extra challenge for your kid, or adding to the challenges kids face when it comes to their behavior.
I would say that the whole "unschooling" thing is what will prove the most challenging to those kids, rather than anything to do with gender roles.
The gender role stuff is an extremely minor footnote compared to the giant glaring WTF that is these parents approach to education.
As far as challenges go, making your kid take piano lessons and encouraging your male child to wear dresses, nail polish, and have long braided pigtails are both challenging.
One will probably benefit the child later on down the road, the other will probably accomplish little beyond racking up future therapy bills (he might end up with a thick skin later on, but it's just as likely he'll end up a neurotic shut-in).
Of course, there are worlds of difference between supporting, protecting and encouraging a biologically male child who wants to wear a dress and encouraging this behavior outright in a biologically male child purely because you personally want to see gender stereotypes undermined in greater society.
I'll bet a lot of transpeople wish their parents had been open to allowing their kids to explore identities instead of saying "You are this gender because you are this sex." It's likely that at some point these kids will opt to fit into a traditional gender role. But you know, those kids are going to have a POV on gender that no one raised so-called "normally" will have, and I think that's a valuable thing--for them and for our society.
For example, they have decided that they have a problem with the traditional method of schooling, and have removed their child from the system entirely. This means the kid grows up in a world devoid of any educational input from people other than his/her parents. Which, in turn, means the parents are the only ones shaping their child, which means once the kid finally gets exposed to the world, he's going to experience a culture shock of learning and education.
Now, it's entirely possible that's a self-contained behavior, and they have no plans to do the same with the issue of gender, but I think it's symptomatic of their approach to problems: remove the child from the situation entirely. They are deliberately enforcing non-stereotypes, and while this may help the kid learn what they want to know and do what they want to do without "the man" telling them what they should learn or what they should do dependent on their gender role, it also means that they are going to be incredibly, incredibly different than society at large. Which, while that may sound good in theory, is going to lead to feelings of alienation and loneliness regardless of how comfortable they are with their own behavior.
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Your children are not the appropriate vehicle for fighting this social battle. If an adult wants to fight gender stereotypes that's great. I'm against people trying to raise little gender warriors the same way I'm against fundies raising little Jesus warriors. It strikes me as horribly unfair to the child.
-edit-
And I'll refer you to previous posts addressing the issue of the capacity for a very young child to "define their identity" in a vacuum.
Yeah, I'm sure there's an interesting philosophical discussion to have about the relationship between sex, gender and society, but I think the fact that both of you found consensus on this one point should indicate that we absolutely should not try to use this particular family as a foundation for that discussion. The parents are unconventional, but the aren't controversial; they are objectively bad parents.
Imagine if instead of the Montgomery Bus Boycott there was instead a movement where black adults continued cheerfully to ride in the back of the bus while telling their kids to sit in the front of the school bus, knowing full well that their kids would endure the brunt of the backlash.
Or -- and let's try this out -- let's say there were a couple of parents whose primary source of income was a school teacher's salary. But they don't believe in school. They think structured, formalized education with books and curricula is a total scam.
Which would be the appropriate thing to do?
1. The teacher should quit his job.
2. The teacher should keep his job, and instead never send his kids to school.
Everything about these parents screams "hypocritical asshats who want their children to fight their battles for them."
Yeah, I understand full transexuality as a brain-body issue, as it's not surprising that something as complex as brain development sometimes goes down the wrong track, but non-surgical trans-ism seems pretty odd to me.
I guess the only solution is to put a non-op, non-hormone transman in an arena with a feminist. ST:TOS rules. If the feminist lives, gender roles and transgenderism are fake. If the trans lives, gender roles and transgenderism are concrete facts.
Because they aren't purely social. There is a physiological element to social roles as well. In a pre-modern society, women would raise children because their anatomy was suited to that purpose, and men protected the home because their anatomy was suited to that purpose.
Fast forward a couple centuries and humanity has constructed a society that is not under constant threat from rampaging boars.There is still a sense of the traditional viewpoint of the male protecting the female (chivalry), though men don't need to constantly protect the home and women can seek other occupations besides childrearing. However, men are still stronger than women (On average) and women still have kids. This leads to traditional "male" and "female" behavior such as playing with dolls (nurturing) and playing cowboys and indians (play fighting).
More forward a couple more centuries and society has completely moved past the need for men to protect and women to nurture. The physiological and anatomical enforcements are still there, but the requirement is gone.
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Technically, women raised the kids because they were stuck at home carrying or nursing the youngest sibling anyway.
Progressive parents refuse to tell child its sex
edit: and yes, I'm aware of the sex vs. gender thing, but I remember seeing this come up in a comment thread somewhere else, so I think it might be what Regina's alluding to
Bucking a bit of the gender stereotype is good. I don't think that anyone is saying that.
However, yes, gender is important. It is because so much of our society is centered around it. Now, which one led to the other is an interesting question but I have to ask this. Is gender bad? Is it a bad or destructive thing to have gender? Gender seems to ultimately boil down to social role. If the kid is raised that no matter what his sex that he is allowed to feel and act the way that it wishes (hooray avoiding gender pronouns!), then I don't really see why it's harmful for the child to think of himself as a boy or herself as a girl.
I also don't see the advantage of not doing that. Even if everyone in the whole world didn't acknowledge gender, we would still have to acknowledge biological sex. We would just group people into biological sex groups and those would not necessarily line up with the genders we have now. Or we'd have genders, but they would merely be patterns of behavior rather than biological sex (which is really what I think that they are now).
I mean, I guess with how I was raised, I wasn't overtly or expressly forced into a gender role. I just am who I am. Sometimes I'm pretty girly (in that I fit what the general social idea of a girl is), sometimes I'm very much a dude (which fits my biological sex). And I'm proud of the fact that I feel comfortable being me, regardless of what gender roles I might occupy.
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
If you want to empower your child to be able to "be who they feel they are inside" then by all means, go for it. Support them and love them no matter what they do. But I think what's more important is to prepare the child for the world they are inevitably going to face once they grow beyond your means to shelter them. Teach them to understand and expect judgments from the rest of society based on how they choose to live their life, and to be strong and secure in themselves.
WHAT?!?! I need to move to where you live. My neighborhood is constantly being terrorized by a gang of vicious boars. The make us pay "protection" money and everything!
Ok I object to this. Human civilization has changed so very much since its birth but you wanna claim that for as long as we exist were going to associate dresses, long nails and child care with women? Thats just silly.
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Regarding the kids, if you don't help your child deal with gender issues then someone else will and you won't have any control at all over what they learn. Even if you isolate them till they are 18, eventually they will get a second opinion and you have no idea what that will be so who knows what they'll end up thinking. If you expose them to a lot of beliefs, including your own, about what their gender means and tolerate their conclusions it will be much healthier.
Well, I never claimed anything specific, but since you want to bring up some scenarios, I'll bite. Let's say child care. Even in the Paleolithic era, with bands of hunters and gatherers, child rearing was associated with females. The reason for this was obvious - they were the only ones with the necessary equipment for the task. Dresses, long hair and nails are fashion trends that developed with time and are things that became associated with genders as they were adopted by various societies around the world, and they aren't the same depending on where you are. But child rearing is pretty much a universal feminine trait.
Associating child rearing with women only is basically a historical gender stereotype, and one that is demonstrably wrong. As society changes, so can that association.
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Or likeminded parents get together in their own little community where they all keep their child's gender a secret.
You do know that the "making innocent children bear the brunt of societal backlash against the social politics of the adult parents" argument has been used, repeatedly, against same-sex couples adopting or having children, right?
The first of two obvious counter-arguments are that being in a nurturing, positive environment that (among many other positive things) allows a child room to express and explore their personal gender identity or at least explore activities and forms of personal expression without being punished for choosing activities or expressions that have been arbitrarily assigned to the other gender outweighs any backlash they may face from bigots in society.
The second is that bigots should not be able to terrorize parents or children into perpetuating their bigotry.
The idea that parents who raise children who don't conform to the increasingly balkanized pink-n-blue genderization of every and anything won't face any social pushback is hilariously naive, also.
Seems like you're confusing "gender" and "biological sex". From what I understand, trans folks feel they have been born into a body of the wrong biological sex. There are plenty of trans folks in all different stage of transition who heartily embrace the concept of gender and binary gender roles. I'd also suggest that admitting that gender and gender roles are social and cultural constructs doesn't mean that voluntarily embracing those roles is inherently sexist, just that falling outside of those constructs isn't inherently bad.
It may be an "alternative" school, but it's still administered by the Toronto District School Board and responsible for teaching the Ontario Curriculum to its students (I checked). By virtue of being housed in a physical structure where it teaches a structured formal curriculum to a collection of students who are all in the same grades using educators hired to create and teach the lesson plan during regular business hours, it is literally "something that happens by rote from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays in a building with a group of same-age people, planned, implemented and assessed by someone else."
No, boobs are a universally female trait. Having them does make at least the feeding portion of child rearing substantially easier, however.
That isn't to say a dude can't use a bottle full of formula though.