They are home schooling too, so no need to worry!

The parents believe in an awful lot of woo, but this actually sounds like a good idea. The kid is going to have a gender identification by the age of 5, no matter what the parents do. Unless they force the child to be neuter after the kid has made their decision, then they’ll have a strong gender identification by the time it’s needed.

What could happen is that growing up without the pink/blue clothes, the dinosaur/doll toys, or the are you going to grow up to be a princess/astronaut questions, the kid might actually grow up without the negative stereotypes that cripple both women and men.

Studies have shown that when given maths tests with neutral language in the control group, women do far worse when reminded of the stereotype that men are better at maths, and much better when shown examples of great female mathematicians. This goes for men too, when the task is more stereotypically female.

If the kid can escape the preconceptions that are already forming in early childhood, then it might have a better chance to do whatever it wants. It’s a bit weird to see this kind of psychological experiment being run on human subjects though, and a child at that, that’s the only thing that does worry me.

What a pathetic, and quite frankly, transphobic piece! I am very surprised to find this garbage in LibCon, it is more suited to the Daily Mail.

To be realistic, I know of a number of trans children who have been buiiled out of school because they are trans, despite presenting as within the gender binary. However I also know of trans children who are supported properly by their school and who have flourished. They have done so because the school has decided that, in order to support this child, they need to ensure that he or she does not get bullied. They have made this happen. I know because I was a teacher in a school which did just that.

Would Flying Rodent have advocated not sending black or Asian kids to school in the 1950s, 60s or 70s because they might have been bullied? No, he/she would have advocated better protection from racist bullying. Would FR advocate that gay and lesbian kids shouldn’t go to school unless they pretend to be straight, in case they get bullied, or would he/she advocate better protection for LGB kids in schools?

This piece is thoroughly transphobic, effectively FR is saying that if a trans child is bullied in school it is their fault, or their parents’ fault. This is wrong, it is the bully’s fault and only the bully’s fault. If our schools are not there to permit children to develop and grow to be the people they really are then our schools are simply robot factories.

We have a bullying culture in our schools, largely because of a bullying culture in wider society, but there are schools which take effective measures against bullying, including transphobic bullying. FR’s article is effectively giving in to the bullies and blaming the victims. But only when those victims are trans.

As such the only conclusion I can come to is that FR is a transphobe.

What an ignorant and retrograde post. I’ll skim over the fact that you’ve ascribed gender dysphoria as a potential cause of sociopathic behaviour and concentrate on your main substative point.

These parents have clearly accepted that gender is a social construct and are trying to do their part in fighting the gender binary. Now actually it’s pretty difficult to discern the sex of most pre-adolescent children are without the usual giveaways of clothing and hair style. So if this child decides she is female, she will then probably style her hair and clothing in the sort of way girls of her age usually do and it’s unlikely anyone will think there’s something odd about her. Similarly if a boy, he will be most likely indistinguishable from the others. This is not the case of someone eveyone knows (or more accurately, *considers*) a boy turning up in a dress halfway through the school year and being bullied because of that change, it’s about finding your identity before anyone else has the opportunity to pigeonhole you. Once the child reaches adolescence, he or she will be old enough to decide the appropriate gender and, if desired, undergo surgery.

And you know what? Schools have successfully explained gender transitioning to pupils. You are blaming the victim rather than expecting the school to protect him or her. If everyone adopts your attitude nothing will change. At least this child is far less likely to suffer the psychological consequences that most people do from being forced into a restrictive masculinity or femininity.

Please take your transphobic attitude elsewhere.

“After all, as anyone who’s ever been to any school, anywhere knows, kids take vicious abuse for everything and nothing – for being too fat, too thin, too tall or too short; for being too smart or too thick, and so on endlessly in a neverending chain of senseless, competitive nastiness.”

Exactly. That’s why it’s necessary to take a stand against that viciousness. It may make things worse for your own kid, but decades down the line, maybe things will be better.

I genuinely think that would be worth it all.

I lol’d…

Interesting you decided to post on here, surely your aware alot of lefties lack the ability to process humour in any rational way?

Or is that the point?

Kids do get bullied for everything and nothing. You can’t keep a kid from being bullied by trying desperately to make it conform. But you can encourage a kid to develop a strong identity of its own, in every way, and to be confident, and that’s the best possible armour against bullying.

“At least this child is far less likely to suffer the psychological consequences that most people do from being forced into a restrictive masculinity or femininity.”

Nah, it’s just going to suffer the psychological consequences of being homeschooled + having no social life + encountering bullying children as a direct results of parents being all experimental as soon as it does actually meet more kids + guaranteed gender confusion + an adolescence of sheer rage and resentment.

As for your second paragraph – if you can’t tell the difference between a pre-pubescent boy and a pre-pubescent girl, I suggest you don’t project that particular blindness onto the rest of us.

This is a pretty immature, unconsidered piece. If you read the original article about the family, you’d have found out that they see this as a temporary period of grace before society comes crashing down on them. A baby looks like a baby: it’s *people* that respond differently to what they think are boy babies or girl babies; they’re just hoping to give their child a break from expectations and pressures and allow s/he to develop their own identity for as long as possible. It won’t be very long and if either of their other kids don’t want to continue to keep up the secret (the dodgiest part of the deal, IMO) then it’s over and done with. Certainly before the child itself is aware of it and definitely before s/he has peers who would be aware enough to tease.
(Btw, I know plenty of kids who have been allowed to find their own way in a much more limited fashion, choosing their hairstyle, clothes and toys with as little gendered influence as possible. It’s not much, but it pleases me to see children wearing hairclips and brandishing swords regardless of their pre-determined gender. There’s a lot more acceptance of this, both by parents and by other children, than you seem to imagine.)

In my experience, kids quite quickly work out which gender they are, often to the annoyance of their right-on parents.

“Would Flying Rodent have advocated not sending black or Asian kids to school in the 1950s, 60s or 70s because they might have been bullied? No, he/she would have advocated better protection from racist bullying. Would FR advocate that gay and lesbian kids shouldn’t go to school unless they pretend to be straight, in case they get bullied, or would he/she advocate better protection for LGB kids in schools?”

This is a pretty awful analogy. It’s not like being black or gay is imposed on children. In this case, it’s as if you made a kid walk around the school with a ‘bully me’ sign strapped to its back.

‘As for your second paragraph – if you can’t tell the difference between a pre-pubescent boy and a pre-pubescent girl, I suggest you don’t project that particular blindness onto the rest of us.’

I see you missed out the important qualifier without gender-identifying clothes or hair.

Rancid article. Not sure what you mean by it Flying Rodent. It doesn’t work.

“Nah, it’s just going to suffer the psychological consequences of being homeschooled + having no social life + encountering bullying children as a direct results of parents being all experimental as soon as it does actually meet more kids + guaranteed gender confusion + an adolescence of sheer rage and resentment.”

Er, hello there, have you ANY idea what you’re talking about?
No.
Then stop making ridiculous unfounded statements.

Children who don’t go to school have as much of a social life as any others, possibly more, since there’s more time to play and less time sitting at desks. Of course no school children have adolescences filled with ‘sheer rage and resentment’ because they’ve got nice conformey parents, do they?

No gender confusion, because as the original article makes clear, this is a time-limited experiment. It is about ADULT reactions to a BABY, not confusing a child by not telling it whether it is male or female.

Children who don’t go to school have as much of a social life as any others, possibly more, since there’s more time to play and less time sitting at desks.

With all the friends they’ve met in sch…

Oh…

“I see you missed out the important qualifier without gender-identifying clothes or hair.”

Doesn’t change my point in the slightest. Facial structure is already discernable by that stage.

“Er, hello there, have you ANY idea what you’re talking about?
No.
Then stop making ridiculous unfounded statements.”

Er, hello there, is CAPITALS, attempting to be patronizing and textual valspeak a good way to argue?
No.
Then stop being an arsehole.

“Children who don’t go to school have as much of a social life as any others, possibly more, since there’s more time to play and less time sitting at desks.”

O RLY? That must be why homeschooling in the US is so very good at churning out christofascist nutters indoctrinated by their parents. By homeschooling kids in the traditional way (as opposed to classes) you immediately deprive the kids of the company of other kids in the classroom. It is not ‘more time to play’. It is ‘less time spent with children who are not part of the family’.

“Of course no school children have adolescences filled with ‘sheer rage and resentment’ because they’ve got nice conformey parents, do they?”

What does this even mean? Teen angst is comparable to hating your parents’ guts for the misery they’ve willingly inflicted on you in the name of some pseudo-feminist/transexualist/whateveryouwanttocallitist nonsense?

“No gender confusion, because as the original article makes clear, this is a time-limited experiment. It is about ADULT reactions to a BABY, not confusing a child by not telling it whether it is male or female.”

Why fucking bother then? If the parents are willing to carry out this little experiment and milk some publicity out of it, it’s fairly clear that they intend to challenge gender roles in young kids generally, not just for the sake of adult response to baby clothing. If it is simply a matter of the latter, then it’s a fatuous waste of time.

Most boys are easilly identifiable by their clothes and hair, and girls by theirs. You may not have noticed this, but your hair style actually affects the way your face looks, including the way its shape looks. The only reason you are assserting that you can tell the difference is because you live in a society whereby even at the age of 8 or 5, hair clothing is usally designed to make the gender apparent. If you shaved the head of every single child in the country and put them in identical boiler suits, most people would have a hard time separating the boys from the girls.

Ha ha! Too Scottish for your readership, FR. Up here this piece just makes you a realist; elsewhere, apparently, you’re a ‘transphobe’. I had to look that up, btw.

You know, after being bawled at for being a west-hating, genocidal racist for the majority of my posts over the years, it’s a new and interesting feeling to discover that I’m also supposed to be a transphobic ignoramus into the bargain.

My point, of course, is that it’s probably better for your kids if you don’t send them into what is and will always be a nasty old world with a “Kick Me” sign on their backs.

If you want to do that, it’s your prerogative, and to be honest I don’t really care what you do – it just seems odd and not a little cruel, to me. School can be a very unpleasant place for many kids. The simple fact is that kids are always nasty little shits to each other, no matter how many anti-bullying initiatives we launch, and no amount of gender-aware diversity awareness training is going to change that, however much we might like it to.

If anyone has any substantive reason to doubt that this is the case, feel free to say so. Neither aggressive bursts of word salad about the gender binary nor picking words and banging the word “phobic” on the end are going to cut it as contrary arguments.

“If you shaved the head of every single child in the country and put them in identical boiler suits, most people would have a hard time separating the boys from the girls.”

Luckily, no-one’s enough of a twat to carry out this experiment, so I’m going to continue to baldly assert my position, since there’s nothing better to be done: you’re wrong.

You know I was going to add ‘not that I’m advocating this, obviously’, but I thought that no-one would be pedentic or obtuse enough to suggest I was.

Fine assert your position, I’ll assert mine: you’re wrong.

I was hoping that you might have a sense of humour and recognise when something’s in jest. I was wrong. Coincidentally, on an unrelated note, so are you.

Up here this piece just makes you a realist; elsewhere, apparently, you’re a ‘transphobe’.

So it would appear Shugs – the clientele has certainly changed since they started cross-posting my stuff here. Frankly, I prefered being complained at for being some kind of self-hating relativist etc. and so on. I’m used to that.

As is so often the case, I suspect that what we have here is a serious case of reality intruding into the rarified world of political theory. Stuff like this is the main reason why I’m not a joiner of parties, groups or campaigns. I don’t have the patience.

“Er, hello there, have you ANY idea what you’re talking about?
No.
Then stop making ridiculous unfounded statements.”

“Er, hello there, is CAPITALS, attempting to be patronizing and textual valspeak a good way to argue?
No.
Then stop being an arsehole.”

Ha! OK, fair enough. Your rubbishing of something you don’t seem to know very much about brought out the affronted adolescent in me.

“Children who don’t go to school have as much of a social life as any others, possibly more, since there’s more time to play and less time sitting at desks.”

“O RLY? That must be why homeschooling in the US is so very good at churning out christofascist nutters indoctrinated by their parents. By homeschooling kids in the traditional way (as opposed to classes) you immediately deprive the kids of the company of other kids in the classroom. It is not ‘more time to play’. It is ‘less time spent with children who are not part of the family’.”

That is not necessarily true at all. These people are not rural fundamentalists, they live in the city and appear to have a good social network. It’s not the same as shutting kids up on homesteads. My experience of home educated children in the UK is that they are very socially competent because they spend a lot of time both with adults outside their own family and other children of all ages (not just 30 kids of the same age being led by one adult). It’s not right for everyone, but the sociability issue is pretty much a myth over here.

“Of course no school children have adolescences filled with ‘sheer rage and resentment’ because they’ve got nice conformey parents, do they?”

“What does this even mean? Teen angst is comparable to hating your parents’ guts for the misery they’ve willingly inflicted on you in the name of some pseudo-feminist/transexualist/whateveryouwanttocallitist nonsense?”

Maybe this *is* personal? Do you have evidence for this beyond-the-teen-norm misery? I don’t.

“No gender confusion, because as the original article makes clear, this is a time-limited experiment. It is about ADULT reactions to a BABY, not confusing a child by not telling it whether it is male or female.”

“Why fucking bother then? If the parents are willing to carry out this little experiment and milk some publicity out of it, it’s fairly clear that they intend to challenge gender roles in young kids generally, not just for the sake of adult response to baby clothing. If it is simply a matter of the latter, then it’s a fatuous waste of time.”

It could well be a fatuous waste of media time, but here we are discussing it. I take issue with the parents for making this a media-frenzy: *that* seems pretty misguided to me. But I’m sure there’s enough decent research about how adults’ gendered attitudes to babies affect the care they receive not to make this a fatuous experiment, but quite a big theoretical deal.

(Jesus, that last one of mine was a quote-fail sprawl of a comment. Apologies for format, if not for my opinions.)

Sorry I didn’t recognise your joke, but tone isn’t transcibed in text.

Some people really have reinforced stereotypes in this comments thread, never seen such a bunch of sour puritanical lefties. Go and get laid ffs.

As is so often the case, I suspect that what we have here is a serious case of reality intruding into the rarified world of political theory. Stuff like this is the main reason why I’m not a joiner of parties, groups or campaigns. I don’t have the patience.

Ah, we share this. And the fact that you haven’t had schools merely described to you – possessing as you do a memory, an increasingly rare thing in the blogosphere. You tell ‘em like it is….

Frankly I don’t get what the big deal is about this story, and I’m amazed it’s made international news.

That aside, I suppose my issue with this article – which I see as more obstreperous than transphobic – is that it is working on a premise which is somewhat insensitive and, well, a bit daft.

FR, you say the kid should not dress in a way that violates gender norms (which I don’t think the parents are advocating anyway – just giving said kid more choice), but how far are you willing to take this? Kids get bullied for being too fat, too thin, too poor, too rich, too clever, too thick, too gay: what other ways should we expect kids to conform?

When I was at school, I got picked on for having trackies with two stripes instead of three. Should my broke parents have rushed out to by me some Adidas, lest I be recounting my anguish to a therapist in ten years’ time? No – the school, and wider society, should have been preaching tolerance, rather than just shrugging their collective shoulders and saying ‘c’est la vie.’

You’re probably right to say that these parents’ unremarkable and over-analysed decision isn’t going to free us from our gendered prisons overnight, but then, neither is writing articles like this suggesting we all just accept the status quo and keep our heads down. Surely if you want the more tolerant world you allude to, you should defend the parents, or at least STFU, as opposed to telling them to get real.

And to anyone leaping in with ye olde hoary cliche that lefties can’t take a joke: please – this article is clearly making a serious point, albeit in a tabloidy way. It’s not meant to be a joke, so if people take offence with the content, engage with them. Or at least, if it is a joke, it’s not very funny.

Just what is the point of this article? It is pathetic.

Whilst I can appreciate that “kids take vicious abuse for everything and nothing” – what is the proposed solution? Don’t rock the boat; or, conformity for an easy life. Don’t be fat, thin, tall, short, smart, thick, male or female, or anywhere in between? Bollox.

Frankly, following confused gendered identities with the not-at-all-hilarious “Gaylord MacWoofter” says far more about you than it does about anyone else.

Natacha @3 has it – unless you actively discourage bullying, whether on grounds of race, sexuality or gender identity, you’ll only get more ignorant arseholes inventing silly names to ostracise and isolate people.

This isn’t humorous, either; it lacks the wit.

FR, you say the kid should not dress in a way that violates gender norms…

Again, I’m not saying this. Let your kids dress however they want, it’s no skin off mine at all.

What I am saying is that school can be a bloody awful place for kids because of the shitty way they’re treated by others, and that this kind of experiment will probably ensure that you make your kids’ experience of school even shittier. That’s a fact, and no amount of complaining that kids should be able to act as they like without being harrassed is going to make it so. They should. They won’t.

the school, and wider society, should have been preaching tolerance…

Schools have been preaching tolerence and implementing anti-bullying initiatives for decades. Guess what? Kids still get bullied in massive numbers every day, not because we are insufficiently committed to anti-bullying, but because they’re kids; that’s what kids do, and we can’t control their behaviour 24/7. Ten thousand years ago, Ug was probably picking on Ag because her mammoth-hide dress was unfashionable. Ten thousand into the future, Theta Sigma Four will harrass Alpha Gamma for having a second-hand anti-gravity bike.

This is a sad fact and a phenomenon that we try to mitigate, but jumping on our high horses like the commenters above is not going to change it. It’s unfortunate for them that reality doesn’t conform to their blog chats, but there it is.

if it is a joke, it’s not very funny.

Congratulations! Very few people seem to notice that the best way to annoy someone who’s trying to be funny is to tell them that they’re not funny. It amazes me that people don’t spot this more often.

you say the kid should not dress in a way that violates gender norms …

Oh for the love of God. The kid is four months old, for crying out loud! Not long onto solid food. He, she, it, doesn’t dress itself – his, her, its parents do. See people? Honestly!

@flyingrodent – I’d be interested to know your thoughts on mainstrean education for Disabled children. You’ve stated both in your original piece and the comments that you feel it is unfair for parents to send children to school when they will most likely be picked on. Certain physical and mental impairments may lead children to be more likely to be picked on – what is your opinion on this?

@31 – “Schools have been preaching tolerence and implementing anti-bullying initiatives for decades. Guess what? Kids still get bullied in massive numbers every day, not because we are insufficiently committed to anti-bullying, but because they’re kids…”

And you think the *best* way to deal with this is to discourage kids from exploring gender identities at a young age?

” this kind of experiment will probably ensure that you make your kids’ experience of school even shittier. That’s a fact”

No, it’s not. Not least because these children don’t go to school, probably for the very reasons that you suggest make school such a hostile place. But also because, if you read the original story in the Canadian press, you will see that this is going to end BEFORE the child and their peers ever get to be conscious of the fact his/her mum and dad didn’t tell the neighbours what genitals s/he had. Shame, as I said before, about the media furore, though.

And you think the *best* way to deal with this is to discourage kids from exploring gender identities at a young age?

Yes, FR – what say you? Personally I very much resent not being able to explore my gender identity when I was four months old. I really resent my parents for confronting me with the fact that I had a penis from such a young age,

Can I just add that dangling your baby before the world’s press is a fairly selfish thing to do regardless of what you’re doing. Whatever their gol’ darn’ gender they can hardly consent.

FR, thanks for response.

But what’s your solution? You still seem to be advocating shutting up and just trying to conform as much as possible. That doesn’t help the thousands of kids who are different simply because they *are*, and not because they’ve got unconventional parents.

Also I don’t agree with your argument that people have picked on each other since the dawn of time, and thus we should accept it. For example, forty years ago, non-white kids might have had shit from their classmates, but that didn’t happen when I was at school, because society had deemed it unacceptable by that point. I don’t understand what your argument is – that we just abandon progress altogether?

Another way of looking at it is, if your kid’s going to get picked on whatever you do, why not just do this if it makes them happier?

Finally, re the funny thing: I was referring more to your entire argument being a joke, rather than individual elements of the piece. Having said that, I thought it could have been a bit more considered, although I think this whole issue’s been rather overlaboured as it is.

@36 – yes, you’re hilarious too. Of course, FR appeared to be making the point that it was the experience of school that would be too daunting for a young child exploring their gender identity. Unless you were some kind of uber prodigy (unlikely) I doubt you were at school aged four months. Whereas, I was certainly aware of my gender, and what I liked, and didn’t like about it, by the time I got to primary school.

It’s true that any deviation from the standard is going to get this poor kid a lot of stick at school. But probably less than your average transkid, it seems to me. If she decides, say she’s a girl by the time and goes to her first day at school in frilly pink princess shite, she’ll be treated as a standard girl. But if she had been raised in a normal upbringing-equals-birth-certificate household, and had already spent three years decked out in dinosaurs and dungarees being told she was a boy, then her claims to be a proper girl are invalid under playground law, and there’s no more legitimate target for the bogwash than a boy who thinks he’s a girl.

Having said that, where FR is bang-on exactly right on this is understanding that the main way in which gender norms are policed and entrenched is probably not the state or the marriage bed or the TV but the schoolyard.

Whereas, I was certainly aware of my gender, and what I liked, and didn’t like about it, by the time I got to primary school.

Hey, good for you. Now I’m of a protestant disposition so you must make allowances for the private interpretation but I take FR’s post to be a gentle side-swipe at silly parents who impose their idiotic ideas on their children who will then have the misfortune of carrying the burden of said parents’ idiocy into the uncomfortable reality that is mass education. As if finding our way in this world of ours wasn’t difficult enough…

Btw…

Unless you were some kind of uber prodigy (unlikely) I doubt you were at school aged four months.

No, obviously not. Shitting and gurgling at this age like all weans No ‘wants’ in the adult sense – only needs. You do realise you’re making my point for me, don’t you?

Sorry, but I seem to be missing the part in which some commenters notice that there’s just something pretty fucking objectionable about a couple of parents treating a small child as if its nothing more than a psychology experiment, particularly when no one understands the developmental mechanisms that underpin the acquisition of gender identity.

Got that? We know about as much about th etiology of transexuality as we do the etiology of homosexuality, which is pretty much fuck all – its complicated and all the current theories have more holes in them than a sponge.

So leave the kid alone, run with whatever the chromosomes are saying for the time being and teach them to respect other people regardless of gender, etc. and they’ll settle on their own sense of who and what they are when they’re ready to do so and in their own sweet time.

but I take FR’s post to be a gentle side-swipe at silly parents who impose their idiotic ideas on their children who will then have the misfortune of carrying the burden of said parents’ idiocy into the uncomfortable reality that is mass education. As if finding our way in this world of ours wasn’t difficult enough…

Exactly.

I don’t even see how the post is transphobic given the young kid isn’t even trans… nor does anyone know what the identity is!

@41 – “Now I’m of a protestant disposition…”

You surprise me. (Not really.)

“I take FR’s post to be a gentle side-swipe at silly parents who impose their idiotic ideas on their children who will then have the misfortune of carrying the burden of said parents’ idiocy into the uncomfortable reality that is mass education.”

Presumably, unless ‘rents are of a Fritzl disposition, if the kid is a boy and wants to be a boy and has no issue being a boy and doing boy stuff, like a boy, it’s hardly an Atlas-like burden for him to be such in the school playground.

It’s no less cruel than being raised a United fan anyway.

“Shitting and gurgling at this age like all weans No ‘wants’ in the adult sense – only needs.”

Were you shitting and gurgling at school, too? What about college? It’s not like the process of developing a gender identity ever stops. If you’ve supportive parents, all power to you…

“So leave the kid alone, run with whatever the chromosomes are saying for the time being and teach them to respect other people regardless of gender, etc. and they’ll settle on their own sense of who and what they are when they’re ready to do so and in their own sweet time.”

The trouble is, though, that there is no leaving alone. That’s the point. If they were on a desert island and were never intending to leave (scary enough thought in itself) there *might* be some faint possibility of leaving a child alone to follow its own path and settle into an identity independently of social norms, but, as it is, a child’s sense of who they are is utterly mediated by who everyone else tells it it is. These parents were trying to hold that back for a short time. An impossibly Canute-like endeavour, really.

Someone discovering that they’re transgender is obviously a stressful experience. However, the majority of people are not. I can safely say that, even if I had been raised in such a gender neutral environment I still wouldn’t have felt any pressure to be male. All that these parents are doing is force confusion on a child.

Look, kids don’t care about race, or gender. It’s only adults that indoctrinate them one way or another. A baby doesn’t care what gender it is. All that will happen is that they’ll eventually notice that their genitalia are the same as 50% of people and different from the over 50% of people. By all means raise a child without any gender stereotypes – that’s great and laudable. But don’t raise a child in a manner that will force it to question it’s own identity right from the word go. If the child grows up to be transgender then it would have anyway and its parents should support its identity. If it doesn’t then it wouldn’t have anyway and its parents should support its identity.

But instead of doing that, they are piling confusion on the child. Let’s look at two scenarios here. The first is that it meets other children and notices that there are girls and boys. It won’t have any knowledge of which it is and that will be confusing and stressful. In the other scenario it will make a decision at a young age that it is one or the other gender at a time when arguably it is not old enough to try and fully determine its gender. After all, what if the child is emotionally and sexually male but incorrectly ascribes itself as a girl – imagine all the confusion that will cause later on in life. Or vice versa.

I wouldn’t say that these parents are inflicting child abuse but I hardly think they count as good parents.

Were you shitting and gurgling at school, too?

Of course. Of shitting there is no end. This I have learned…

It’s not like the process of developing a gender identity ever stops.

Really? Why not?

…but I take FR’s post to be a gentle side-swipe at silly parents who impose their idiotic ideas on their children who will then have the misfortune of carrying the burden of said parents’ idiocy into the uncomfortable reality that is mass education.

That was certainly the intent. I foolishly didn’t think it would be controversial, given that everyone has experienced school and knows exactly what it’s like. I think I underestimated people’s ability to maintain their ideological commitments in the face of personal experience, and not for the first time.

Lucy:

I’m afraid you’ve got your argument arse about face.

Unless a child is brought up in a complete controlled environment a la the Truman Show, it will acquire the environmental infliuences it needs to form its own sense of identity regardless of anything its parents might try to foist on it.

What little credible evidence there is for the etiology of gender identity and sexual orientation in humans suggests that the acquisition of both stems from a complex interaction of biological and environmental influences and that the process itself is largely, if not entire, an unconscious process. The proof of this is the fact that both homosexuality and transexuality occur in social environments that are openly hostile to both.

Some people go against the grain of the social ‘norms’ of the society in which they grow up and develop a robust identity that is largely, if not entirely, at odds with those norms, irrespective of any efforts to socialise in a particular, socially sanctioned direction. As a parent you don’t need to create some bizarre artificial home environment in order to allow that process to happen. It’ll happen anyway, you just need to to accept it, and your child, for what it is when they do start to express their own sense of identity.

The kid doesn’t need to ‘explore’ different gender identities. If its gender identity is to differ from prevailingsocial norms it will assert itself anyway as it develops, without the need for its parents to pretend that its somehow genderless simply to satisfy their own idiot ideological beliefs.

@48 – “Of course. Of shitting there is no end. This I have learned…”

Aye, fair enough. Shitting into nappies, though… And gurgling?

“‘It’s not like the process of developing a gender identity ever stops.’

Really? Why not?”

Because anything that doesn’t change is dead. Are you really the same person you were a week ago? A year ago? Ten years? Even the conservative party changes with the times (albeit slowly)!

“I foolishly didn’t think it would be controversial, given that everyone has experienced school and knows exactly what it’s like.”

My Dad’s experience of school was very different to mine. Should I expect the experience of the next generation to be precisely the same as my own? Or am I some foolish dreamer for believing that sometimes things change for the better?

Unity – the parents aren’t suggesting the child is genderless though.

“None of my children are gender-free or genderless (and neither am I).” Kathy Witterick

Obviously FR and others above are chattering idiots, but I’m surprised you are joining in. It’s not like you to lie. What’s up with everyone tonight?

Are you really the same person you were a week ago? A year ago? Ten years

It’s pretty tiresome for the people who have to live and work with me but I’d say pretty much, yeah. This goes with the caveat that self-assessment is fairly pointless…

Yes, I’ve just read that piece – the mother desperately needs to step away from the child psychology books and TV ‘experts’.

“As a parent you don’t need to create some bizarre artificial home environment in order to allow that process to happen. It’ll happen anyway, you just need to to accept it, and your child, for what it is when they do start to express their own sense of identity.”

Unity: surely all home environments are constructed to some extent and many of them are bizarre, not just the ones which don’t tell their boy children to play with guns and their girl children to want to wear princess dresses? It’s not like parental influence is entirely neutral in the equation; robust senses of self are helped along by a certain amount of positive nurturing. What these parents are trying to do is to support rather than repress/restrict/trammel whatever identity their child ends up expressing.

@Earwicga

What up with me is no one understands the etiology of gender identity, least of all Alfie fucking Kohn, so its unwise in the extreme to try and muck about with an important developmental process when you haven’t got the foggiest idea what you’re messing with.

Gender differentiation is part of human social and psycosexual development. All kids go through a stage of dividing other members of the species into male and female and attaching values and ideas to those concepts as part of developing their own sense of identity. Its perfectly reasonable for parents to try and influence the values that children attach to their internal concepts of male and female and, in particular, to teach them that these concepts are not limiting in the sense of certain things only being for boys or girls, but that’s a very different matter from what this particular parent is doing, which appears to be trying to shield their child from the very enviromental influences and cues they’ll need to establish their own robust sense oif identity,

That’s the point that seems to escape some people here – transsexuals do have a robust sense of their own gender, its just one that doesn’t match up with their chromosomes, and they acquire that regardless of the social norms that surround them.

Children do appear to need access to gendered environmental cues even if the one’s they internalise are not those that wider society would regard as going with their chromosomes, which makes it unwise in the extreme to seek to restrict their access to those cues.

Earwicga: Obviously FR and others above are chattering idiots…

Oh, obviously.

Seems to me the parents weren’t planning on banning the kid from having a gender – they’re just not going to try and force it into any particular gender, and have made the unusual choice of keeping the sex a secret for its very early years in order to facilitate that. I really don’t understand what the big deal is. I’m also amazed at the number of supposed lefties who apparently feel they have a right to judge other people’s parenting methods.

Anyway, I don’t find this piece bigoted or transphobic – I just think the premise is weak and it sounds a bit tabloidy. And like tabloid columns, when the weaknesses in the argument are pointed out, its supporters accuse others of being humourless or too PC, when there’s clearly a serious point being made and continuing to be defended.

I’m not bigging up my own argument there by the way, I’m just suggesting that others should engage with the debate itself, as opposed to telling others they should chill out, take a joke, or stop being so cerebral about the whole thing. If you’ve got an opinion on the subject, defend it. Innit.

Lucy:

There is a big differennce between conscious socialisation – teaching children not to see gender in limiting terms by classifying certain things as being only for boys or for girls – and depriving children of the gendered environmental cues they need access to in order to develop a sense of their own gender identity, whatever that turns out to be in the long run.

There is a difference between gender identity, in the sense of possessing an inner sense of one’s own maleness or femaleness, and gender values, the concepts and ideas that one attaches to the notion of being male or female. One can reasonably influence the development of the latter but one should not seek to interfere in the development of the former, because we simply don’t no enough about the underlying developmental mechanism through which we acquire our inner sense of out own gender to go buggering about with them.

Sounds like more of a problem for schools than for this family, as they are one of the few institutions where you be mercilessly abused outside of prison that you can still be compelled to attend. I sometimes wonder to what extent the bullying into normality at school is part of how the state and it’s establishment institutions reproduce themselves so successfully.

@Unity: OK, I do take your point, but I don’t know how much putting off revealing a baby’s sex for what will probably only be a few months is really going to remove gendered environmental cues. Whereas the effect in terms of the gendered expectations/behaviour that grandparents, neighbours etc show even tiny babies has been researched already and may well be worth challenging. All parenting is experimental, some is just more common practice that others: doesn’t make it necessarily safer or more responsible than making an unconventional choice, especially when the conventional practices are such demonstrably poor options for so many less-conveniently self-identifying children!

@ Unity

That assumes that male/female has always had fixed meanings throughout every human setting. Have they?

And how does this:

but that’s a very different matter from what this particular parent is doing, which appears to be trying to shield their child from the very enviromental influences and cues they’ll need to establish their own robust sense oif identity

Not contradict this:

That’s the point that seems to escape some people here – transsexuals do have a robust sense of their own gender, its just one that doesn’t match up with their chromosomes, and they acquire that regardless of the social norms that surround them.

Btw, the parents (there are two of them) are only not telling people outside the immediate family, the other kids know the sex of the baby so the ‘shielding’ isn’t absolute. I doubt it will have any affect at all. It always amuses me when parents, usually mothers, are accused of determining their trans child’s gender. I can’t even get my kids to put their dirty laundry in the bathroom. There are some very special people amongst us.

@earwicga

No I don’t assume that male and female have fixed meanings other than in the sense that the existence of both are biological facts. What I assume, and what the evidence shows, is that maleness and femaleness are meaningful but the cultural meanings applied to each are complex and subject to considerable variation across cultures,

There is no contradiction in those two statements – you’re making the mistake of assuming that gendered social norms and gendered environmental cues are the same thing when they’re not. Even in a strongly gender normative culture, a minority of individuals develop a gender indentity outside the prevailing social norms because the environmental cues they unconsciously internalise are not those mandated for their biological sex within thay culture.

Why? No one really knows but we know it happens because transsexuality exists.

The same is also true of homosexuality in strongly heteronormative cultural environments.

The key thing to understand is that the basic parameters fo gender identity and sexual orientation are acquired unconsciously – neither is innate, in the sense of being biologically determined, but we might just as well treat both as if they are innate as we have conscious control over their acquisition and development.

I agree that the parents seem more interested in generating publicity for themselves than in their child. They are going to have to avoid all use of personal pronouns relating to him/her in his presence – that small point immediately, to me, drives home the ridiculousness of this project. They are going to have to be so busy policing the way they speak, for fear of ruining their experiment, that they won’t be able to interact with the child in a fully natural way.

FR#19 – you are clearly an apologist for Islamofascism and an enemy of all that is decent! (I hope that made you feel more at home.)

To the owner of this blog: I don’t come here to read bigoted rants. This has nothing to do with liberal-left politics. Please don’t allow this kind of thing to be posted here in future.

This article makes sick.

For a non-story, as suggested by some posters, this is generating plenty of interest. Perhaps it touches on stuff we all take for granted?

I agree with Unity that the parents appear a bit too happy to experiment on their kids in quite an extreme way.

And I can’t help the Modern Parents popping into my head whenever I think about it, so I must be some kind of bigot.

@Sarah 64

They are going to have to avoid all use of personal pronouns relating to him/her in his presence – that small point immediately, to me, drives home the ridiculousness of this project

If they were French it would be impossible. “Mon petit, ma petite”. In English you could just about get away with it if you always used the first and second person and avoided the third. “Where’s Neuter?” “Out playing in its sandpit.” “Now be a big – um – um CHILD um PERSON and stop crying.”

Flying Rodent is morally bankrupt.

“They can choose their own clothes even if that means wearing girls clothes”

My next door neighbour has two young children the older of the two is a girl, the other day I saw the boy (age two) in his sisters dress & shoes, I laughed & said what has your sister done to you, he of course looked puzzled and his mum said he choose them to dress up in himself and as long as he’s happy what does it matter, I agreed, the mother always dresses him like boy when they go out because she is a “normal” parent not wanting people to throw stones at her child when she isn’t there to protect him. Seems like a fair balance.

This story does make me think about religion though!
I have a problem with parents making/forcing or just encouraging their children to believe in a god at a young age, I believe all children should be left to discover a god if they feel the need to in their own time because being religious makes people see you in a certain way, with that in mind I’m torn between letting children find their own way and being told to conform.

As far as bullying goes I had my own approach when one of my children was being bullied at school.
I got my child to point out the parent of the child that was doing the bullying, I said to that parent, a man, your son is bullying my child and I want it stopped he laughed and said so what, what you going to do to him, I said nothing, but I am with you! I told him that no matter if I win or lose the fight I WILL fight him EVERYTIME I see him as long as his child is bullying my child, guess what?
The bullying never happened after that day. Sorted

Flying Rodent is morally bankrupt.

I’ve had that particular charge thrown at me by all manner of muppets and tools over the years, but this is the first time it’s been slung because I had a little laugh at the expense of a pair of well-meaning dullards who think raising their child in a gender-neutral environment or whatever is a blow against prejudice.

Frankly, I’m about at the end of my patience with over-educated complainers who believe that reality’s failure to conform to their factional politics represents a triumph for the forces of reaction. It’s tiresome enough getting ten years of this silly bullshit from idealists who think you can make the world sit still and behave by dropping high explosives on enough of it. I don’t have the will or the temperament to discuss school playground politics with people who are intent on pretending that they don’t know what playgrounds are, despite their own formative experiences.

On a related point, this thread neatly demonstrates why left wing politics in any meaningful sense is fucking doomed – we’ve got The Big Waggy Finger Of Tut-Tut being waved; an epic display of freaking out about absolutely nothing and a ferocious intramural frag-fest on an issue that’s of no interest at all to the public. This is what happens when we declare that everyone has a valid opinion and a contribution to make rather than ignoring single-issue zealots and inviting them to shut the hell up.

No wonder the West has swung dramatically to the right, despite the right’s red-handed culpability in the planet-wide financial catastrophe. Right wing politics generally may feed on fear like it was scrambled eggs, but at least they keep their eyes on the prize – political power and governance. While they were shoring up their control and filling the airwaves with horseshit, we’re engaged in an eighteen-way circle jerk over the rights of “transgender children”, for fuck’s sake. Try selling that to a voter on a doorstep.

I’ve long thought that we get the political movements we deserve, but I don’t remember drowning that many kittens or kicking that many puppies.

#62

“It always amuses me when parents, usually mothers, are accused of determining their trans child’s gender. I can’t even get my kids to put their dirty laundry in the bathroom.”

I’m glad I read all the way through the comments thread. It was worth it just for this.

It’s difficult to tell how the parents are treating the kid just from that article. If they’re treating the kid as an experiment rather than a human being, that’s obviously not good. But I’d prefer to err on the side of assuming, in the absence of other evidence, that they do actually love their kid. Most parents manage to screw up their kids in some way or other: these parents may be getting more attention than others but parents who insist that it’s somehow biological that their girls prefer pink and nothing to do with the fact that they and the kid’s environment have made being a girl synonymous with pink for the kid’s entire life wind me up more.

Love covers over a multitude of sins & people are remarkably robust, even kids. I’m sure this kid will grow up just fine.

Okay, so I think everyone can agree that children getting bullied at school is bad. Oh hang on actually, not everyone agrees on that – if I had a pound for every time I’d heard someone call it ‘character building’ or ‘part of growing up’ I’d be rich. This is the problem surely – if wider society accepted that school bullying was a real problem which causes real psychological damage, there may be more efforts to tackle it than are currently available.

I was bullied at school and the teachers did precisely nothing about it – they had a ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude and looked down on ‘soft’ kids. So did the parents, who quite often ignored the havoc their little angels wreaked on other children – or even approved of it in some cases. Because where do you think other children get their attitude of ‘anything different is bad’ from? They learn it from their parents. The girl who was the ringleader of the bullying I experienced had parents who were ignorant, prejudiced, aggressive, Daily Mail-consuming morons. I’m quite sure that wasn’t a coincidence.

I was bullied mainly because I was clever – should I have tried to be more stupid? Should my parents have given me the message, conform at all costs and if that means failing a few GCSEs like all the cool kids, fair enough? Erm, no, I don’t think so. The bullying I suffered caused me to have mental ill health for years, but I think I would suffer more if I was trying to live my life as someone I’m not.

The ‘but the child will get bullied at school!’ argument is one that’s also currently being used as a ‘reason’ to disapprove of gay people adopting. It’s not a valid argument against that, and it’s not a valid argument against what this Canadian couple are doing.

The answer is greater tolerance, and the more exposure children have to other children who are different from them, the more likely it is that difference will become accepted. In fact, when you bring a child up to be tolerant of others and show a good example by being tolerant yourself, it’s surprising what they accept and understand. The anxiety about conformity is more to do with the parents’ prejudices and fears projected onto children than it is about the kids themselves.

The people making the biggest stink about this baby are adults, after all.

Flyingrodent – I think KB Player was just trying to cheer you up actually. (See your comment 19 and my 64 to which she was responding.)

Yes, she probably was. Sorry about that, Rosie, but this thread has confirmed pretty much all of my worst fears about the state of politics in this country. Come, friendly bombs…

This is a bit of everything thrown in, wacky North Americans, gender politics, children, home schooling, a great opportunity for the Right to mix up the whole gamut of sexual/gender conditions from transgender to homosexuality and everything in between and the old staple ‘Political Correctness gone maaaad’.

And yet…
And…

And yet, for some reason the Left seem almost honour bound to impale themselves on this rather obvious spike in the ground. Why? No-one really believes in a complete androgynous planet, nor are we even demanding androgynous pre-school children. Yet for some reason there appears to wind behind this story, why? The attraction for the ‘Right’ is obvious. This is what they see is the natural progression from talking about non-stereotypical behaviour to its natural course. Every time we hear about the concept that boys sometimes like to play with dolls and girls enjoy ‘Bob the Builder’ more than ‘Dora’ this is what the Right threaten us with. Anyone who does not snatch that car out of the girl’s hand or fails to buy their son the latest war machine is ultimately condemning us to a genderless future. Well, ahem, that is silly, but…

So where is the need for the Left to keep the kettle boiling on this? One couple have had made this choice that will doubtless end in failure, so what is in it for us? We know the difference between transgender and homosexuality so why the need to scrutinise EVERY decision made by every parent in the World?

Why the need to publicly self flagellate ourselves every time some arsehole make a stupid decision? Not even the type of decision most of us would make ourselves?

Kids still get bullied in massive numbers every day, not because we are insufficiently committed to anti-bullying, but because they’re kids; that’s what kids do, and we can’t control their behaviour 24/7. Ten thousand years ago, Ug was probably picking on Ag because her mammoth-hide dress was unfashionable. Ten thousand into the future, Theta Sigma Four will harrass Alpha Gamma for having a second-hand anti-gravity bike.

But don’t you know Fabianism can cure everything? You’re well off message.

All the wrongs and cruelties and excesses of the world can be put right if we just listen to those smart people and understand what is good for us. Any admission of the possibility that they cannot make us perfect and the house of cards falls down.

Incidentally, it was a while ago but I remember how I acquired my gender identity- I noticed my dick.

It was huge and still is.

I just didn’t realise at the time that my assumption that I was male was over simplistic.

It was a joke, FR. Evidently the sense of humour failure on this thread is infectious. I’m pretty much on your side (this time only – don’t get carried away!) on this post.

There are of course serious discussions to have about gender identity. I’d call myself a feminist but I when I’m commuting on my cycle I shame myself by shouting “Stupid bitch” or “Stupid prick” at people in cars who try and mow me down or pedestrians who walk in front of me with plugs in their ears. It made me realise that the first thing you notice about another human being is their gender. However I was brought up in a society where gender roles were extremely distinct. (Men drove tractors, women were housewives).

They fuck you up your Dad & Mum,
And worst are those who mean so well,
By trying methods that are dumb,
They make your life a living hell.

It would be nice if everyone commenting on this remembered that the article was written about an entirely fictional family doing entirely fictional things, in the “ooh, political correctness is taking us to hell in a handcart!” straw-liberal tradition of the Daily Mail.

The *actual* family is not doing what the author has accused them of doing, which is to raise a genderless child then throw that child into the bear pit of the school playground to be set upon by bullies. It’s not happening so you don’t need to get all hot and bothered about it!

It’s a bit ridiculous to base a rant about how appalling and stupid and cruel these (home educating) parents are being in sending their child to school when they are NOT sending their child to school, probably because school is a bear pit.
They are also not raising their child to have no gender, they are just holding off telling the neighbours what sex their baby is for a while. It’s an unusual decision but it’s totally different to what they’re being accused of here.

@Unity

“No I don’t assume that male and female have fixed meanings other than in the sense that the existence of both are biological facts”

http://www.dellagracevolcano.com/statement.html

The *actual* family is not doing what the author has accused them of doing, which is to raise a genderless child then throw that child into the bear pit of the school playground to be set upon by bullies.

I imagine that they will have to interact with other children at some point, though.

Bluntly, I couldn’t care less what these parents do. Let them raise their kids according to whatever gender studies theories they like, it’s no skin off my nose. I won’t be performing any interesting social experiments on my kids, largely because I know how difficult childhood can be without minor local celebrity status. And that’s it.

‘this thread has confirmed pretty much all of my worst fears about the state of politics in this country.’

Not David Miliband covering up torture, not the gradual carving up of universal healthcare, not the woefully poor voter turnout for every general election, not the expenses scandal or prostitute-frequenting MPs or liars or villains – but THIS! THIS THREAD! It’s confirmed everything that’s wrong with British politics today!

Is anyone on the phone to Nick Robinson?

@Violet

“Okay, so I think everyone can agree that children getting bullied at school is bad. Oh hang on actually, not everyone agrees on that – if I had a pound for every time I’d heard someone call it ‘character building’ or ‘part of growing up’ I’d be rich. This is the problem surely – if wider society accepted that school bullying was a real problem which causes real psychological damage, there may be more efforts to tackle it than are currently available.”

You are absolutely bang on here.

Schools can, and do, create environments where bullies do not thrive, I have taught in a school where a transgender girl was able to be who she is without any kind of bullying at all. the secondary school she moved to subsequently did as well because she came back and helped me with a drama production I did with my year 6 class. If my staff team could do this in one of the most notoriously difficult primary schools in north-east London any school could to that if it wanted to. As you say, it is just a matter of the will; too many parents, politicians and even teachers think that bullying is character-building and inevitable, as does Flying Mouse.

That is the real problem with this article, it makes bullying appear inevitable. The other problem is that it picks on trans children as “inevitably” being bullied, if he suggested that black or Asian children would “inevitably” be bullied it would not sound so good would it…

“Bluntly, I couldn’t care less what these parents do”

Ha! Well, don’t write an article making up what you *think* they’re doing and use it to hold them up to the world as examples of idiotic parenting!

@Ellie Mae: Not David Miliband covering up torture, not the gradual carving up of universal healthcare, not the woefully poor voter turnout for every general election, not the expenses scandal or prostitute-frequenting MPs or liars or villains – but THIS! THIS THREAD! It’s confirmed everything that’s wrong with British politics today!

Of course. You’d probably still get most of that stuff even if lefties didn’t spend so much time and energy fragging each other to pieces over inconsequential bullshit like this, but who knows? Maybe with all that spare time, we might find time to focus on stuff voters are more interested in.

“I won’t be performing any interesting social experiments on my kids, largely because I know how difficult childhood can be without minor local celebrity status. And that’s it.”

Yeah, the media attention is shit. The parents seem to have utterly misjudged the stir their decision would cause.

As far as I can see, *all* parenting is an experiment. You don’t actually know if your child is going to thrive in school or sink like a lead balloon. You don’t know for certain if by coercing them into conventionally gendered clothes, persuading your boys not to chose to wear the pink dress they’ve got their eye on or your girls not to get a crew cut, you are going to be squashing an important part of their identity. It’s not like parenting to fit in with society as it is at the moment has shown itself to be a safe/hapy choice for everyone.

Pagar @76

Incidentally, it was a while ago but I remember how I acquired my gender identity- I noticed my dick.>/b

I’ll get my coat.

Watch it Jim!!!!

You’ll get drummed out the brownies.

What’s the betting the child is a boy?

You know, Douglas, the thought that this might all be rooted in parental disappointment at having a fourth male child in row has occurred to me.

What’s the betting the child is a girl? and the parents want her to miss the first few years of pink and princesses that give her expectations of 70p in the £1, that ‘maths is hard’ or that unless they’re pretty and thin, they’re useless?

What’s the betting the child is a boy? and the parents want him to miss the first few years of of blue and astronauts and toys based on violence? where emotion is considered ‘weak’, child-rearing isn’t ‘men’s work’ and the gives them the male privilege issues that mess up their relationships with their partners?

Not to mention the subtle nudging that makes LGBT people value their worth when they are constantly bombarded with heteronormative stereotypes from day 1, based solely on their dress and demeanour.

If they can raise a child without the stereotypes that can cripple aspects of life for both men and women, that’s a good thing.

But yes, this family believes in a lot of woo, and the homeschooling can cause just as many interpersonal relationship problems as the gender problems they’re trying to avoid. They’re running a psychological experiment on a child, and even if the child turns out well, the lack of a control group, safety measures, and a decent write up, the experiment is worthless. If the child doesn’t do well, then the right wing press is going to have a field day, and it’ll put the equality movement back 5 years.

Huh. And here was me thinking that the few schools that had taken pro-active steps toward the bullying of ‘diffrunt people’ had actually reported a significant degree of success and greater acceptance and inclusion.
But apparently no, you can’t teach children not to be little shits…

“homeschooling can cause just as many interpersonal relationship problems as the gender problems they’re trying to avoid.”
Do you have evidence of that? All the educational research I’ve read on the subject (quite a lot) suggests the exact opposite.

“They’re running a psychological experiment on a child, and even if the child turns out well, the lack of a control group, safety measures, and a decent write up, the experiment is worthless”

God god, what they’re doing is trying to bring up their children in the way they think best, whether or not you agree with their methods. They are not running a psychological experiment any more than any other parents are. They are making an unconventional choice because the conventional choices available to them seemed pretty rubbish.

(PS: Unity – they have two boys already, not three. I suspect that, of all people, parents who raise their children as free from gender expectations as possible really don’t give a flying fuck what genitalia their third child turns up with.)

Akheloios,

Yes, I suppose it could be a girl:

http://tinyurl.com/3rfev8c

The idea that it’s just woowoo theory bollocks to try and organise childraising around the fact that for a significant minority of people gender isn’t as simple as being one thing or the other, and that mostly this “boy girl” thing is a social construct, completely misses the point that there are quite a lot of us around in the world who experienced shitty childhoods where wellmeaning conformist parents tried to knock gender variance out of us and tell us if we just looked less freakish we’d get bullied less rather than supporting us.

I don’t personally think parents *need* to do some sort of experimental genderless child rearing project, and I think in any case, many children being brought up somehow “without gender” (the recent news isn’t the first time this has happened by far) end up picking one thing or another, and it’s completely impossible to isolate anyone children or otherwise from gendered society. On the other hand the idea that it’s dangerous to let children take a leading role in determining their own gender identity is complete rubbish. The lack of support in self-determination is something that leads a lot of gender variant kids to the brink of suicide.

Well, you amused me, FR; and congratulations to Sunny for publishing your piece.

The parents in question seem like gender-obsessives to me. And by the very use of the term ‘gender’ (rather than the objective ‘sex’) they seem to subscribe to the perverse, discredited, unscientific and false view that there is no difference between a male and female person other than the configuration of their genitals, apart from what prescribed social roles and political ideology have allegedly inculcated…

This is false because we know that the human person is a complex mix of biological (genetic, epigenetic and hormonal) influences with social and environmental factors. And, furthermore, in no way do sexual differences have any substantive bearing on sexual equality. We can be different but equal. Men and women tend to have significantly different but complementary perceptions, preferences and attitudes. But that does not matter if boys are brought up to respect women, and girls are brought up to believe they can achieve what they want. My daughter is very feminine in many respects — and has been from an early age (unlike her mother) — but she has a fine intellect, is intimidated by no man, and is a high-achiever. We will be impoverished socially and emotionally if socially we lose what Henry James called “the sentiments of sex”.

@ 94 Paul – The difference between girls and boys hormonally is what?

@ 71 tim f – Agreed and cheers

@ 63 – Unity – every single culture through the whole of time has used a gender binary? I don’t think so.

This year, several hundred UK parents will be informed that their new baby is intersex. The medics can see from conventional biology that the baby does not conform to the 99.9% norm. The majority of those children will grow up relatively normally and all of them will be closely monitored and assisted through life. Post puberty, some will opt for gender reassignment surgery, some will switch gender identity (perhaps more than once), the majority will strongly identify themselves as men and women. For all of those people and their families, there will be many painful moments. The suicide rate for intersex and transgender people is itself distressing.

So I am particularly offended by this experiment. If you read the original article (http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/babiespregnancy/babies/article/995112), it is clear that the new child, Storm, is the third stage of an amateur gender identity study that has already gone wrong.

Here’s how five year old Jazz behaves: “Jazz was old enough for school last September, but chose to stay home. “When we would go and visit programs, people — children and adults — would immediately react with Jazz over his gender,” says Witterick, adding the conversation would gravitate to his choice of pink or his hairstyle.

That’s mostly why he doesn’t want to go to school. When asked if it upsets him, he nods, but doesn’t say more.

Instead he grabs a handmade portfolio filled with his drawings and poems. In its pages is a booklet written under his pseudonym, the “Gender Explorer.” In purple and pink lettering, adorned with butterflies, it reads: “Help girls do boy things. Help boys do girl things. Let your kid be whoever they are!””

Jazz’s non-verbal message is what you’d expect from a five year old; the written message stinks.

Jazz “wears a sparkly pink stud in one ear”. An ear piercing on a five year old? Not a cut and dried example of child abuse, but something a bit iffy given that the parents do not wear jewellery.

I wonder most about what happens when these children grow into puberty. Assume that they are encouraged to dress more conventionally and enter mainstream child society. They’ll probably get on for a couple of years until hormone changes kick in, which is when many transgendered people report that they suffered their first crises. Intersex people who have not been diagnosed previously are often identified at this age. Parents and/or children suffering a gender identity crisis can seek the advice of charities such as Mermaids (http://www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/index.html). I am not aware of any organisations designed to assist young people who had their gender identity intentionally fucked up by their parents.

Defenders of the parents fail to distinguish between allowing children to establish their gender identity (or to create a gender-light personality), and the imposition of a genderless childhood by adults. This freak experiment probably makes it more difficult for transgendered or intersex children and their families.

The parents are obviously well intentioned liberals with decent IQ scores, which have not translated into common sense. Take this: “Upstairs they co-sleep curled up on two mattresses pushed together on the floor of the master bedroom, under a heap of mismatched pillows and blankets.”

That’s another experiment with their own children: living without privacy or an independent lifestyle. Jazz is old enough to attend school but is taught at home. He is finding it hard to associate with children of his age. He spends his time with his parents or their friends.

@paul ilc: The term “sex” is logically more correct than “gender” but the argument was lost years ago. “Sex” pops up occasionally within terms such as non-op and post-op transexual. You acknowledged the expression “gender-obsessive” yourself, and “gender” becomes unavoidable when talking generally about transgenderism.

The child lives in the world and provided they send it to school, let it watch TV, raise it with gendered siblings, allow all of them to have friends and outside contact with other people then none of this is going to make a bit of difference. Most of our experience of gender comes from the outer world not our inner selves and these kids, including the one who isn’t being assigned an identity are going to interact with all the societal stereotypes around them. This child will still be stereotyped, it just won’t necessarily be on the basis of their genitals, the likelihood is that some people are pretending it’s a boy and other’s are pretending it’s a boy so frankly I don’t see what everyone’s getting so worked up about.

In case you hadn’t guessed by my slip there I think most people are probably pretending it’s a boy.

There are people on here saying, in effect, that there’s no reason to assume that a gender-neutral upbringing is “weird” in a way that a gendered upbringing isn’t. True enough, but the problem is that the rest of society goes with gendered upbringings. So it’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with the idea, the problem is that the child is going to be singled out by their peers, and is probably going to feel alien among other kids.

It just seems like a hell of a dangerous game to play with a child’s life.

@99 Chaise

I think there’s more to it than just the risk of bullying. The whole issue appears to have been pushed to the forefront in the children’s thinking so that the oldest is almost obsessive rather than natural about this aspect of his development. Surely this alone suggests a crass and insensitive handling of this dubious experiment?

@ 100 Cherub

Yes, indeed… I suspect it’s a mistake to give young children mission statements beyond the obvious developmental stuff like “work hard in school” and “be nice to other people”.

All raising of children – ever – is an experiment of some form.

What I don’t get is why these parents felt the need to tell the world’s media about what would usually be a private decision.

@97. Nina: “The child lives in the world and provided they send it to school, let it watch TV, raise it with gendered siblings, allow all of them to have friends and outside contact with other people then none of this is going to make a bit of difference.”

The problem is that the recent child, Storm, will not be growing up into such an environment. The eldest child, Jazz, feels unable to enter school and there are questions about his ability to associate with children outside the family. The experiment failed already but the parents are pushing it further. It was insufficient to experiment with two boys, so try it again with a genderless infant.

@ S Pill

“All raising of children – ever – is an experiment of some form. ”

Agreed, but obviously there are distinctions, such as that between “let’s experiment with letting them decide their own meal times” and “let’s experiment with letting them do whatever they want, even if that includes juggling knives”.

At some point, it becomes a dangerous imposition on the child.

Meh, say what you will about the parent’s batty decisions but I’m under the impression that Storm’s childhood will be fun and filled with love, as opposed to say Baby P’s brief life, the kids of that mother who decided to snuff out their lives just prior to the world ending last week, or the lives of those for whom the NSPCC exists to help.
Seriously. They have a loving mother and father, I’m sure they’ll turn out okay.

“The eldest child, Jazz, feels unable to enter school and there are questions about his ability to associate with children outside the family. The experiment failed already but the parents are pushing it further. It was insufficient to experiment with two boys, so try it again with a genderless infant.”

Charlieman, you’re making assumptions that aren’t there in the original (Canadian) article. It’s clear that the parents were not experimenting with their first child, but responding to cues he gave. Parenting is a whole series of responses to unexpected twists and turns: if you have a little boy that loves hair clips and pink shoes the choice is either to support his choice or suppress it. They supported it. They discussed it with him. He is aware that his choices are unpopular. I know several families that have made similar choices (some of whom are involved in the Mermaids organisation you mentioned). It’s staggering that you would assert that this kind of parenting is deliberately fucking up a gender identity. (The mother, by the way, makes it clear that the baby is not genderless; she just isn’t telling yet.)

Cylux has it right in saying that Storm’s life will be filled with fun and love: the three kids obviously have kind, attentive, thoughtful parents and spend their days doing interesting and creative things. The parents’ misjudging of the world’s response was unfortunate but their intentions and parenting practice are full of love.

What the ****?

Oh well. Goodbye Liberal Conspiracy.

Lucy Cage,

Don’t you think this degree of intrusion into a clearly dysfunctional family by people on the internet who know nothing of them is, perhaps, a bit distasteful? You have had oodles of space to write stuff about boys that would be girls, etc.

It is not typical.

Could you get that through your head.

When it happens then the child should be given all the support he or she needs.

But claiming this as proof positive of anything other than the prurient nature of the internet is ludicrous. Frankly your idea of parental love is a joke. You do not use your children as front and foremost in any campaign whatsoever.

Anyway,

http://tinyurl.com/namx6e

@Douglas Clark:
“Could you get that through your head.”
No, I just I disagree with you, Douglas.

“a clearly dysfunctional family”: I disagree with you about that. It is not clear. When I see parents bullying/shaming their children for not being who they are expected to be (go to any park, you can see it too) *that* behaviour is dysfunctional and damaging, but it’s normalised.

“Frankly your idea of parental love is a joke”: I disagree with you about that too. Parents that support their children’s expressions of identity, however unusual, are being loving.

My comments on this article are trying to question the multiple misreadings and misunderstanding about the family whom no-one here actually knows. It’s all mediated by other people’s opinions, from the disapproving journalist who first interviewed them to this particular wildly inaccurate piece. Even the mother’s letter is not the whole picture (as she says, they are getting judged by people who know not 10% of what and who they are as a family). But there’s no campaign here. There’s no mission. They have refused all further interviews/TV appearances and are clearly horrified by their misjudgment of the ensuing publicity.

Lucy Cage,

You say:

Parents that support their children’s expressions of identity, however unusual, are being loving.

What sort of mirror universe are you living in? It is the parents expressions of identity that are being, err, expressed here. The child wants parental love. The parent is the one exploiting the situation. I doubt a child of that age has duplicity in it’s nature. But the parents certainly have.

The choices you have at that age are limited to the extent you can scream. And you are, frankly, imposing adultish feministic notions on a child that can barely toddle?

Get a grip.

—————————-

Well, that was the first half of your diatribe.

However you came around to my point of view eventually.

Well done.

All you need to do now is admit that they are completely off their trolley and we’ll be done here.

@106. Lucy Cage: “Charlieman, you’re making assumptions that aren’t there in the original (Canadian) article. It’s clear that the parents were not experimenting with their first child, but responding to cues he gave.”

Nope. The Canadian article suggests that Jazz is making choices about what to wear now. We cannot know how he may have felt or been induced/encouraged in the past.

There is a possible experiment here. How about taking Jazz shopping with an independent “aunt” and “uncle”, and observing the way he gets on with a morning suit or mini-biker outfit? Or some glam rock gear? But that would still be unethical, given the way he has been treated for five years of his life.

“The mother, by the way, makes it clear that the baby is not genderless; she just isn’t telling yet.” I have no problem with that argument; in the other thread, I mentioned the difference between genderless and unannounced (undefined) gender.

The problem is that the parents *are* trying to construct a genderless child. The first experiments, for them failed, when they presented two boys who were biologically identified; so they are trying it again. The twist this time is that the birth identity of the child is unannounced.

Jazz, Kio and Storm may be reading this in a few years time. I hope that
that they have found a role model for them to hang onto through life.

Charlieman,

Jazz, Kio and Storm may be reading this in a few years time.

If they do, perhaps in fifteen or twenty years time, I hope they hate all the bullshit that pseudo sympathetic transgendered folk have given to their parents and not to them. Because the sympathy was a false positive. It was attempting to make Jazz, Kio and Storm their personal cause celebre.

This has been a disgrace of a comment column.

“How about taking Jazz shopping with an independent “aunt” and “uncle”, and observing the way he gets on with a morning suit or mini-biker outfit? Or some glam rock gear?”

@Douglas Clark: if you read the original article, you will have learnt that he went out shopping with his grandparents (who aren’t happy about the whole “not telling thing, kind of understandably!) and bought his first pair of shoes – so, probably as a toddler – and chose pink ones.

(Less of the patronising tone would be appreciated: this isn’t a “diatribe”; I don’t need to be told to get a grip any more than you do.)

“The problem is that the parents *are* trying to construct a genderless child. The first experiments, for them failed, when they presented two boys who were biologically identified; so they are trying it again”

If that is really the only way you can see it, let’s leave it there. I disagree with you about their motivations and intentions. I’ve seen very small boys gravitate independently towards a ‘girly’ identity to their parents’ surprise and I’ve seen parents try their very best to be loving and supportive in an unexpected situation: my reading of the parents’ own comments is that this is what happened in this family.

[deleted]

@114. Lucy Cage: I suspect that you may have projected some of my arguments onto an unfortunate bystander, Douglas Clark.

If you perceived a patronising tone to my comments, I apologise. I try to write in a flat voice (even when I am annoyed, like, like this minute when you misunderstand me). And I always try to be moderate, which is sometimes difficult for an old fart liberal.

The Canadian parents are not “liberal”; the children are too young to determine an independence for themselves.

And the trendy liberal parents are denying the opportunities for them to grow up and socialise.

@Charlieman: sorry, yes, I did ascribe your comments to Douglas Clark; and it was his tone/words that were patronising, not yours.
I apologise if I am misunderstanding your arguments: you seem to be saying that these people’s parenting techniques add up to a cynical, manipulative, damaging, uncaring experiment into genderlessness. I disagree. I think they are trying to do the best they can in a difficult situation. Jazz’s preference for bright colours triggered their decision to allow him to experiment with his ‘look’, rather than the other way around. That’s what happened with other kids I’ve seen who’ve been allowed to do a similar thing: boys who unexpectedly wore tutus and ‘girls clothes’ for years (and whose parents decided to not shame them for doing so) have grown up into confident, self-aware, happy young adults, who have made their own decisions about fitting into conventional expectations when they were ready to do so. They certainly weren’t ‘denied opportunities to socialise’ or get fucked up by being parented that way.
It’s true that ‘girlish boys’ are not regarded as anywhere near as acceptable as tomboys in our society, but even the tomboy look is not as prevalent these days as it was in the 70s, say, when girls could have boy hair cuts and wear identical clothes to their brothers without anyone batting an eye. What is acceptable for boys and girls to wear is ridiculously restricted and gendered and it’s all to the good that it’s being challenged by some parents. Look at the outrage one little boy wearing pink nail varnish caused recently: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/04/jcrew/
Would you rather that kids stuck to the programme? Do you think allowing free rein over nail varnish or clothes or hair length is really going to fuck up children’s sense of self so badly? Bear in mind that the secret over Storm’s gender is very unlikely to last very long according to the parents, and the wider world will almost certainly know his/her sex long before s/he is aware that anything unusual is going on.

Perhaps the kids would fit in if they went to a Steiner school? (Ducks and runs…)

@118. Lucy Cage: “…you seem to be saying that these people’s parenting techniques add up to a cynical, manipulative, damaging, uncaring experiment into genderlessness.”

Those are my beliefs, but I have tried to avoid expressing them explicitly and attempted to provide arguments from which people can make up their own minds.

“Jazz’s preference for bright colours triggered their decision to allow him to experiment with his ‘look’, rather than the other way around. That’s what happened with other kids I’ve seen who’ve been allowed to do a similar thing: boys who unexpectedly wore tutus and ‘girls clothes’ for years (and whose parents decided to not shame them for doing so) have grown up into confident, self-aware, happy young adults, who have made their own decisions about fitting into conventional expectations when they were ready to do so.”

I simply don’t believe the first sentence. In other words, I don’t believe the parents. The rest of the paragraph defines good parenting, of course.

“It’s true that ‘girlish boys’ are not regarded as anywhere near as acceptable as tomboys in our society, but even the tomboy look is not as prevalent these days as it was in the 70s, say, when girls could have boy hair cuts and wear identical clothes to their brothers without anyone batting an eye. What is acceptable for boys and girls to wear is ridiculously restricted and gendered and it’s all to the good that it’s being challenged by some parents.”

I duuno about tomboys. However you can buy combat trousers in the women’s section of TopShop nowadays and female pop stars (and adventurous young women) sport crew cuts. But I don’t have evidence to argue that tomboys are less or more common than in the 1970s.

“Look at the outrage one little boy wearing pink nail varnish caused recently: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/04/jcrew/
Would you rather that kids stuck to the programme? Do you think allowing free rein over nail varnish or clothes or hair length is really going to fuck up children’s sense of self so badly?”

I was attending primary school during the glam rock years. You could wear what you wanted in punk circles and the New Romantics reinvented glam. But few people dressed like that in everyday life. I still dress for everyday life like Mark E Smith of The Fall, or maybe he has been copying me.

No, I do not wish to prevent children from experimenting with appearance and I don’t believe that it will fuck up their lives. I do believe that parents should act as parents rather than part time socio- or psycho-experimenters.

“Bear in mind that the secret over Storm’s gender is very unlikely to last very long according to the parents, and the wider world will almost certainly know his/her sex long before s/he is aware that anything unusual is going on.”

Storm’s oldest brother is called Jazz and he is five years of age. Storm’s parents are still using him in their misguided experiment about gender identity.