The kid who's parents think it's cool to let their kid chose their sex.

So if a 2 year old is asked this question, and answers "I'm a boy!"
Should the parents start acknowledging this? Or do you think there is no harm in continuing to avoid using apparently terrible descriptions, such as boy or girl to label their child?

What about if a 1 year old declares itself to be a boy? Is it old enough to be taken seriously?

How about if bub is just 8 or 9 months old?
My boy was answering basic questions at this age, simple things like which toy he wanted to play with, if he needed to go to the poty, etc, and he obviously knew what he was talking about!

Nobody has stated that a boy should not wear a dress, or that a girl should not wear pants. If a girl wants to wear camo pants, a black shirt, and cut her hair short, a supportive parent can simply inform the child "You can make yourself look that if you like, just don't be surprised if people think you're a boy " I'd expect the girl to laugh at this and have fun dressing up this way, but if a parent is negative about it, and tells the child "NO! Then you'll look like a boy! " etc, well that's just mean, controlling, inciting rebellion, etc.

You don't think these parents in the op have taken things to the extreme?

If not, then what would be the extreme? Surgically removing the babies genitals at birth, freezing them, and only ever reattaching them, when you have confirmed they are in fact the child's true gender?

And yes, there are many things to teach a girl, so that they aren't manipulated by the many pathetic influences society puts on them. Doesn't mean we should hide the fact that a girl is a girl, just to avoid the job of educating them!

 

I understand that is the parents' intention, yes. The child gets to choose what gender it is, and what that looks like.

Children have a firm sense of their gender from age 2. So I would say yes, until it decides otherwise. Don't worry; by the time that buying a new wardrobe would become an issue, children are firmly fixed in their sense of gender.

I find that at that age they don't talk much about gender identity issues.

it's nice to see you credit a child that young with some intelligence and inner life (seriously; many parents don't). In that respect you are not unlike the parents under discussion. But keep in mind that there is a difference between a bit of protodeclarative pointing and learning to regulate its bodily functions, and having meaningful introspection about its gender.

Nobody has stated it, but that is exactly what they struggle with. Otherwise gender wouldn't be an issue, no?

No. Parents who teach their children to hate n*gg*rs, fags and Jews do (cf. The Rev. Phelps family. Google them up. They're just like the Waltons*). These parents are teaching their children a sense of social conscience (you know, the one we have so been admiring in those Japanese pensioners recently), to feel secure in one's personal choices and identity, and to try and challenge societal prejudices.

I'm not sure what point a reductio ad absurdum is supposed to prove.

The problem is that it's not only you that is doing the educating. It is everybody that your child comes into contact with. People will treat your child in a particular way just because they know it is a boy or girl. They will project certain ideas, roles and expectations on it without knowing anything about the child. These parents have decided that they would like their children to get the chance to define themselves before society defines them. I can see their point.


* OK, you may be a bit young to remember the Waltons. Google them up too.

 

This discussion has been very effective at twisting my melon and getting me thinking about the issues involved and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

I get Nexxos point of view entirely. If my wife and I had a daughter I would actively promote the fact she is just as capable as anyone. I have done this with my niece and have always refused to buy her dolls etc when she was growing up unless it was something she particularly asked for. But as a girl friends and family would make assumptions and buy pink clothes, dolls, toy ovens and washing machines as that society tells us girls should get.

I can particularly emphasise with this as its something my wife has come up against most of her life. She has a very 'traditional' father and she has often commented on how she wanted to help him fix his cars when she was young but he wouldn't allow it and would instead involve her brother who was not interested in the slightest. The achievements of her and her sisters are overlooked by her father when everything her brother does is celebrated. She has also faced similar views during her working career.

Now where I struggle with this, (and I think MVAgusta does too) is I don think there is anything intrinsicly wrong with identifying a child as either male or female. Nexxo has pointed out the complexities of gender and how it can be a complex thing to determine. That must be relatively rare though? When gender is obvious I think it right to tell a child what gender they are; the problem occurs if you start to treat them differently because of that.

 

Children have a firm sense of their gender from age 2. So I would say yes, until it decides otherwise. Don't worry; by the time that buying a new wardrobe would become an issue, children are firmly fixed in their sense of gender.

Call me inpatient then, I couldn't wait that long, and as Da_Rude_Baboon says, I still think it's good to not ignore what they appear to be.

I dunno, it is possible that we asked him if he was a boy or a girl, just as a joke... but we probably didn't challenge him like that until he was maybe 1 or 2, I can't recall

But actually, when my boy was around 9 months, he made up a song about his dickie all by himself! Sometimes when he was butt naked, he would grab his dickie, and sing:

Dickie, Dickie, Dickie, Dickie, Dickie,
Dickie, Dickie, Dickie, hehehehehe.

I pretty sure if I just add some bass and cymbals to it, loop it over about 100 times, I'll have a number one hit.
Ok, fair enough, he wouldn't have known that girls don't have one, but he did get his first kiss on the lips from a girl, when he was 11 months old.
It was during a mother's group meeting, I was at work, and no-one else made it to that meeting... the mum's couldn't believe what they saw them doing, and they had to separate them 3 times! The little girl's mum told me that "she couldn't get enough of him!"

We didn't try to teach him that much, as apparently they can't really control what happens down there yet, but from about 5 months old, with help from a poty training book, we just kept an eye out for the warning signs, and took him for a fun and rewarding trip to the poty when it looked like it might be go time. By the time he was 6 months, he'd be only using a couple of nappies a day. By 9 months he was down to a few nappies per week, and could independently use the toilet by 1yo, except for wiping up after number 2's.

It is pathetic how some parents will spend more time teaching their pet tricks, than teach their baby anything, they'll just shove a bottle in it's mouth or just throw them in the bouncer in front of the TV to shut them up! That's neglect.

Maybe it's too much worry about nothing. Kids pretty much just wear jumpsuits for the first year, and the toys are pretty much unisex, such as rattles, animals, duplo(big lego), bubbles, toys with buttons, music and lights, etc, and many don't cut their hair for the first year anyway, so many baby boys look like girls.
I've seen parents take it as a compliment when people mistake their long haired boy for a girl, and the kids didn't seem to care.

That's not just extreme, that's evil.

Yeah ok they aren't doing that, it's just the whole ignoring what's between the legs, as if nothing is there, as if it means nothing, when in fact, a complete set of reproductive organs, means that things are most likely just as they seem! What are the odds when everything appears typical? 99.9% accurate?

You know, come to think of it, I'd say all babies are basically treated like little girls. It's not until kids are over 1 have I started to see, little expectations only here and there, put on kids depending on their gender, one of the biggest ones are the presents at their 1st birthday party... but hey... no need to shield kids from this! Ask the parents to buy unisex toys, or give them a list of preferred toys.

They are simply being slowly introduced, to the world they will be living in!
It's time to keep an eye on them, support and guide them, teach our kids as much as we can, let them get used to dealing with society from a young age.

They are kinda before my time, never seen them before.

 

You've never seen the Waltons? They were 1980's version of the Osbournes.

 

You put your finger on the central question: what harm can it do to designate a gender to a child? Apart from the 1 in 5000 chance that you get it wrong (which admittedly is small, but the consequences can cause a lot of grief) the parents' worry is that it causes the gender-prejudiced amongst us to treat the child in a particular way just because of it's gender, and more importantly, that the child draws lessons from that on how to perceive itself and its relationship to others.

Now you can reasonably ask how much the casual encounters with strangers weighs against the experiences imparted by the parents. But it is not just strangers --it's friends and family too. And it's all the time; literally every interaction with every person who is not the parent or sibling. And at a very young age is when children learn the most important lessons about how they are perceived, how others relate to them and about their sense of self and self-esteem. All these lessons become the template for how they see themselves, others and their relationships to others. For life.

Why not? Gender will out. They don't need us to tell them. As I said before: they work it out all by themselves by age 2. It is the adults who can't handle the ambiguity, and that is theirproblem.

So there you are: he has discovered he has a penis. At some point he'll find out only boys have one, and the rest is simple logic. But already he (and the girl) are experiencing heterosexual gender role conditioning. I doubt it if everybody would have looked on so indulgently if he kept being snogged by another little boy. But what would be the big deal if he was?

I don't think either your son or the little girl were really thinking meaningfully about sex or their respective gender. But already lessons about sex and gender are being taught.

Exactly. Gender is no big deal until it becomes relevant to the child, not the adults.

What makes you think that they are ignoring it?

The thing is that some people (especially family members, who think that they have special entitlements) are stubborn and most are blind to their own prejudices. These parents are not ignoring gender --they are just allowing the child to decide what it is and how to express it, rather than have it imposed by others.

 

Personally I find it very hard to believe the parents aren't pushing their own sort of expectations on the kids. "Gender neutral" parenting, and surprise surprise, the kid just "wants" to act like a girl. You just know the parents are giggling and feeling satisfied every time the boy does a girly thing because it reaffirms their belief that they've successfully stuck it to the man and fulfilled their own countercultural aspirations.

And there is indeed the problem with much of what masquerades as cultural "liberalism". It isn't real liberalism, not the textbook definition. It's reverse conservatism, taking the old norms and doing the opposite just because. Feminists who angrily decry anyone who chooses to be a stay-at-home mom, people who snatch away their kids trucks or dolls and give the doll to the boy and the truck to the girl so they won't be contaminated by "patriarchal gender norms".

Just because something isn't the old, conservative cultural norm, doesn't mean it's true freedom. There are plenty of people out there all too willing to shove some new, just-as-bad idea of "culture" down your throat, and I'd be wary that these parents might be one of them.

I'm no traditionalist on gender or sexuality but I'd take all this with a grain of salt.

 

That's actually a hell of a point. +rep.

 

That is a very good point, but it's supposition that this is what these parents are doing (as much as the goat sacrifices to Satan). The children do not act like girls. They act like children. The "like girls" is the gender interpretation placed on it by the article (and members in thus forum). It frowns on a five-year old declaring an interest in fashion and doing laundry with his dad because, the heavy implication between the lines is, that ain't a wholesome activity for a boy. If it was a five-year old girl declaring an interest in fashion and doing laundry with mum it would be regarded as perfectly normal.

What we have here is a problem of binary thinking. If a boy is not behaving according to a traditional boy's gender role, then he can only be behaving like a girl, right? Not so. He is still behaving like a boy. Just not a boy who has been conditioned to be a 'conventional' boy. The girl (yes, Storm is a girl, does that change things for you? And if so, why?) is behaving like a girl, just not a girl who is being conditioned to be a 'conventional' girl.

So I suspect that the parents are not smiling every time the boys do something girlish, but every time they do something that is not conventionally boy-ish. The opposite of conventional is unconventional. The opposite of conventional boy is unconventional boy, not girl.

 

inb4hippoz: buttsecks
(i hereby apologize to all forum members and to my own dignity)

 

Yeah, it is supposition. I don't know for sure, I'm just rather wary of people who claim they're rejecting society's values, it seems half the time they just reverse the values and call it a day. It may be prejudicial but again I'd be kinda surprised if the male kid decided "hey, I'm a boy" and the parents wouldn't give some sort of negative feedback, because they want their kid to be "different".

A boy doing fashion and laundry would be cool in my book. Wearing pink dresses, now personally I would discourage that until the kid is old enough to understand that kind of thing. And I think not calling your child him/her is definitely too far, though. Biological gender is a fact even if you choose to reject society's expectations of what that means. So in a sense they're imposing androgyny on the kid.

Bottom line people are fallible and even if these parents have the best intentions they're probably going to end up imparting some sort of expectations on the kid.

I was raised "normally" yet don't care one bit whether anyone thinks I'm sufficiently "manly", I just be myself and if people don't like me f*** em. I don't have kids, but if I do I'm going to play it safe. Given that plenty of people are raised conventionally yet realize they're gay or transgender when they get older, and turn out just fine, this radical approach seems unnecessarily risky.

Just my 2 cents. (Or 1.2 pence if you prefer. )

 

Only if they continue doing so after it has announced to them what gender it is.

(And notice how in the English language, "child" is a genderless word. ).

Quite probably. But at least they'll have thought about it, and tried not to. I'm not fussed about it because gender will inevitably out.

 

So why not do it from birth then?

 

Because it doesn't out at birth. It starts to out at roughly age 2. It firmly establishes itself by age 4. Sexual orientation outs around puberty.

 

think that's a bunch of crap myself.. I have a nephew that's 2 and he likes to stick his hands down the back of girls pants when they bend down to pick up something.. he thinks it's funny

does that mean he's a boy? I mean really- I've never seen a kid who thinks he/she's the opposite sex at that age.. they're minds are moldable- they suck up everything like a sponge, that's where it comes from

if you tell them they're pat.. they'll believe it.. how would you know your kid is a boy trapped in a girls body? what kind of kids are you talking about? romanian ok j/k but it sounds like the parents are into the buttsecks

 

People who ended up having gender reassignment surgery often report having a sense that they should have been the opposite gender at age five.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it must be wrong.

 

yeah that's true.. really at 5? see I can't even remember much at age 4- remember some things in kindergarten (was 4-5)

 

Actually in old English word gender was not related to sex, for example 'wifmann' (woman) is a masculine word.

/end of tangent

 

thanks for the accurate and insightful comments, @nexxo.

these parents appear to be aware of, and opposed, to not only the most obvious, normalized demonstrations of gender bias, but also the persistent and subtle tendency to view girlish characteristics as less desirable than boyish characteristics. if there were no inherent value assignments, there would be no news story and no thread on this topic.

by forcing harsh gender distinctions on a child during the first couple of crucial, formative years, and when it is completely unnecessary, we are unwittingly hard-wiring our kids with a damaging self, and world, view. a view that places a value on traits identified as either masculine or feminine, thereby robbing them of the opportunity to experience the full range of human response.

more power to these people for having the courage and fortitude to challenge the status quo. they're certainly going to need it.

 

You make a good point about the relative value attributed to masculinity and femininity. The below video comments on people's reactions to girls breaking the conventional gender mold: