Canadian Parents Raising "Genderless" Baby

[Broomstick]

Just in case anyone is wondering - Simon_Jester is doing a very good job of speaking on my behalf/putting words in my mouth, which is why I've largely shut up. Carry on.

[Simon_Jester]

Thanks, though it feels kind of awkward when it's said that way.

Perhaps an example less profound and less outside standard daily experiences of the modern day would help too: think about tattoos. You can get a tattoo for all kinds of reasons, some of them very profound, some of them very frivolous. The tattoo may have deep meaning to you- it should, if you're permanently inking it onto your skin.

But display of tattoos is not always socially accepted, and certain kinds of tattoos are even more socially unacceptable- a guy with a swastika tattooed on his forehead is going to be pretty damned unpopular anywhere he goes. There isn't much you can do about that.

People who have tattoos, and who live outside of very small insulated subcultures, learn to cover up their tattoos. Or they learn to accept that their tattoos will have social consequences- people will see all the ink on their arms and make inferences about their personality and history, some of which are justified and some of which aren't.

Now, a man with two or three square feet of tattoos can protest that his workplace shouldn't require him to cover them up. In some sense it is not fair, but it's hard to avoid. Those social standards aren't going to change overnight, and the case for reform is not overwhelming- you can't point to millions and millions of people who are disenfranchised by their possession of a tattoo, for instance.

So how foolish is it to raise a child while attempting to prevent them from ever having to deal with anyone who might find a tattoo unprofessional, ugly, or otherwise a negative marker that should be covered up in the public sphere? Someone who gets a tattoo needs to know what they are getting into, for their own protection, because otherwise they will constantly bang heads with people over the issue of their tattoos, and will often lose.

[Serafina]

I think the most important part is being understated here:

IF you raise a child genderless, even IF the environment is perfectly supporting - you will rob the child of the experience of growing up into a certain gender.
It's great if that experience is non-limiting - but growing up as the gender fitting your gender identity is an important experience, and you should not rob a child of that.


Now the article quoted by Maj severely lessens my concern that Storms parents actually plan to do that. Instead they just seem to have a very hands-off approach in regards to gender, which is fine by me.
However, it is my understanding that Bakustra was defending a "genderless"-approach - whether or not the parents are doing it has no impact on that. Thus, unless i am mistaken, i still want to see him defend his claims.

[Simon_Jester]

From the sound of it, there's no real danger of Storm being raised 'genderless,' and my worry that the parents would try to keep the child from making up their mind until "enough time" had passed in their eyes are probably baseless.

But there's still the very real concern for me that they will pull Storm out of society to such an extent that they're not prepared to deal with it. So much depends on exactly how they go about teaching Storm (how 'unschooled' is their 'unschooling' going to be?), and how carefully they insure that Storm interacts with other children even if some of them are mean, and factors like that.

Which I worry about, in light of the rather odd mindset required to say "we don't want to tell you whether our child is a boy or a girl, and we'll tell the world that we don't want to tell the world!"

[Manthor]

Gender is very much something that has both a biological and social dimension, IMO. The child will probably face some developmental issues down the line if the parents do persist in this....fallacy. But even with the home schooling, at some point Storm will have to interact with social peer groups - which may or may not undo any damage suffered by the child.