Gender Identity: A step forward?
 

Not so sure about this, but I sort of get it.....

A Toronto couple are defending their decision to keep their infant's sex a secret in order to allow the child to develop his or her own gender identity.

We didn't tell anyone the sex of our babies in advance, even though we knew. We treated all three the same. None of them wore pink or pastels, they all wore purple and flowers. (that was the cutest pair of dungarees/overalls). And they all loved princess dresses, "click-clack" shoes, Thomas trains and Hotwheels/Matchbox cars. Now we have two typical boys and a not-so-typical girl, .......but still very much a girl. Moreso by the day, it appears.....

It never occurred to me to continue to keep it secret. I wonder if we would have if we'd thought of it? And why is it creating all this hoo-haa -who really needs to know at this age? Why do people care if this couple won't say what sex their baby is?

They are weird.

And Canadian.

Which may not be mutually exclusive.

i'm, obviously, all for it.

Sounds like some kind of social experiment.

Are they going to tell the child when it's old enough?

Maybe it will tell them?

When I heard about this it was in a different article that included more information on the couple's other two children. The 5-year-old, a boy named Jazz, is very unhappy. He's having "emotional problems" and an "identity crisis" (according to his own mother.) It's one thing to let your kids be whoever they want to be. But these parents clearly have something to prove, and I'd be willing to bet they actively pressure their kids to be androgynous--which is, of course, just as bad as pressuring a kid to fill a traditional gender role. When I was growing up, my mom made it repeatedly, exceedingly clear that she would be "okay with it" if I were a lesbian. Even as a young kid I had the distinct impression that she wanted me to be a lesbian just so she could show the world how tolerant and progressive she was. But I knew I was not a lesbian, and for a long time I felt guilty that I wasn't living up to her expectations.

Not telling other people your baby's gender? Sure, whatever. 50% of strangers are gonna get it wrong even if your baby is dolled up in a pink dress, makeup and heels. But the older kids are proof that there's more going on, and that these parents are forcing their children to be a social statement rather than actually giving them freedom. It's gonna be sooo awkward when Jazz gets caught with straight porn in his room.

Did any of you read The Wasp Factory?
Super smashing great boook is all I'm saying.

God, I hope, I hope, I hope that kids last name is Hans.

For all we know the kid is a hermaphrodite (more prevalent than we think) and instead of choosing for the kid they want to see what the kid thinks. I'm only slightly kidding. *shrugs*

Maybe the kid will tell them. We don't know everything.

the rather more PC term is intersex.

the huge prevalence of intersex births that are "fixed" neo-natally is by far the best argument, to me, that binary gender is, at best, insufficient, and more likely than not utter bullshit and just a societal construct. there are NOT "two sexes", so arguing that since there are two sexes there must be two genders is utterly fallacious.

I agree Ibby. It oversimplifies something incredibly complex and individual.

I can see what they were trying. Brave move, but a risk. There are definite differences in the way people treat male and female babies in general. Right down to how they are held (boy babies tend to be held facing outwards, girl babies facing inwards, i think i have that the right way around :P) and there is a good amount of evidence to suggest that it is this difference in how babies experience the world from the start that leads to gender distinct brain development in some areas.

That said: first off, no matter how much they try to keep it a secret, they cannot keep it secret from themselves. The parents are as much a product of their environment as anybody else, and will almost certainly have acted differently in subtle ways around the girl and boy babies. They may not realise it, they may be consciously treating them alike; but unless they are 100% conscious and aware of every verbal and non-verbal cue they give off, they will have given gender clues along the way.

It's a nice idea, that we could somehow remove the social constructs of gender entirely from a child's development and allow them to form their own anew. But the reality is that we live in a gendered world. And we seek gender confirmations from our parents, siblings and peers. Little girls want to know what big girls are supposed to do, and little boys want to know what big boys are supposed to do. Whether the child then feels that relates to them is another question entirely. But they need to know.

And as Ibs points out: gender is more complex than a simple set of male and female binary poles. Kids growing up intersex face confusion and a kind of hostility towards their uncertainty is woven into the fabric of our culture. Anything that eases that confusion and allows them to find themselves without the negative connotations society would place on them if it could, is a good thing. But actually instituting gender confusion and ambiguity in your child's life seems cruel to me.

The truth is, despite the evidence I spoke of for the elasticity of 'brain gender' at the start of life, and the likely impact of culturally agreed gender norms on brain development, we don't fully know. This sort of thing can only be experimental. We have no way to kmnow for sure that we haven;t been barking up the wrong tree for the past 30 years of neuro-science when it comes to gender. For the very simple reason that it is all but impossible to test.

These kids weren't raised in a vacuum. The rest of the world exists and they interacted with it. Even if the people they interacted with weren't told the kids' gender. Even if that gender was disguised. The other people in the equation have a gendered understanding of the world and will have arbitrarily assigned a gender to the child in question and interacted according to how they would with a child of that gender. Even if they, like the parents, made a concerted effort not to. This stuff happens at too deep and fundamental level to just think it away like that.

I'm sure they had very laudable reasons, but it seems far too much of a child-development experiment to me.

To me, a better idea is to just not foist too much social baggage onto concepts of gender and make a conscious effort to minimise the extent to which interaction is gendered.

I was raised with clear notions of gender. But those clear notions allowed for girls to play with guns and boys to dress up the family dog.

Twin studies have proven gender is not a social contruct.

No they haven't. They have strongly indicated some areas in which there appear to be innate gender distinctions. But there is also evidence to show a great deal of what we understand as gender distinctions are not innate.

I think growing up in the country with lots of farm animals is very non gender specific. Everyone has an even playing field. Everyone hauls the feed, everyone gets chased by the crazy rooster, gets jumped on and eaten by the randy goat, stepped on and bucked off by the horse. You wear your grungy clothes too that by the end of the day are as smelly and dirty as anyone.

With land and the responsibility of farm animals, a persons identity isn't tied up into being what a female or a male does or doesn't do because if you want to be a contributing member you do it all.

At that point whether you have dolls are trains in your bedroom becomes moot because it isn't what defines you.

It's only when you hear of someone spending too much time with the sheep, then and only then is sexual orientation is in question. :unsure: :P

I know that people have to push the envelope for social change to take place, but it is a safe bet that this child will be more fucked up than if the parents took the simpler route of easing expectations... it just makes me think of Pete's uncle raising a daughter without using the word no. The results were easily anticipated.

I mostly held my boy facing out, and my girl facing in. Because you see, the boy squirmed like mad when he was facing inward. He wanted to see what was going on. Meanwhile, the girl wouldn't let me hold her facing outward. She wanted the close contact and comfort. Some people do treat babies differently, no question. But some babies really do just meet stereotypical expectations.

There was at least one real-world test in the sixties. I forget the name of the psychologist, but he was trying his hardest to prove that gender was completely and totally a societal construct. There was a case of twin boys at that time (maybe this is the same one UT was referring to) where by accident one of the boys was horribly maimed during the circumcision. He convinced these parents to complete the removal of what was left, and raise the child as a girl. This was not a child who was intersexed or otherwise hormonally ambivalent, he just didn't have his physical genitalia anymore.

The psychologist continued to have regular contact with both children over the next 20 years, so there's quite a lot of documentation about the boy's feelings during this time, and how miserable and confused he was, and how angry he was after he finally found out as an adult what his parents had done.

Society doesn't tell us whether we are a boy or a girl or anything in between. It just sets the ground rules over whether we'll be miserable with how we're treated. Accepting a kid for whoever they innately are is different than pretending it's all a big choice that they're free to make.

Clodfobble, you are referring to Dr. John Money.

He tried to prove his theory that gender identity was socially conditioned on one David Reimer. He made an ideal "test case" because he came with a built-in control: a twin brother.

To his dying day (in 2006), Dr. Money insisted that his case study was valid and proved his point even as other doctors and researchers, not to mention the Reimer family, proved otherwise.

I consider the man a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein. He should have been prosecuted for child abuse, improper conduct, possession of child pornography and a host of other charges.

I think part of the problem is that gender is partly biological and partly a social construct. We haven't always understood gender the way we currently do. We have at various historical junctures held notions of gender that to the modern western mind seem absurd. To suggest that our age is the one that has the purest expression of gender untainted by cultural factors, is equally absurd. Some of what we understand as gender is biologically driven, some of it is chemically driven, some of it is culturally acquired. To what extent biological and chemical differences are themselves driven by cultural expectations during early childhood is almost impossible to know. What we do know is that there are greater levels of difference between individual brains of either sex than there is between 'male' and 'female' brains.

To me it seems likely that there is a relationship between cultural and biological. What that relationship is, I dunno :p

I think gender is fluid and the binary construct of xx and xy are just a convenience for the sake of conversation.

The spectrum has to run from dyed in the wool/bred in the bone xx or xy to every permutation expression manifestation imaginable. I personally don't believe nurture has much of a role in determining our gender identity.

Dan savage had a great challenge last week (or this?) where he challenged some Canadian politician to prove homosexuality was a choice by choosing to become gay and then sucking Savage's dick.

Makes sense to me.

I think trying to "cultivate" someone's gender is like trying to train someone to not be left handed, or right handed for that matter. The big difference being that "handedness" is not as strong an urge as sexual identity.

I don't think nurture forms our gender identity, so much as it informs how we experience and express gender.

Nature nurture. We'll never know until our society devalues life enough to allow us to experiment with our children for scientific purposes.

It'll happen eventually. Life is pretty cheap already.

It will never be nature or nurture. It will be a combination of both.

I agree with Dana. Nature determines which chemicals will be released in our bodies and nurture teaches our society's expression of gender and the norms that are associated with them.

Well there are quite a number of examples where kids have had nurturing through means other than normal human interactions and the results have surprised sociologists, anthropologists and other professionals in the field.

I'm thinking specifically of an boy in France discovered to have lived in the wild with wolves, and a girl in the US (I think) who was the victim of gross emotional abuse and basically had no human interaction her whole life until she was found at the age of 11 or so.

Both are amazing case studies, but the conclusions drawn can never be proven because people would never agree to allow children to be treated that way on purpose by scientists.

I agree with you that there are a lot of studies that would be sociological and psychological gold but will not occur due to ethical standards. The human mind is extremely complex and I'm guessing the combination of nature and nurture can lead to an almost endless amount of possibilities where each combinations is too sensitive to ever exactly replicate.

It's just that the idea of an absolute "nature or nurture" answer or trying to say that one is completely dominate over another just bugs me. For what I've seen, there is more than enough proof to show that both absolute sides are wrong and the political and social implications behind saying one or the other is absolute is extremely large.

It has been postulated that their are instances where genetics can impact the sexuality and even the behavior of an individual. An example of this is the XYY or "super male syndrome."

ARTICLE from the Encyclopædia Britannica:

On the other hand, the idea that genetics may somehow be a causative factor for homosexuality has been pretty much debunked.

The couple in the OP are probably doing more harm than good. The children are being steered into a non-gender experience (supposedly) which puts them at odds with the experience of other children in the society around them. This is bound to leave a mark of some sort on the children who have become lab rats in a highly questionable parental experiment.

Whatever happened to the concept of raising girls who are encouraged to be self sufficient and do well at math :rolleyes: , and boys who are encouraged to help with cooking and housework and do well at expressing their emotions?

It seems to me that the Toronto couple are actually giving more credibility to the sexual stereotyping that they oppose. A girl can be feminine, yet excel in engineering. A boy can be a "manly man," yet still express his emotions. In fact, it takes a strong man to go ahead and cry. An individual does have to be neutered to experience what it is to be human, whether male or female.

As for people who have an affiliation for their own sex, so what? Surely, we are finally beginning to leave those tired and erroneous stereotypes about gays behind us. We need to work on how we think of and judge others as they REALLY are instead of attempting to hide it.

Are you sure? Maybe you just didn't put enough effort into it.

My understanding of the current science says the exact opposite. There are all sorts of physical manifestations that are more common in gay men; for example, in women, the index finger is generally longer than the ring finger, while in men it is the other way around. Gay men, however, usually have a finger-length ratio that matches women. Gay men are also more likely to have a counter-clockwise hair whorl on the back of their head, while the vast majority of straight men have a clockwise whorl. In addition, gay men are more likely to have multiple older brothers, the theory being that the mother has built up a resistance to the source of extra testosterone in her body with each successive male fetus.

I wish. It would be so much easier to live with another woman. Except not one of those butch lesbians, you know, I want a real woman who will cook and clean for me.

mail order brides.
It's a win-win deal.
US citizenship and a ticket out of her godforsaken hell hole of a country and a serf for you.

Sex is optional.

My index finger is shorter than my ring finger. Does that mean I should be a man? Or gay or something?

That depends. How long is it in relation to your penis?

I don't have a penis, but boy I've got some balls from time to time.

bwahaahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa