Pre-School Gender Confusion for Dummies

Swedish parents keep 2-year-old’s gender secret

Yeah, you heard me.

Pop’s parents, both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few – those who have changed the child’s diaper – nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.

I know that not all feminists believe this.  But the ones who do are stupid and/or insane.  Is it not obvious to any reasonable person that there are physiological, emotional and psychological differences between males and females that function at a much more basic level than whatever effect social conditioning has on people?

“Ignoring children’s natures simply doesn’t work,” says Susan Pinker, a psychologist and newspaper columnist from Toronto, Canada, who wrote the book The Sexual Paradox, which focuses on sex differences in the workplace.

“Child-rearing should not be about providing an opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child’s needs as an individual,” Pinker tells The Local.

Pinker says there are many ways that males and females differ from birth; even if gender is kept ‘secret,’ prenatal hormones developed in the second trimester of pregnancy already alter the way the child behaves and feels.

OK, think about this.  A newspaper reporter had to go out and find a psychologist to point out the obvious.

Reporter:  “Sorry to bug you about this crap, Pinker, but there are a couple of intellectual morons in Sweden who are crippling their kids.  I know, I know, it’s beyond ridiculous, but I gotta write a couple inches so that no-name conservative bloggers have something to go apoplectic over.”

Pinker:  “Fuckin’ A.  I have real problems.  Make something up.  Anything you write is going to make me look reasonable next to those two jackballs.  Just be careful if you run into any Swedish gender equality consultants who think this might actually have positive results.”

But Swedish gender equality consultant Kristina Henkel says Pop’s parents’ experiment might have positive results.

“If the parents are doing this because they want to create a discussion with other adults about why gender is important, then I think they can make a point of it,” Henkel says in a telephone interview with The Local.

She says that without these gender stereotypes, children can build character as individuals, not hindered by preconceived notions of what they should be as males or females.

“I think that can make these kids stronger,” Henkel says.

Stronger than what?  A normal man or woman who faces down the usual challenges of childhood and puberty, and comes out the other side as a regular human being without having been emotionally crippled by his/her hippie-dippie parents?  Might the mere act of introducing confusion and identity squishiness into a child’s sexuality in his/her formative years have some potentially negative effects?  Haven’t these parents listened to Johnny Cash?  WE KNOW HOW THIS ENDS.  Sue got the crap beat out of him his whole life until he grew up and beat the shit out of his good-for-nothing, a-hole dad for imposing his half-assed personal philosophy on him.

Both Nordenström and Pinker refer to a controversial case from 1967 when a circumcision left one of two twin brothers without a penis. Dr. John Money, who asserted that gender was learned rather than innate, convinced the parents to raise ‘David’ as ‘Brenda’ and the child had cosmetic genitalia reconstruction surgery.

She was raised as a female, with girls’ clothes, games and codes of behaviour. The parents never told Brenda the secret until she was a teenager and rebelled against femininity. She then started receiving testosterone injections and underwent another genetic reconstruction process to become David again. David Reimer denounced the experiment as a crushing failure before committing suicide at the age of 38.

“I don’t think that trying to keep a child’s sex a secret will fool anyone, nor do I think it’s wise or ethical,” says Pinker. “As with any family secret, when we try to keep an elemental truth from children, it usually blows up in the parent’s face, via psychosomatic illness or rebellious behaviour.”

Yeah, well, by then these jackass parents will have made their political point, they’ll be heroes among feminazi eggheads, and they’ll just blame whatever goes wrong in Pop’s life on society’s unhealthy obsession with gender anyway.  Their stupid ideology has built-in blame for anyone but themselves.

I wish Pop well.