Wednesday, June 15, 2011

4PM A baby with a secret gender?

In Canada, a very disturbing story has arisen about an extremely unorthodox set of parents have made a rather unprecedented decision: they aren’t telling anyone the actual gender of their third child. Not even the grandparents. They have previously done their best to allow their two older boys to be uninhibited by what they consider the artificial and stifling gender norms of society, and now they’re going one step further in trying to keep this third child’s gender a complete secret. But as the article in the Globe and Mail rightly points out, if the entire point is to remove gender as a meaningful category and make gender boundaries nonexistent, the very worst way to do that is by turning it into such an object of fixation by refusing to say what it is. They’ve actually turned it into the single most important thing about the child, precisely the thing that defines this child for the media attention and which will be its most enduring personal legacy. This goes beyond people being misguided about the nature of human sexuality and gender and just becomes farcically stupid.

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