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| Oh boy |
A story that defies understanding until you realize... how old the parents are.
It's a boy! And he's five. Beck Laxton, 46, and partner Kieran Cooper, 44, have spent half the decade concealing the gender of their son, Sasha. "I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," Laxton said.
I'm confused. Is being stereotyped as a boy worse than being stereotyped as a court jester with an extra chromosome? "Wha--! That is so offensive!" Agreed. So why did she do it?
"Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?"
On a hunch I checked out her blog to see how opposed she was to slotting people into boxes:
I may be wrong, but this appears to be a woman whose whole life is boxes.
The premise for this unstory is that the parents wanted to prevent any gender stereotyping, so hid the child's gender from everyone to let him [sic] grow unstereotyped.
The problem is that the parents already know the sex. They can't unknow it. They aren't acting from no information, they are acting in reaction to the information. They are saying they are raising him gender neutral, but what they are actually doing, precisely, is choosing not to raise him as a boy.
Sasha's gender was almost revealed when he took to running around their garden naked, but Beck was resolute and encouraged him to play with dolls to hide his masculinity.
Hide it from whom? The kid knows he's a boy. If he wants to play with dolls that's one thing, but evidently the dolls aren't for him, for his benefit, but as a signal to other people.
Not wanting other people to affect his development is fine, but as parents they are the most important influence in his early years, and their chief lesson is that who he is is less relevant than the appearance of who he is. They are telling him reality doesn't exist. Not "boys can do whatever they want" but "pretend you are not a boy."
As a "radical feminist", would she have encouraged the same denial from a daughter?
Read the rest at The Last Psychiatrist.
