DO MOTHERS MATTER?: Discussion thread sparked by this post. Start here and scroll down.

From the initial post: “Do children perceive [] their parents as gender-free beings? Do children ever talk about ‘my parent’? Why does gender matter so much to gays and lesbians, who only want to partner with someone of the same gender, but it’s not supposed to matter at all to their kids, who supposedly don’t give a hoot whether their ‘parents’ are embodied as male or female, or whether the bodies they came out of (a male one and a female one) are the same bodies caring for them everyday? Why is ’embodiment’ such a hot topic among liberal academics when it refers to fun things like sexuality and the discourse of fashion or whatever, but children aren’t supposed to care about their own embodiment and its links to the embodied parents who conceived them, and who may or may not be the people raising them?”