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One afternoon in Ithaca, N.Y., my kids were playing on the swing sets in the park when a little tike wearing a football jersey ran into my daughter\u2019s path. I lunged for the swing \u2014 I jerked the chain so abruptly that I feared whiplash \u2014 and shared a \u201cwow, that was close\u201d exchange with the kid\u2019s mom.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow old is he?\u201d I asked. The lady looked at me as she placed her kid on the swing and said with no trace of irony, \u201cHis name is Jill, and she\u2019s three.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
As I tried to match the pronouns and antecedents, she explained that she belonged to a group of parents who rebelled against gender stereotypes, allowing their children to decide their genders after they\u2019d been exposed to both options. I\u2019d learned of this in a philosophy class at NYU. My professor argued that children are born with \u201csex\u201d but taught \u201cgender.\u201d The claim is that children unwittingly learn certain gender signifiers that dictate their behavior. Little boys don\u2019t naturally want to play with trucks, and little girls aren\u2019t naturally drawn to dolls, if unsullied by eager parents who try to indoctrinate their children with heterosexist ideas about \u201cgender.\u201d According to my professor, gender roles cause people to live according to the very limited ideas of others. The ultimate goal, of course, is androgyny, where no differences between males and females exist.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to raise her as gender-neutrally as possible and let him decide which gender she prefers at the age of eight.\u201d (Oh, eight; that\u2019s the age at which my son dug up our Tennessee yard one square foot at a time, because he was convinced pirates had buried treasure there.)<\/p>\n
Whenever I write about Ithaca (as I did in one of my memoirs<\/a>), I invariably get e-mails asking, \u201cReally?\u201d<\/p>\n Understandably, people can\u2019t quite believe that there are parents like this in America.\u00a0 However, a recent New York Times<\/em> article called, \u201cWhat\u2019s So Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?<\/a>\u201d attempts to further push the normalization of gender-confused children into the mainstream.\u00a0 It includes a very similar playground anecdote:<\/p>\n One day this spring I went to a playground with an 8-year-old boy named P. J. A pink ribbon with sparkly butterflies held back his thick black curls, which he occasionally flipped dramatically. He was wearing a serpent-and-skeleton bike helmet, a navy Pok\u00e9mon T-shirt, black-and-pink stretch pants, a fuchsia sweatshirt and an iridescent heart necklace. As he and a friend raced happily around the park in a loud game of tag, they accumulated new pals.<\/p>\n After playing for half an hour, a few kids huddled to catch their breath and finally introduce themselves. One 10-year-old girl\u2019s eyes opened wide. She turned to me, the closest adult. \u201cDo you know she\u2019s a he?\u201d Yes, I nodded. Certain that I\u2019d misunderstood, she pointed at P. J., who was right next to her. \u201cNo!\u201d she said. \u201cShe is a he!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The article, by Ruth Padawer, a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism, examines how various parents deal with children when they don\u2019t seem to fit into traditional gender roles.\u00a0 Padawer \u2014 and psychologists \u2014 describe this \u201ccondition\u201d in the following flowery terms: gender-atypical, gender-fluid, gender-variant, gender-creative.<\/p>\n Parents Susan and Rob have one of these \u201cgender creative\u201d youngsters.\u00a0 Consequently, they sent an e-mail to the parents of their son\u2019s classmates explaining their child will sometimes be wearing a dress to preschool. They explained that their son <\/em>\u201chas been gender-fluid for as long as we can remember, and at the moment he is equally passionate about and identified with soccer players and princesses, superheroes and ballerinas (not to mention lava and unicorns, dinosaurs and glitter rainbows). . . . The important thing was to teach him not to be ashamed of who he feels he is.\u201d \u00a0When Susan let her son wear dresses around town, however, her son was upset when strangers assumed he was a girl. \u00a0He said, \u201cI just hate being misunderstood.\u201d<\/p>\n Other parents have paid for a half-day of gender-diversity training for the staff their kid\u2019s school, though it doesn\u2019t stop teasing during recess.<\/p>\n Padawer goes to great lengths to make sure her readers accept the \u201c\u2018middle space\u2019 between traditional boyhood and traditional girlhood.\u201d She writes, \u201cBut the parents of the boys in the middle space argue that gender is a spectrum rather than two opposing categories, neither of which any real man or woman precisely fits.\u201d\u00a0 Padawer then goes on to write that this \u201cmiddle space\u201d is more acceptable these days in the form of the transgendered. The \u201cvisibility of transgender people \u2014 be it running for office or tangoing on Dancing With the Stars<\/em> \u2014 has provided an opening for those who fall between genders.\u201d<\/p>\n The most astonishing quote of the article was from Edgardo Menvielle, head of a program for gender-nonconforming youth at Children\u2019s National Medical Center in Washington.\u00a0 He said, \u201cI would argue it\u2019s not even ethical to say to a child, \u2018This is the gender you must be.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n The author helpfully explains what we already know about the political persuasion of the parents of these children, \u201cMany of the parents who allow their children to occupy that \u2018middle space\u2019 were socially liberal even before they had a pink boy, quick to defend gay rights and women\u2019s equality and to question the confines of traditional masculinity and femininity.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, I wasn\u2019t exaggerating about what my professors at NYU taught about gender and sexuality, and I wasn\u2019t exaggerating about what I saw on the playground in Ithaca.<\/p>\n Though, believe me.\u00a0 I wish I had been.<\/p>\n This article first appeared on National Review\u2019s Home Front Blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n Read more on the Faith and Family Channel<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Are children born with a sex? Um…. yeah. So what are the effects of some parents teaching their kids to be “gender fluid?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[667,48,29,666,104,69],"class_list":["post-3459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abuse","tag-gender","tag-liberals","tag-nyt","tag-parenting","tag-sex"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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