Posted on 10/03/2022 5:49:40 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
As Gabriella Martenson prepared for the birth of her first child, she came to a decision. She wouldn’t tell her child if they’d been born a girl or a boy, and would largely avoid discussing their birth sex with people outside her family and friendship group.
“I wanted them to be who they want to be. I don't want to decide that for them,” says Martenson, who was 30 and living in her home city, Stockholm, when she had her first child. “[It’s] just as I don't want to decide what they grow up to do, or who they decide to love or live with.”
As a child herself, Martenson had mostly been raised within stereotypical gender norms, such as being given pink belongings and dresses to wear. But in her late teens, she says she “discovered feminism” and began questioning gender norms. So, when she became a mother, she chose to buy her own child a wide range of clothes and gifts, ranging from trains to dolls.
She hoped her parenting style would help her child feel more comfortable exploring a range of hobbies and studies, rather than nudging them towards more gender-stereotypical activities. She also believed raising a child without gender would make things easier if they eventually identified as a gender different from their assigned birth sex, and help them accept other people who don’t adhere to the gender binary or other societal norms. “I'm letting them be anything… and teaching them to not be so narrow minded,” she says.
Martenson, who’s since repeated the approach with her two other children, is part of what some experts say is a small yet growing number of parents – both straight and queer – who’ve opted for gender-neutral parenting in recent years.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
“Prejudice is necessary to survival. If we had to develop a new set of rules for every type of encounter, we’d be dead in short order.”
Exactly! It’s a survival mechanism, it’s playing the odds. Everyone is prejudiced.
And the prejudice stems from our individual assessment of the AVERAGE behavior of easily identifiable groups. And that assessment comes out of our observations and experiences, ie, reality.
If I’m walking down the street at night and I hear footsteps behind me and I turn around and see a black person, my quickly calculated odds for danger would be considerably higher than if he was white or Asian. Just like Jesse Jackson’s calculations.
The reason is so simple and rational that it hardly needs elaboration - on AVERAGE blacks have proven to be more violent than other races.
The fact that, unknow to you, that particular black may be a very nice man doesn’t alter the probability of danger, and anyone with any sense of survival will act more warily, until proven otherwise by further observations.
So, yes, the good blacks suffer from that prejudice (which most likely he himself, like Jesse, holds) but the way you fix that problem is not by FORCING everyone to abandon reality and their sense of survival, but by working at making the prejudiced group on AVERAGE, better behaved,
Which may not at all be an easy thing to do, if the cause of that misbehavior is genetically determined, which evidence sure points that way.
The most practical, but still difficult solution, is to find a way to separate the races into separate, self governing countries.
I have read of a number of actors wrecking their kids lives by pretending boys are girls and girls are boys just so the actors can get some publicity.
Mommy Dearest books about these actors will be written by the messed up kids.
Moron. It was decided at fertilization. XX or XY.
Oh, it'll be a disaster. I believe in living simply, but it only works if it's a free choice, not something egomaniacs engineered.
Sure, but some are quite arbitrary and not particularly useful. Like clothing styles, hair styles, hobbies and interests. Those are really the only areas these parents seem to be addressing.
Many folks have a singular notion as to what is considered arbitrary and what isn’t. What works for one culture may be seen as arbitrary to folks in another culture.
The intellectual bent and interests of the budding child, no matter the sex, must certainly be addressed. Yet as soon as the boy child or the girl child(not knowing which in this story) asks why the opposite parent has a certain set of genitals and they don’t and who has babies and where do they come from, then the battle is on and the masks of ideological gender neutral nurturing must drop, at least for sake of pure intellectual honesty. Women with vaginas have babies and men with penises do not. “Parents can still act to “round off” the sharp divisions that have existed between perceived gender roles in the raising of their children. Boys get to learn to clean the house and cook their own food for this teaches them self reliance and to be self independent when there is no mother around to do the “girly” stuff. The girls can learn to cut the grass and rake leaves ao that they know how to do that when they own a home and there is no man to do it for them. The parents can turn a blind eye if Tommy plays dolls with his sister for a while. Teacing co-operation,mutual support and encouragment, and sharing does more to lessen gender role differences then an enforced ideology that makes dull unimaginative drones of both men and women.
Proverbs 31 describes a woman who is beyond value. Yet when you read the description....she has attributes that could be seen as more manly then many of the soy boys living in parents’basements and and more manly then the perfumed, pompous metro sexual squish men(Mitt Romney comes to mind) that have infested our politics. She is wiser still, than most of our lady politicians as well. AOC and Kamala could not stand up to such a woman. Palin is a woman like that described in Proverbs 31 which is why the establishment tries so hard to keep her buried!
Plato’s republic endorses such an engineered society posited upon the notion that the most talented and wise must shepherd those perceived as being less intelligent and direct them in those necessary jobs seen to be fit to their intellects yet deemed necessary to the functioning of the society. A benevolent slavery mercifully run by a voting intellectual aristocracy of free persons intelligent enough to understand their world,all directing a stratified layer of lesser hoi polloi.
Plato’s notions fall apart when real life and history has taught us that it isn’t very often that the noble wise and charity minded assume roles of power and that republics are fragile and given to dissentions, particularly when the undergirding moral principles of that society start to be seen as moldable plastic by those who have more selfish, libertine, and sensual motives in mind!
Plato also didn’t realize that even if the wise and the good set up a perfect society, they would soon be replaced by venal opportunists.
Decades ago they started this, buying girls toy trucks and bulldozers and buying boys dolls and tea sets.
Back in the 50’s my parents gave my sister a Lionel train set. I don’t know what it was about because they didn’t give her four younger brothers girl stuff.
Probably because your Dad just wanted to play with the train set.
Probably because your Dad just wanted to play with the train set.
Hey, that must be it. It got past Mom, didn’t it? Then he got us boys to play with it. Thanks FRiend, a little mystery solved.
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