A mom in Seattle decides to let her 6 year old son decide his gender. He decides he's a girl. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/fashion/modern-love-transgender-child-identity-parenting.html?_r=1 From He to She in First Grade By LAURIE FRANKEL SEPT. 16, 2016 When our son turned 6, my husband and I bought him a puppet theater and a chest of dress-up clothes because he liked to put on plays. We filled the chest with 20 items from Goodwill, mostly grown-man attire: ties, button-down shirts, a gray pageboy cap and a suit vest. But we didnt want his or his castmates creative output to be curtailed by a lack of costume choices, so we also included high heels, a pink straw hat, a dazzling fairy skirt and a sparkly green halter dress. He was thrilled with these presents. He put on the sparkly green dress right away. In a sense, he never really took it off. <> So we asked him, What do you think youll do with your dress when school starts in a couple weeks? We said: You need new clothes for the new school year. What should we buy? For weeks, he wasnt sure. And then, on the day before school started, he was. <> When he woke up on that last day of summer vacation, the first thing he said was that he wanted to wear skirts and dresses to first grade. O.K., I said, stalling for time, as my brain flooded with all the concerns I hadnt yet voiced. What do you think other kids will say tomorrow if you wear a dress to school? <> I dont know, he admitted. So we brainstormed. We role-played. We practiced saying, If girls can wear pants or skirts, so can boys. We practiced saying: You wear what youre comfortable wearing. This is what Im comfortable wearing. We practiced polite ways of suggesting they mind their own business. Who honestly believes the parents didn't "encourage" their son to act like a girl? Was this really all about the child or did the parents see a chance for their moment of fame? A 6 year old is not a miniature adult, 6 year olds do not have the mental and emotional capacity to make these types of life altering decisions, and they have no idea what the ramifications will be. That's supposed to be the job of the parents - to steer the child in the proper direction. The mom writes The question I couldnt stop asking myself was: Do we love our children best by protecting them at all costs or by supporting them unconditionally? Does love mean saying, Nothing, not even your happiness, is as important as your safety? Or does love mean saying, Be who you are, and I will love that person no matter what? I wonder if these parents let their child make other major decisions - such as even going to school in the first place. If next year the kid decides he doesn't like school, or only wants to eat at McDonalds, or wants to smoke and use drugs, or maybe he decides he isn't even human but a cat, are they going to support him unconditionally? These "parents" should be charged with child abuse.
I have no idea how I'd handle it if one of my sons wanted to dress like a girl for school. Not that I'd be angry but I feel like that's too young to make that sort of decision.
How many parents out there go out and buy their sons girl's clothing? Why would the kid think high heels are for girls only if he never saw them before? At six years old a kid doesn't know a boy from a girl no less what clothing is supposed to go to them. This is a progressive parent sacrificing her kid just so she can prove her progressiveness. Yes, it's child abuse.
This kid doesn't know the difference between boys and girls yet. The parents should not foster that kind of thing. I agree it is child abuse.
Progressives can claim that gender is a social construct, then turn around and claim that a child born as one gender can determine that they were born the wrong gender.
I fail to see the need for speculation along those lines, as I find distinctly more hideous the possibility that they are altogether enraptured by the notion that they're doing right by their son.
Here's what's telling about these parents; they didn't actually try to dissuade their child, they basically just went with it. They allowed their ideologically driven thoughts to create a course of unknowable and possibly negative events to occur, based on some whim of their child. If we were sane as a nation, CPS would pop up each and every time such an event occured.
1. I don't think they should be legally sanctioned for this. I have extremely, almost impossibly strong standards for child abuse requiring removal of the child. This doesn't meet that standard by a long shot. 2. What ever happened to gender being appearance-independent? The whole idea that girls wear pants too. If the lottery of history was a little different and dresses were the masculine garment, would society deem this kid a boy just because he likes dresses? Answer: yes. So to what degree is gender a construction imposed by society? 3. People too often confuse transgenderism and androgyny.
Dunno why anyone should care, since that idea is bloody nonsense. Zero. It's gender confusion that's imposed by society. You're welcome.
I'm talking about gender specific clothing and the such. Surely you wouldn't suggest that an affinity for dresses is present in the DNA of females, or pants in the DNA of males? These are social conventions. That doesn't make your sex a social convention.
So you'd be turned on if your date (assuming you're a man) showed up looking like a (*)(*)(*)(*)ing lumber jack? How about a lumber jack cutting down trees in a skirt and halter top. (*)(*)(*)(*) off with your "everything is the same and equal bull(*)(*)(*)(*)". Or don't... keep feeding the fire (*)(*)(*)(*)****, we're near capacity with the type of bull(*)(*)(*)(*) people like you spew.
Because telling the kid "no, that is not appropriate attire for a boy to wear to school and the other kids will make fun of you" must be evil republican parenting. My kid wanted to wear a Halloween costume to school about a month prior to Halloween. I had to tell her "no". I think she was in 2nd grade and didn't have the maturity to know that would be distracting to the others and was not the time, nor the place to wear a costume. I was the adult.
People like me? That's racist! (Just kidding I'm on the right). How would women feel if men started wearing skirts? Quite good as it turns out, Scottish men do alright. I'm not saying that your biological sex is cultural, I am saying that blue being boys and pink being girls is a historical happenstance, not something etched in the genetics of men and women. Is that some radical idea? I don't think so at all. I don't think it would have been a controversial idea in 1800 either.
I was thinking the same thing. My 4 yr old granddaughter pretends she is a mermaid. Should we go with that and buy her mermaid costumes and encourage her to be a mermaid? Except the next day she is Rapunzel. Or Elsa. Oh, my poor confused granddaughter. But some people miss the operative word here: PRETEND. They don't realize kids pretend all the time. How sad.
The parents should be thrown in jail, the child should be taken away from them. Case closed. I bet both parents are voting hillary. Disgusting.
Fairly obvious the father doesn't have much influence in the day to day. And so the boy looks to his mother, or other females as role models. If the dad was a dad and spent time with his son, his son would want to dress like him. And no I don't mean they have to do "manly" things. He could spend time reading or watching TV, cooking, what ever and his son would want to be like his father. I would bet the boy has almost zero male role models.....
MOre child abuse. A 1st grader has no idea what the hell he or she is really talking about when it comes to this. SOunds more like it was pushed on him.
But we're just being paranoid. People won't choose LGBTUVXYZ. Only those born that way. It's your sin. The wages of sin is death. Good luck.
Possibly. But the child is going to have a lifetime of difficulty and anguish over the decision his parents made and imposed upon him. And I have no doubt that as he encounters these problems, his parents will attack through the courts in order to continue their crusade. The child is going to suffer, people the child encounters are going to suffer, the parents are the root cause of all this suffering and the parents should be punished. Just because someone in 21st century Seattle (for example) decides to live by the standards of 1st Century Rome does not make that decision acceptable and will not make that persons life pleasant. A person has to live within a reasonable range of the norm of his society. And in this case the victim is a 6 year old who is at the mercy of his PC obsessed parents. And this goes far beyond an issue of clothing. By the end of the article, the mom was calling her son a girl and "her daughter". The mom titled her letter "From He to She in First Grade".