I admit to being an old codger painfully out of touch with the latest fads and fashions. I still like narrow ties, double-breasted jackets, fat on my beef, and classic rock and roll.
Maybe that’s why so much of the modern world is beyond my understanding. I know right from wrong, up from down, and, I thought, boy from girl. Imagine my shock to discover that for some, wrong is right, down is up, and we should leave it up to a kid to determine his or her own gender.
When Storm was born seven years ago in Toronto, he or she became the most famous baby in the city. That’s because Storm’s parents announced that they were going to raise the baby as gender neutral. “If you really want to get to know someone, you don’t ask what’s between their legs,” Storm’s father, David Stocker, told The Toronto Star. In an e-mail, Storm’s parents told their friends, “We’ve decided not to share Storm’s sex for now – a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation.”
Storm’s parents, it turns out, weren’t oddballs. They were pioneers. More and more progressive parents have decided to liberate their children from the chains of gender. They give their children gender-neutral names such as Zoomer or Scout. They refer to them using gender-neutral pronouns. They buy them gender-neutral toys and scrupulously avoid pink and blue. They tell people that it’s up to the child theirself to decide what gender they identify with.
If an adult wants to ignore reality, they should be able to do so in perfect freedom. They want to believe they’re aliens, fine. They want to think they are a reincarnation of Genghis Khan, who are we to say otherwise?
But forcing innocent children to accept a parent’s vision of reality by raising them “gender neutral” is child abuse and the parents should be locked up and their kids taken away.
As The New York Times reports, Swedish teachers encourage boys to play in the kitchen and girls to shout “no.” Some boys show up in dresses; no one cares. Sweden’s national curriculum requires preschools to “counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns” and encourage children to explore “outside the limitations of stereotyped gender roles.” In one pilot project, boys and girls were split up and coached to behave in gender-non-conforming ways. Boys were instructed to massage each other’s feet. Girls were taken on on barefoot walks in the snow.
If individuals want to play this idiotic game of gender non-conformity, they should be allowed to do so. But what happens when government not only encourages such nonsense, but actually forces it on innocent children? How does a normal parent fight this tyranny?
Margaret Wente, the author of this thoughtful piece, voices the concerns of most of us:
I do feel a bit uneasy for children such as Storm (who, for the record, is now identifying as a girl). Most kids like a bit of structure in their lives, especially, I imagine, on the existential question of whether they’re a boy or a girl. It seems like a lot to ask them to sort it out for themselves. Is it really fair to make your kid the subject of a social experiment, no matter how righteous you think it is? And do you really think they’ll thank you for it? I have my doubts.
It does no good to complain that gender is a “label” that should be changed or altered at the whim of an individual. Gender is a biological fact and no amount of new age nuttiness, progressive faddishness, or LGBT lunacy will alter that.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member