This makes me angry:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13581835
While all kids are, to a degree, raised with our own beliefs and ideals, to my mind it can't be right to impose such a radical ideology on children too young to make their own decisions, and which are likely as a result, to become targets for every bully and sociopath in their peer group. By imposing their beliefs on their children in this way, they are surely creating a potential issue for these children around questioning the fundamental matter of gender, which they would probably never have otherwise encountered.
Publicity seeking, political correctness gone mad, or do they have a point?
|
|
Potty and borderline child abuse...!
|
I understand their choice to allow the older boys to make their own choices, as I do with my children, however the gender secret is odd.
In my case though, the boys usually choose boy type things with little influence anyway, and my daughter wants to do girly things
|
I can see the point of raising them outside of gender image norms, but id take issue with denying the child knowledge about their actual gender because that is a factual point rather than societal, so I hope it doesnt go that far.
It does rather have the whiff of social experimentation though.
Im not convinced stereotypes have much traction these days anyway, a few years ago I saw a stunningly attractive late teens girl at the wheel of a traction engine - nothing cross the girlie/blokey divide more than a sight such as that - if I have a daughter, I couldnt want for more!
|
|
Angry indeed. They were doing so well until the last sentence, where they finally fell into the trap of using the word "gender", a grammatical term, when they meant "sex", which they had used correctly previously.
|
|
If you're going to be pedantic at least check that you are right. In this case you are wrong.
|
|
The poor little mite is going to grow up in a nasty world consisting of men and women. Much better to have a simple operation now and then it won't have to decide.
|
>> If you're going to be pedantic at least check that you are right. In this
>> case you are wrong.
>>
You must be one of those modern fellas.
|
I sympathise, Crankcase, but I think 'gender' has been taken out of its purely grammatical usage and acts as a substitute for 'sex', as the PC brigade think of sex as meaning something else.
We're stuck with it I think, partly also because so few people study grammar nowadays; more's the pity.
Last edited by: Avant on Sun 29 May 11 at 21:14
|
|
It has been used in a non-grammatical sense to mean sex for at least 600 years as any good dictionary will tell you.
|
>> It has been used in a non-grammatical sense to mean sex for at least 600
>> years as any good dictionary will tell you.
Damned linguistic upstart. I blame Chaucer.
|
|
In the same way as we no longer have Religions - they are now called Faith Groups, for some reason
|
>> and acts as a substitute for 'sex', as the PC brigade think of sex
>> as meaning something else.
>>
>> >>
It's meaning has moved on again:
"Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word "gender" to refer to anything but grammatical categories.[1][2] However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, like feminist literature,[3] and in documents written by organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO),[4] but in most contexts, even in some areas of social sciences, the meaning of gender has expanded to include "sex" or even to replace the latter word.[1][2] Although this gradual change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed when the Food and Drug Administration started to use "gender" instead of "sex" in 1993.[5] "Gender" is now commonly used even to refer to the physiology of nonhuman animals, without any implication of social gender roles.[2]"
Wikepedia of course.
|
Canadian couple defend their 'no gender' baby. - R.P.
