I recently read an article on Yahoo, which reports
on a couple who after five year's have released the sex of their little boy.
The article say's gender but you'll see what I'm getting at soon enough. The
parent's, whom I understand to be a heterosexual couple, told the least amount
of people possible at their child's birth what his sex is. By doing this they
were trying to bring him up without all the gender stereotypes that have been
instilled in us since birth. Now before I go any further I would like to point
out that there is a difference between sex and gender. Sex is your body; your
penis, your vagina, your ovaries etc. Having a penis defines your sex as male
as your body is not equipped to bare children and vice-versa, sex is
unchangeable. And now I know you can change what someone looks like on the
outside but not on the inside, although please correct me if I wrong here.
Gender is changeable, I don't know how easily if it can be day to day or needs
serious time but then again that's possibly a very personal thing. Anyway
gender is who you see yourself as and is I believe who you should be described
as because quite frankly skin is skin and I'm more interested in you the
person, not you and your genitals.
All right now I know exactly just how hypocritical
my next few sentences are going to be but bear with me. Piper Weiss, writer of
the article handled the report somewhat horribly, because in my somewhat
underserving opinion maybe, she writes articles reporting events that are
factual. Factual. Interesting word that. The term for factual is:
1.
Of or pertaining to facts; concerning facts: factual accuracy.
2.
Based on or restricted to facts: a factual report.
(Source)
Now Piper likes to write in a Woman's Day/ People
kind of way, i.e. She likes to warp the facts. Also the article is written in a
very biased way, going against the parents not even allowing really for a word
in edgeways. Throughout the article she refers to the parents as
"partner's". Now I know that word can be used for a heterosexual
couple or for a primary school lineup, but in the case of this article it is totally
and utterly the wrong word, I swear the amount of comments that accuse the
"lesbian" couple of spreading their "gay propaganda" is
astounding. Gay marriage is legal, get the fuck over it, people are gay, who
cares.
Ok so we have now established that
A. The parents are not trying to spread "Gay propaganda"
and
B. Gender is a personal decision and
C. We are all brought up listening to constant stereotypes.
Now these parent's wanted to let Sasha choose his
own gender and not be swayed by what he is taught to believe is masculine or
feminine. Weiss points out that this dual gender may cause bullying, Ok, yes I
can accept that aaand I can see how that would work, however I was bullied, my
boyfriend was bullied, my friends have been bullied, hell my tutors and even
you most likely will have been bullied. It's actually a rather horrible aspect
of normal human nature. She also feels the need to comment and say that "Sasha
may have less of a formed identity because of his upbringing, and feel angry at
his mom for dressing him in flowery shirts and telling the world about it"
and then flippantly say's "Or not" the tone is all very against the
idea and even though she’s hints at the possibility of that this could mean a
higher development of self she follows that with the former response. Hints?
Yeah right she slams the door shut on such possibilities.
My hypocrisy of someone who has more experience
writing than me is obvious but then again I'm not writing a report I'm writing
my opinion. For me the idea is somewhat revolutionary, I believe that if
children were brought up in this way even just like Sasha and only until they
reached school and got to form opinions themselves, there'd be a whole lot less
'koodies' floating on boys and no one would care if you wanted to play dollies
with the girls instead of fighting. Gender is not specific and we are still
fighting to ensure this, however it's a bloody hard battle. The main degrees my
campus offers are art, nursing or business something that has made my
university something stupid like three quarters female or more. If everyone
stopped critiquing this little boy and his parents and I don't know took the
backseat once in a while and really looked and felt maybe there wouldn’t be
thousands of comments hating homosexuals and gender choices and we'd have more male artist's and nurses. This is my rant,
but I implore you to make your own decision, read the article and really
think about it, don't get angry with ignorance.
Lot's of Love
Audrey Megan
