If that child ends up being cisgender they're going to go through a shit ton of hardships while other kids make fun of them and they won't know why. It's better to just keep the birth assigned sex marker and let your kid wear/play with whatever "gendered" stuff they like and if/when the time comes that they say they aren't their assigned gender, embrace and love them. This is putting a lot of unnecessary stress on a toddler. It's also very dangerous for medical reasons if you're ignoring your child's biological sex on papers.
-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
First baby born without a gender in Canada
- Thread starter CoolOff
- Start date
Hell no. Transgender kids need to figure out who they are before puberty really kicks in or the dysphoria gets really freakin' bad. It is absolutely more optimal to have kids transition before they start getting those secondary sex characteristics than to wait until the damage is impossible to undo.
Obviously, the chances of the kid being transgender are quite low, but that doesn't mean it's not worth making sure. Especially when it comes to something that is partially irreversible (in the case of things like the bone structure changes that occur during puberty).
gender is the sex of your brain and sex is the gender of your chromossomes
NoblesseOblige
Banned
And a lot who had "normal" childhoods resent their parents too. Anecdotes are fun!
Snowman Prophet of Doom
Member
This is a pretty bad argument, given there are dozens, if not hundreds, or hormonal, metabolic, structural, and behavioral differences beyond JUST genitalia or chromosomes. Doctors use genitalia, not chromosomes, because they are unambiguous and correlate to that constellation of sexually dimorphic features 99+% of the time, which makes them a pretty damned solid heuristic.
There are differing conceptions of gender between cultures, as well as how strictly (if at all) one must conform to the gender typically associated with one's biological sex, but sex, itself, is pretty universally recognized, given categories corresponding exactly to biological maleness and biological femaleness exist in every culture and are what the vast majority of individuals in a society fall into.
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
I mean, if one side wants to go to the "logical end" of this process and proclaim the kid is going to be fucked up, then I think it's only fair I start listing off mass shootings, kids who were disowned from their parents, or killed, because they didn't fit in with social norms or pre-conceived notions of what they are supposed to be.
All of this can be done without changing the birth certificate to U.
What can be dangerous is how society reacts to someone labeled U
NoblesseOblige
Banned
Gender assigning based on birth sex is imposing a "personal belief" on a child.
Poor GRIMES
Banned
This reads like an argument against having queer parents because the child is going to be "bullied" because of the increased stressors and pushback that they have to face against their contemporaries.
Which is why I linked the entire article to provide the context of the social constructionism of what constitutes "biological sex" in societies. This is not simply me retorting that genitalia doesn't exist. It's more nuanced than that. Give the article a read.
Probably not, but it's also probably not really useful to have either. Most things identified as issues in this space revolve around the cultural gender angle and what is "normal." So maybe it's interesting from a census point of view but from a identification view it's about as useful as hair color. Medically, the doctor doesn't care how anyone feels about it because it's not important for treating ovarian cysts or whatever sex-specific issues come up.
For what it's worth, I think teaching kids that is good. I don't disagree with you. All I'm saying is that I would worry about sending a child to public school without a clear understanding of the issue, or who they are, and that posing problems in their development with other children. I was really sheltered and cut off socially from my peers in school all the way up until I was about 17 years old, and it really negatively affected my life until I started forcibly taking more of a stand against my parents' helicopter parenting style. So these "quirky" parents raise alarm bells to me and I often worry for the kid.
Speaking purely statistically, it is most likely that the kid will just be cisgender. If not, that's absolutely okay and cool and wonderful. I mean that. But if they are then this would just create difficulties for them that most people don't have to go through.
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
And who exactly is going to ask the kid what his/her birth certificate has labeled for sex?
Again, why is the BC such a huge issue for some of you? Because it makes it official?
GeordieMark
Member
You're late.
Exactly. Many people in this thread seem to believe that treating every child as if they might potentially be transgender will somehow harm their development. The exact opposite is true. If they're cisgender, they'll be cisgender. No amount of liberal, flowery, gender neutral parenting is going to change that - just as no amount of stoic, conservative, be-like-me parenting will "fix" a kid with gender dysphoria.
The difference is that the former example requires no special psychological or medical help. The latter example absolutely does, and having parents who are aware and ready to provide that help is fundamentally better for the child then having parents who are too busy trying to raise their kid to be "normal" to meet their medical and psychological needs.
They wont have to ask as it's a big news story
But the thing is, there are so many ambiguous aspects to sex beyond just the chromosomes that it starts to break down when you look deeper into it.
At some point we have to recognize that the binary is a mistake, not for medical reasons mind you, but because of what it means for non-binary individuals and transgender individuals and how society views them. The fact that I have to deal with "There are only two genders!" being spouted in my face on a regular basis says well enough.
You are talking about the Reimer case? That child wasn't misassigned at birth. Or am I missing something?
It was only after the sexual reconstructive surgery at 22 months that he was assigned to be female. In this case the boy was born with a penis, and identified as male.
All i'm saying is that external genitalia reflect someone's biological sex in 99% of cases and thus the practice is still used today.
Audioboxer
Member
Of course not. Unless you're someone who thinks evolution is also oppressive and cannot accept we evolved from common ancestors and human beings are not "above" the animal kingdom. We're part of it, just arguably at the top of the food chain and a species with the most advanced intelligence. Although sometimes I think there might be one or two species out there who give some humans a run for their money
When things aren't as they seem then that is where humans should be evaluated on "oppression", or how we handle diagnosis, cause and treatment. Not when things do appear as they seem.
Yes, it's also correct ~99.7% of the time.
Mohonky
Member
Its best to think of it by seperating the physical from the psychological.
Sex is the reproductive organs present.
Gender is what your brain perceives your sex to be.
Its late, Im tired, but my understanding is that the bodys sexual organs and the way the brain is wired to understand its sex develop at different points in the fetal stage and can sometimes go out of sync, so you situations where the parts if the physical sex because wired one way where other parts develop another way (this doesnt necessarily refer to penis / vagina, but more to do with hormonal, psychology etc) and so depending on the variation and potentially number of them and stages of them the alignment between the physically observable and what the brain and other sex related devices like hormones actually end up being arent actually a complete match or even cause variances in how strongly one might be characterised as having male or female traits.
Impeccable
Member
And how do these nefarious children find out and then go out of their way to make fun on the kid who will most likely be confident in their gender by the time it begins? Keeping in mind it will be about eight years for the "proper" bullying age.
I will say that I live in a small town in Ontario Canada and I know there is a transgender student that is loved and accepted by all their peers and they are grade five, I believe. Struggling to see this torturous hell of an existence will actually come to fruition for this child especially considering it is basically guaranteed they will have defined themselves early enough it literally won't be a thing aside from this piece of paper.
NoblesseOblige
Banned
Elfotografoalocado
Banned
This is fine. Not being trans, I don't know whether provisionally asigning a gender before the kid gets to grow as a person does much harm. (Effectively assuming a gender that is the most probable outcome) This is, of course, given that the kid's environment would be supportive in the case they happen to be trans.
In any case, maybe what should be shown in the birth certificate is biological sex, which I'm sure is of some importance, and have gender as an entirely different category.
In other words, I feel like this is just semantics over one of many documents that the kid will need, but what do I know. That lawyer seems someone with good stories to tell.
In any case, maybe what should be shown in the birth certificate is biological sex, which I'm sure is of some importance, and have gender as an entirely different category.
In other words, I feel like this is just semantics over one of many documents that the kid will need, but what do I know. That lawyer seems someone with good stories to tell.
I've seen this said so many times but no one has ever actually explained how it is dangerous for medical reasons in any legitimate way.
The amount of posts using Medium as a source for how we hand the use of the word "sex" is astounding. As someone who has studied biology this thread gives me a fucking headache.
"Sex" is a biology term relating to chomosonal and primary sex characteristics of a given person. The "sex" of the child has already been determined. If the child ends up being trans, they are still gonna feel body dismorphia, so this entire point is dumb anyway. If you wanna raise your child without gender norms and have them choose how they express themselves and have them understand what gender they are for themselves, that great, more power to you. Altering "Sex" on a birth certificate doesn't do shit to do that though. In fact doing this just adds to the wording confusing where people stupidly think gender and sex are somehow the same thing.
Saying "this kid is neither a boy nor a girl" is fine but saying "this kid has no primary genetic or physical sexual features" is beyond stupid.
I'm very much confused as to what this even has to do with the topic of sex in a birth certificate? Are you somehow insinuating that this father would treat their potentially trans child like shit just because a U wasn't on their birth certificate? I'm confused here.
"Sex" is a biology term relating to chomosonal and primary sex characteristics of a given person. The "sex" of the child has already been determined. If the child ends up being trans, they are still gonna feel body dismorphia, so this entire point is dumb anyway. If you wanna raise your child without gender norms and have them choose how they express themselves and have them understand what gender they are for themselves, that great, more power to you. Altering "Sex" on a birth certificate doesn't do shit to do that though. In fact doing this just adds to the wording confusing where people stupidly think gender and sex are somehow the same thing.
Saying "this kid is neither a boy nor a girl" is fine but saying "this kid has no primary genetic or physical sexual features" is beyond stupid.
I'm very much confused as to what this even has to do with the topic of sex in a birth certificate? Are you somehow insinuating that this father would treat their potentially trans child like shit just because a U wasn't on their birth certificate? I'm confused here.
Playmaster
Banned
I don't hv time for any long social, scientific discussion right now. But my stance in general with this is the post before.
I'm doing one liners because I'm on mobile.
nekkid
It doesn't matter who we are, what matters is our plan.
You can be sensitive to the signs, and the parent in this case would be acutely aware of those without having to go completely neutral.
Our eldest (coming up on 3) enjoys occasionally playing with dolls and loves pushing a little pink pram around with a doll in it, which I'm absolutely fine with. But he has a penis and we raise him as a boy, and buy him cool boy toys which he also loves - the "social norms". Does that mean we are terrible parents who risk screwing him up because we didn't put a blank on his birth certificate?
NoblesseOblige
Banned
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
GeordieMark
Member
Cheers buddy.
Chittagong
Gold Member
Reminds me of the Finnish 'gender neutral' couple that renamed themselves to Fox and Wolf, and named their kid Roo, so that no gender roles could be assigned to any one of them. Somehow I think the poor kid will end up living through hell.
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
No, but why do you give a shit if other parents aren't raising their kid specifically to be a boy? Why is that kid suddenly going to be fucked up, or that it's some type of "experiment"?
I'm a queer person, don't try to box me into that. This parent isn't truly raising their child without gender in mind, they're forcing this child to essentially be nonbinary. They are doing this wrong and the person it'll hurt is the child.
It's not 99.7%. We don't have exact numbers, especially because the Age of Information is relatively new and a lot of closeted folks may not have even known they were transgender before getting information to let them identify as such.
It gets even more complicated when you consider that the younger generations are more likely to identify as transgender, indicating that self-identification relies, at least in part, on people actually knowing that transgender people exist (and that identifying as non-binary is even an option, for that matter). With estimates anywhere from 0.5% to 1.5%, we really don't have any actual certainty on it, but at the very least we have at least a few million transgender people in the US alone. And with our suicide attempt rate being as high as 41%, it is a major concern that we support ALL transgender individuals as much as we possibly can.
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
Because the conversation is far beyond a birth certificate if you haven't noticed, and it's not even about if the kid could be trans.
The parents are literally going to let their kid grow up and like what it wants to like.
No? That's not how nonbinary works. They're letting the kid figure out who they are themselves without the parents forcing anything on them. Especially not forcing the kid to be nonbinary.
Totally agree. Whether it's right or wrong we live in a world that has certain norms. This is ridiculous. If the kid turns into an adult and makes a decision on their gender then no problem.
The overwhelming likelihood is the child will simply be the person they were born. Working on that basis is not in any way stopping the kid figuring out who they are themselves.
You're making things up. They are not forcing anything on the child. They're doing the exact opposite of forcing things on the child.
It's no more a personal belief than the location of the birth, the fact that the child has 2 eyes, a nose, and a mouth, etc. What parts are attached to the child, that's all the birth certificate needs to say. Once the child is capable of forming their own coherent thoughts then we can explore their gender identity.
I mean, I like to idea of being hands off somewhat and allowing a child to naturally find what they are interested in rather than forcing them to conform to gender stereotypes, but sometimes a parent needs to provide a little guidance too, right? Like, does this parent just literally not discuss genitals? Their purpose? Etc?
Snowman Prophet of Doom
Member
...but that would be why I said that there are many things correlated with maleness and femaleness aside from JUST genitals or JUST chromosomes. Yes, any particular sexed trait exists on a spectrum, but when you look at the overall grouping of traits in any particular person, they are overwhelmingly likely to fall into an overall pattern of being prototypically male or prototypically female for almost all of them. The number of truly intersex persons is quite small. Some people have persistently patent foramens ovale throughout their lives, or are born without a leg, but this doesn't change the fact that, colloquially, it is acceptable to state that human hearts don't have holes connecting the atria and that humans are bipedal.
NoblesseOblige
Banned
Even were it 99.7% that is 22,500,000 people who bsp and the like are cool with dismissing in order to serve the status quo. Opposed to the alternative of doing harm to 0 people in not dictating a gender at birth.
Gender isn't a physical characteristic.
The child has a super recognisable name and this is a news story, it's not hard to imagine that the kids will find out.
Also, you make it sound like the birth certificate isn't a big deal anyway, so why even change it to U?
TheLostBigBoss
Banned
Because the parents have a belief that the sex of their newborn is unimportant and are willing to fight for that belief.
Interesting math you got there.
And I consider this pretty dumb as documentation shouldn't depend on whims.
And again, they're free to treat the child as sexless as they want, why fight over the documentation which will likely only cause trouble in the future
Not being facetious, but sincerely asking. Kids start talking about gender at about 20 - 22 months old. I'm curious how you talk about other children at that age. Do you just not teach them that there are boys and girls and refer to all other children in a genderless sense? Or do you look at a kid dressed as a boy and assume they are a boy, but not talk to your own kid about it until they are older?
It's not 'dictating' anything. It's a classification based on external features and occasional karyotyping.
It dictates just as much the time of birth or birth weight. It's a descriptor.
The parents can go whatever way they feel with their child and they don't have to assign a gender to the sex at birth at all. But that's not erasing the fact that people are born with different external genitalia and genetic factors that, among our species, dictate the male or female sex.
Enter The 36 Chambers
Member
I can never understand making an account here for just talking shit a few years later knowing you'll be banned. Just weird.
I feel I've definitely learnt a couple things about talking to/about lgbt members through my time on gaf.
May seem like an uphill unwinnable battle, but I've seen some posters itt say they've learned something. Little victories I guess
I feel I've definitely learnt a couple things about talking to/about lgbt members through my time on gaf.
May seem like an uphill unwinnable battle, but I've seen some posters itt say they've learned something. Little victories I guess