Women don't have to wax. They choose to to attract mates. I don't see a problem here.

If that were my point, I'd definitely have pointed it out, because that's an incredibly inane conclusion to draw from that image. I think you're just trolling at this point.

EDIT: Oh this is Lite Discussion again. No wonder I feel like I'm slamming my head against a wall of illiteracy.

You started trolling two whole pages of replies ago. And you're still in a thread wherein you haven't stated your opinion on the topic discussed in the OP.

Oh, come off it, admit your mistakes. No one could deduce your supposed point from that picture without having the knowledge that dresses for children were the norm a hundred years ago, which is a very obscure fact.

I'd rather not be so open-minded that my brains start to fall out of my head. Also this is not oppression, this is me giving advice to females with an over excess of unruly hair. You want to look like a gorilla? By all means just let yourself go.

It's called an unconscious oppression. Not to mention that even the ones that do not want to "attract mates" shave/wax too.
This is -exactly- the same thing as the fact that more women like pink then men: they are conditioned to like or not the pink color since their very birth.

Why the hell on Earth should men have the right to look like gorillas, but not women?

This illustrates quite nicely my argument for you Payne.

Society is comprised of individuals, and each individual will have preferences, and prejudices based on things they observe. Seeing a boy in a girls dress might be completely normal to some people, but to the overwhelming majority, it'd seem bizarre.

And to nutshell my argument - like DevliN did...

In plain English, all I am saying is that these parents are wrong to submit their child to unorthodox parenting when that child will ultimately become a member of a society which was brought up 'normally'. It serves no purpose other than highlighting the contrast between 'freedom' and 'society', and ironically imposes freedom on the child to be whatever it wants, at the cost of judgement and ridicule from society.

I don't want anyone to look like a gorilla. Just a human being...with soft silky smooth...lotion on the skin...

I haven't really replied much to this thread, because I don't have time to type a whole lot out.

But this is probably the closest response that what I think. I 100% agree with and see where the parents are coming from, but I think they're taking it a little bit overboard. If you read the article, it says that Jazz knows he is a boy and wants people to call him a boy, but at the same time he doesn't have a problem with long hair and wearing pink (and dresses). I don't see anything wrong with that. Refusing to tell people the sex of your baby for fear that it'll 'taint' them however is a bit extreme - but at the same time, children up to the age of about 4 or 5 are excessively gendered by society. Boys get boy toys and blue clothes, girls get pink clothes and girl toys. This is highlighted in the article when they said that in an overseas holiday, they called Storm a boy, and the words used by strangers talking to/about him/her were very stereotypical.

Your alternative deduction being that parents of a future president chose to dress their child in something extremely eccentric in a professional photograph from the late 1800's, which is both expensive and time-consuming? You honestly think that's a more logical conclusion to draw? I look at that picture/caption and go, "Wow, male children used to wear dresses." not "FDR's parents were freaks!"

If there's a mistake, it's that I didn't elaborate the point well enough, not that I was trying to make the incredibly stupid claim which you've attributed to me.

What a complete and petty waste of time.


As for my opinion, this is obviously a radical approach to the concept of dismissing cultural norms and I'm interested to see if there will be a followup. Since the child is being homeschooled, I don't see any problem with it as by adolescence Storm will likely have chosen a gender to associate with. The concept of living an entire life fully androgynously is more interesting; I personally doubt this will have much of an effect on the baby's life.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 26 2011, 2:32 am by FaZ-.

The whole point of the parents is to fight against the judgments...
If nothing's done, how can things change?

What they are doing is bringing attention to the issue, which means it gives people an occasion to educate others about their point of view.
I guess we all agree a man should be allowed to dress like he wants, to like any colors he wants, to play with any toy he wants, etc. (I'm restricting the analysis only to men, but god knows women should also have more freedom.)
Yes? Good. I'm pretty sure a huge majority of the American population out there would agree with this as well. However, strangely, there still is judgment and oppression (== freedom restrictions) coming for those same person, thus showing they do not even apply the ideals they are declaring to be advocating.

A lot of people have a malicious pleasure to tell that "you always have the choice", but it's kind of hard to choose for something that will induce you unneeded pain. Stop blatantly saying so.
Unfortunately, one of the few ways to counter that kind of oppressions is by actually doing it the hard way: not conforming yourself. Those parents made that choice, and this is just a step in the right direction. A direct action that will move things; little actions count.

We may not agree on the way to reach such an ideal, but we do agree it is an ideal that we should all be trying to reach.
I find this action very concrete because it is provocative. Most of the time, only provocative things get people to really think about something.
While you may not agree with me on this one, I'm pretty sure you do agree that parents should at least try to apply some of their principles: stop forcing stereotypes on their children. For example, when buying a toy for your kid at Toys'R'Us, visit both "Boys" and "Girls" rows, and just take what your kid likes.

There a lot of examples of induced stereotypes among our current societies. For example, open a "child-book" that teaches the professions to children, and take a close look at how the progressions are being "genderized". In fact, most of the "child-teaching-books" have extremely stereotyped images and claims that do condition the children directly. Books show the dad looking at some sport channel on the TV while the mother is doing the dishes. Dad is working outside, mom is inside, doing household chores. And the list goes on and on.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 26 2011, 2:44 am by payne.

But nothing will change because of this. The world is already becoming more accepting without these people pulling this stunt. Most people who read that article will think the same way as many of us in this thread. We're open to kids dressing how they want, but we object to the way the parents are enforcing it (for lack of a better word).

The world will continue to evolve without the need for these parents making a big deal about hiding their kid's gender. Keep in mind that what kids play with nowadays are very different from when we were kids or when our parents were kids. Our prior generation had dolls for girls and G.I. Joes for boys. When we grew up, we still had boys with guns and girls with dolls, but more often than not the genders were co-mingling. When I was younger (like 6 or 7), two of my younger cousins (both girls) always wanted me to play with them and their dolls and I would oblige. I enjoyed myself because I was having fun with them rather than what objects we were playing with. They would then play with my Transformers with me and enjoy that as well. For our generation, it seems like it was more acceptable for kids to bridge that gap. We were also obsessed with creating and building thanks to thinks like Lego. The next generation of kids is growing up with computers and video games where the is no major gender definition.

Clothes are also becoming more and more gender neutral. One can claim pink is the favorite color of women, but I highly doubt that. Just because Victoria's Secret capitalizes on the color and is made for women doesn't mean all women love that color or are supposed to love it. "Metrosexuality" became huge years ago and it was suddenly okay for straight men to care about fashion and dress well.

EDIT:
When's the last time you saw a children's book like that that defined gender roles?

A better question is asking when's the last time you saw a children's book DEFY typical gender roles.

I agree that things are changing, but my childhood was pretty much blocks, legos, tinker toys, K-nex, Lincoln logs, and erector sets. I don't think that's typical, but I assume I showed an interest in those kinds of things so my parents kept giving me new toys along those lines, not just boy=engineer. While I don't think there is a need to pull an experiment like this, I also don't think it's a big deal.

I guess the one question I ask out of all of this is how the parents will react if, say, Storm is a girl, and she likes being a girly girl right down to beach blond ditz.

I also wonder how the kid will feel when s/he grows up and realizes spler brothers have genders but s/he doesn't, or that awkward moment in the locker room when all of those that align themselves as "boys" have the same genitals as he does (and of course she's a girl, same thing).

Honestly I wouldn't do this, because I find the exercise to be useless. I don't feel like my sisters or I had any gender roll thrust upon us, and we weren't restricted from having friends of the other gender. I think the closest thing was that I was friends with a guy since we were young, but when I reached middle school and wasn't allowed in his room anymore. Not that we were really in there, anyways. xD I have mainly male friends and I enjoy some otherwise male hobbies like games, I have a crude sense of humor and overall I like male company more than female. But I like baking and cute things like . What of it? Meanwhile, if you take my boyfriend, he grew up around all girls (my sisters adn I were two doors down, across the street was another girl, next door to her another, down the street another; there were two other boys in our neighborhood), and he likes his project car and nerf guns and ace combat. Whatever. I don't think a gender defines that much of who you are in the end.

The parents aren't denying the gender of their baby.
If it's a boy, they do know it's a boy and will not tell him he isn't a boy.
What they want, is not to stereotype him to only "boy stuffs". They are -not- going to force him to like girl things: they will simply let him do whatever he likes, without restricting his likes to what the society thinks boys should like. Get it now?
So if it's a "she", and the "she" is a very girly girl, well so be it to their eyes: they will not complain nor try to change it.
I really, really don't know where all of you seems to find that they want to force their children to be gender-less or to actually force it not to like something because it is what the general society wants it to like. Again, they are just trying not to let themselves or others (including societal stereotypes) affect the likes of their baby, period.

And about children's books, the last book I saw that represented such a thing is dated 2009.

No, I don't get it. What does that have to do with them hiding the gender of their child? If they don't want to force their kid to like girl things, then they can not force him to like girl things.

Pardon me for asking this, but how many of you actually read the article? I have no idea where you're getting this whole "forced" thing from. As far as I can tell, the parents aren't pushing anything on the child at all, and that's their point. You may disagree with their raising of the child, but the child is not being harmed or treated badly. The parents clearly nurture the child with everything needed.

Society may mistreat the child, but I feel as though the treatment will be met harshly. It has happened before and it will happen again. We're not insects. Our roles in society should not be thrust upon us at birth, and although we lack the means to change genders easily, we do not, however, lack the intelligence to realize that we must accept it. There are species that do change gender freely. And such changes present biodiversity that is favorable for evolution. This is a hallmark of a species, not a problem.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 26 2011, 4:27 am by Sacrieur.

The child isn't being harmed or treated badly by the parents, but we seem to be more concerned with how asshole kids will treat them for being different.

See, unless you know them personally, you can't say that.

Then please cry out for the stupidity of the -other- parents who aren't teaching tolerance to their children, not for the ones that advocate freedom.