Children and Gender Confusion

Remember this article?  I feel like it was the one that started them all.  

Little boy wants to dress up like Daphne from Scooby Doo and his mom posts, in the title of her entry, that this implies he's gay.

But no worries, because in the body of the entry, you realize that was simply a bait.  She then writes "Or he's not.  I don't care.  He is still my son.  And he is 5.  And I am his mother.  And if you have a problem with anything mentioned above, I don't want to know you."

I remember when I first read that feeling offended for her.  How could ANYONE dare to have a problem with this?  Who would think to be so callous as to spout anything negative at a little boy who just wants to dress up for Halloween?  Even if it is a little odd.

Now that the feeds have been absolutely SATURATED with stories like this, I've learned to put my critical reasoning skills to better use.

She, like every other blogger after her, sets the stage for inevitable conflict.  They want the conflict; it drives stats.  I refuse to post the litany of these articles because I refuse to give them a bump in referral hits.

Now I just roll my eyes and pass on them.  They're all the same.  Each demanding respect for allowing their boys to dress as girls and play with My Little Pony dolls, or steering their girls away from pink things and more towards "boy toys" like race cars and Legos.  We've all seen them.  It's just...

C'mon now.

Instead of trying to dictate what our kids play with in an attempt to show how forward-thinking we are about gender-stereotypes, how about we just let them be kids who like to play with toys of any sort?  

And how about we stop patting ourselves on the back for going out of our way to confuse the very clear distinctions between the two sexes.  No matter how many bags of lip gloss your son wants to have, he's going to be a little boy.  No matter how many Wrestlemanias your daughter begs to go to, she's still going to be a little girl.  

And no matter how many times you allow your son to dress in skirts or your daughter to pull on boxers, their biology will remain unaltered.  That includes sex change operations and hormone injections.

Also, this sort of gender confusion does not necessarily mean your child is gay.  But again, throwing that into the mix is a great way to solicit a jump in stats.  

*Shakes head*

We need to have open, honest communication on this topic.  Blog posts like those I reference above are not helpful.  If anything, they're harmful because they seek to divide. They seek to cause in-fighting and paranoia (everyone's out to get me and my son because we're different!).  There are children in serious jeopardy because of this confusion, and patting ourselves on the backs for the bang-up job we're doing with this saturation of gender confusion is not the right course of action.  It's just not.

I don't have the answer on how best to respond to this growing trend, but I just can't take the constant stream of articles that decry any sort of acknowledgement that boys and girls (and thus, men and women) are different; they are.  Does that mean that they are not equals? No; they have equal dignity.  But they are inherently different from one another. Consistently ignoring that (and worse... teaching our children to actively ignore it) is a 
grave error.  

Kids growing up in this climate are the reason we've got fifty billion "genders" on Facebook, men waging legal war against a woman's right to use a private bathroom, and young kids (and their PARENTS) fighting to dictate biology without bothering to think of long-term health consequences.

This is only the tip of the iceberg.  Trying to blur the lines between male and female have led folks to be hyper-aware of not only gender, but sexuality and thus, sex.  

Methinks that's why textbooks like this exist.  It's also why lessons like this exists.

We are hurting our children way, WAY more than we are helping them.  That much is apparent.  We are teaching them it's okay to disregard facts - scientific facts - and create an alternate reality that they then expect everyone else to go along with.  I can't imagine that being a good coping strategy for such a real, all-areas-of-life entrenched problem.  

I just don't have clue one where to begin, or even how to protect my son from falling victim to this sort of confusion.  It's like parents are expected (and even bullied into) encouraging this sort of behavior.

I was recently invited to a birthday party with my son in which the parent informed me the boys would be dressing up as princesses alongside the girls.

No thank you.  I opted to decline that one.  Vince is curious about women's clothing sometimes (my veil and bras come to mind), but I would not actively encourage him cross dressing, ESPECIALLY at such a young age.  

I'm just... ay.

What the heck ever happened to kids being kids?

---