Saturday - January 21, 2012

THE DUMBEST THING YOU MAY READ ALL YEAR … MAYBE

As anyone who reads this site often knows, I have a habit of declaring many items as the most stupid.  I need to make a belated New Year’s resolution, that I will no longer declare at the start of a new year or half way through a year, that I have already discovered theee one moonbat award for the whole year.  Because as readers also know, after making such grand pronouncements, it often turns out that there’s yet a dumber item then the previous one I nominated as the absolute pig ignorant dumb thing. I should wait till the end of the year and then pick out one that really does take the prize. Right?  Well .. I would like to do that.  However ..... of all the dumb things I’ve written about, of all the loony tune items I have found over the last few years, and I have found a few, for example.
Remember a few years ago the story about the then Labour govt. deciding that a public park was being used by “Too many middle aged, middle class white people.” Remember that?  Now that was pretty stupid. I believe the plans were to also dismiss the park attendants and close the park.  It was kept open for another year because a private party donated the money to keep it open and the jobs intact.  I have no idea what happened after that year. So that was dumb.
Then there was suggestion by one politician who wanted to form an agency to encourage muslim women to learn the skill of fishing in England’s famous rivers.
The charge was made again that it appeared to be only men, and then men of a certain pale skin color and of a certain income level, were using England’s fishing grounds. Or should that be waters?  It went nowhere of course.  How many muslim women are interested anyway?  And would their masters allow them out like that?  Pretty dumb, yeah?  Well, here it comes BMEWS.

My nomination for the absolute dumbest, the most weird, the stupidest and most loony tune decision I have ever heard of or imagined.  This might just make it.
This might just be the dumbest thing for the rest of the year. 

Boy or girl? The parents who refused to say for FIVE years finally reveal sex of their ‘gender-neutral’ child

By DAVID WILKES

His fairy wings, pink tutu and ballet pumps suggest this little boy has raided the dressing up box.

But if five-year-old Sasha wanted to wear this every day, his parents would have no problem at all.

In fact, as they are bringing him up to be ‘gender neutral’, they would see it simply as their son expressing himself.

Gender neutral: Sasha dressed as a fairy on the picture that was used on the family Christmas card in 2010

Not that they usually refer to him as ‘him’. From the moment Sasha was born, Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper have been at pains not to lumber their son with the stereotyping they fear that gender brings.

So they simply called him ‘the infant’ and kept his gender a secret from all but a few close friends and relatives. As he grew older, he was encouraged to play with dolls as much as Lego, slept in a neutral yellow room and was allowed to wear both boys’ and girls’ clothes.

But now that he is five and at school Miss Laxton, 46, and Mr Cooper, 44, believe it will be almost impossible to keep it up.

Last year parents in Canada who refused to say whether their child was a boy or girl stirred up outrage and accusations they were turning their child into a freak.

Sasha’s parents, who have faced their own share of raised eyebrows, are thought to be among the first British parents to speak about this far-from-traditional method of raising a child. They are keen to highlight the issue publicly and get other parents talking about it.

‘I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping,’ Miss Laxton explained yesterday. ‘Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes? 

‘Gender affects what children wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person they become. I start to get cross with it if it skews their potential.’

The process began even before Sasha was born, with his parents choosing not to be told their baby’s sex after scans during the pregnancy. It wasn’t because they wanted a surprise, they just wanted to avoid the inevitable expectations of what having a boy or girl meant.

After he was born, they waited 30 minutes before asking midwives his sex because they ‘did not want to prejudice his life with gender’. They gave him a name that suited both boys and girls and referred to him as ‘the infant’ rather than a son or daughter.

It is only now that Sasha has started primary school that the secret has become impossible to keep and they have started telling the wider world that Sasha is a boy.

Miss Laxton, a web designer from Sawston, Cambridgeshire, admitted that keeping her child’s gender under wraps for so long had not been easy. At her mother and baby group, she said she was regarded as ‘that loony woman who doesn’t know whether her baby is a boy or a girl’. ‘I could never persuade anyone in the group to come round for coffee,’ she said. ‘They just thought I was mental.’

At school, Sasha sometimes wears a ruched-sleeved and scalloped-collared shirt from the girl’s uniform list.  But he has yet to encounter any teasing or bullying. ‘Nobody’s ever mentioned it and I would hope that if they actually said something to Sasha, he’d be confident enough to make a good response,’ his mother said.

His father, a computer software designer, said Sasha is aware he is a boy and has been allowed to grow up taking an interest in whatever he wants. ‘If Sasha wants to dress up in girls’ clothes then so be it,’ Mr Cooper said. ‘But we’re not forcing it.

‘The girl’s clothes and fancy dress are for fun at home. We don’t make Sasha go out in girl’s clothes.’

Miss Laxton said her own background had influenced her view about gender stereotypes.

‘My mother’s very sporty and my dad was very emotional. We’d watch The Wizard of Oz and always start crying, whereas my mum would think we were really soppy,’ she said. ‘So it’s always seemed obvious to me that stereotypes didn’t fit the people I knew.’

Dr Daragh McDermott, a psychology lecturer at Anglia Ruskin University, said it was difficult to predict any long-term effects of Sasha’s unconventional upbringing.

‘It’s hard to say whether being raised gender-neutral will have any immediate or long-term psychological consequences for a child, purely because to date there is little research examining this topic,’ he said.

‘That being said, the family setting is only one source of gender-specific information and as children grow, their self-identity as male, female or gender-neutral will be influenced by school, socialisation with other children and adults, as well as mass media.

‘As a child grows they develop their own independent sense of self that will include their own individual gender identification.’

Last year, Canadians Kathy Witterick and David Stocker insisted that they would raise their baby Storm as a gender-neutral child.

Of that case, Dr Harold Koplewicz, a U.S. child psychiatrist, said he was ‘disturbed’ that well-meaning parents could be so misguided.

‘When children are born, they’re not a blank slate,’ he said. ‘We do have male brains and female brains. There’s a reason why boys do more rough and tumble play; there’s a reason why girls have better language development skills.’

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Posted by peiper     on 01/21/2012 at 10:36 AM   
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