Accidental Blogger

Jordan Brand: They are definitely getting a large amount of attention about this. 

Ruchira Paul: ‎Jordan, that in itself is quite bad, don’t you think? Ironically, people are now focusing exactly on what the parents don’t want to reveal. Who would have cared if Storm was just another little boy or girl?
BTW, I think it is a boy. 

Jordan Brand: I also think the child looks like a boy. I guess we’ll never know. Until he rebels and grows up to be an ultra right wing talk show host or something.

Elatia Harris: Well, if you want to seriously make a fetish of something, keep it a secret! These people have gone to too many Marilyn Manson concerts. I suppose the reductio ad absurdum here is starting a special account for Storm’s transgender surgery, in the event he or she shall have been raised with too many choices.

Akim Reinhard: They don’t want to burden their children with society’s definitions, but they have a son named Jazz. 

Ruchira Paul: The parents have embarked upon a crusade and are using the children as weapons. This is how Jazz feels:  

But Stocker and Witterick’s choices haven’t always made life easy for their kids. Though Jazz likes dressing as a girl, he doesn’t seem …to want to be mistaken for one. He recently asked his mother to let the leaders of a nature center know that he’s a boy. And he chose not to attend a conventional school because of the questions about his gender. Asked whether that upsets him, Jazz nodded.

Elatia Harris: Okay, well, this has left the sphere of Progressivism raised to eccentricity. This is pussyfooting around child abuse. Childhood is not a time of life when being “the odd one” in a group feels okay; rather, it is a time of life when most ki…ds want to differentiate themselves very slowly. Ask any kid who had 30 IQ points on the rest of the smart ones in 2nd grade how good that difference felt; you will not find one to say it was highly rewarding to be off the charts at age 7. Letting an unusual child be unusual is good, and refraining from privileging the mainstream over all other options is good, but if a little boy is asking to identify as such, and avoiding situations where his mother’s refusal to designate him a boy causes pain, then these parents are not all about choice for their kids but about flouting norms they’re angry with, and sending the bill for that to the kids. If they want to create a gender-free society they should start by muddying up their own genders, not with inflicting that life on their kids.

Lester Hunt: The first time I saw this title I literally thought it was an Onion headline. It reads like a stinging parody of parenting styles I have actually seen. My wife calls it “trying to raise a boy-girl.”

Samina Raza: Way to confuse the hell out of the poor child… life is confusing enough without crazy parents…

Elatia Harris: Ruchira, it’ll be a post to remember! Do you find it funny that no one has come out for the parents’ rights to their philosophical conceits and the methods those conceits generate? Christian Scientists teach their children to have no truck …with medical science, after all, even if physicians say their lives are at stake. And countless people raise their children to expect the End of Days — soon! Still more teach their children to disregard evolution, global warming, and certain nagging problems with Hitler. Civil liberties lawyers seem to embrace all that at the legal and philosophical level, while not of course liking it personally. Could it be the parents in this case are afflicting their children with problems that education, peer pressure, and the eventual embarkation on a life beyond the parental grasp just cannot ameliorate?

Lester Hunt: Elatia, I do think these parents have a right to do what they are doing, but whether it is wise to exercise these rights in this way is a separate question for me.

Elatia Harris: If they have rights to raise there children this way, then our questioning their wisdom is only an exercise. I’ll bet we all know some very impaired people who raise their children with love and precious little judgment. As long as love is …present, life at home may be better than life in the foster care system. But defiantly presenting your child to the world as ungendered, and digging out on all the ensuing confusion because, s–t, man, your point is made, and you HAVE gotten in peoples’ faces, is really unhinged. Malicious stage-mothering x 10, and I wish a sane auntie would step in.

Lester Hunt: By “have the right” I just mean it would be wrong to use force or violence against them. The rest of us have a right to remonstrate with them, ridicule them, and so forth. To start coercing people about things like this would be a slippery slope to Hell, I believe.

Elatia Harris: I agree, Lester — the greater harm would not be outbalanced by the isolated good. This is like the Neo-Nazis parading in Skokie, IL, home to many Holocaust survivors, some decades ago. A real test case. If these parents are let alone, to w…oefully compromise their kids’ journey to puberty, because they are not doing anything illegal, only something grotesque and harmful, then the rights of unconventional parents who do not expose their children to harm are safeguarded. Difficult as it all is, it’s better so.

Lindsay Beyerstein: This is a publicity stunt. I don’t see why people are so exercised about it, though. Basically, they’re saying that they’re not going to announce the kid’s gender based solely on his (?) anatomical sex. They’re waiting for him (?) to come t…o his own conclusions. If you accept the thesis that gender is primarily a matter of what’s in your brain, as opposed to what’s between your legs, it seems only reasonable to wait until the individual can express their identity. Odds are, Storm will come to the conclusion that his brain matches his junk–but if not, so what? I don’t buy the whole “confusion” argument as to why you’re abusing your kids if you don’t relentlessly drill gender norms into them. I’m too much of a biological determinist for that. Kids know who they are. The worst-case scenario is if the brain doesn’t match the junk and society spends an entire childhood trying to ignore or suppress the mismatch. That’s what’s confusing.