NPR Trumpets 'Gender Neutrality' Advocates, Wonders 'Do We Really Need to Know' Gender
On Thursday, NPR's Linton Weeks spotlighted several extreme proponents of eliminating gender differences and hinted at support for such an endeavor: "In a country with the ideal of treating everyone fairly and equitably, do we really need to know if someone is a boy or a girl?" Weeks portrayed the cause as just part of the normal progression of society: "As history shows, one enterprise in which Americans excel is the breaking down of divisions."
The correspondent began his article for NPR.com, "The End of Gender?" (which was the most viewed article on the website on Thursday), with three "signposts" which supposedly pointed at an end of the concept of gender:
• Kathy Witterick and her husband, David Stocker, are raising their 4-month-old child, Storm, without revealing the child's gender. According to the birth announcement from the Toronto couple: "We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place?)"
• Andrej Pejic, an androgynous Australian model, worked both the male and female runways at the Paris fashion shows earlier this year.
• A recent J. Crew catalog drew national attention when it featured a young boy with his toenails painted pink.
Weeks then quoted his first expert, Lise Eliot of the Chicago Medical School (who penned a book titled "Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gap and What We Can Do About It"), who acknowledged initially that "sex differences are real and some are probably present at birth," but also added that "social factors magnify them" and issued her conclusion: "So if we, as a society, feel that gender divisions do more harm than good, it would be valuable to break them down."
After hinting at his support for gender neutrality, the journalist cited even more examples of gender blurring, including a school adapting its prom court so it would be gender-neutral, the push by several colleges to implement "gender-neutral housing" for students, and how even
the State Department "began using gender-neutral language on U.S. passports — replacing 'father' and 'mother' with 'Parent One' and 'Parent Two.'" Weeks then noted that "everywhere you turn, it seems, there is talk of gender-neutral this and gender-free that: baby bedding (Wild Safari by Carousel); fashion (Kanye West in a Celine women's shirt); Bibles (the New International Version). Gender neutrality, writes one blogging parent, is the new black."
The NPR correspondent's second expert, Seattle University School of Law's Dean Spade, a "female-to-male transsexual and advocate for transgender rights," revealed her radical proposals for government documents:
Spade makes a passionate pitch for the elimination of gender categorization in most government record-keeping. "I really don't think that data needs to be on our IDs or gathered by most agencies and institutions," Spade says. Tagging someone as female or male "enforces binary gender norms and it pretends that gender is a more stable category of identity than it actually is."
Spade says, "I can see why we might want institutions to be aware of gender at a general level in order to engage in remediation of the sexism and transphobia that shape our world."
Weeks devoted the last part of his article to a parent who has a blog bizarrely titled, "Raising My Boychick:
[Arwyn Daemyir] describes herself as "a walking contradiction: knitting feminist fulltime parent, Wiccan science-minded woowoo massage therapist, queer-identified male-partnered monogamist, body-loving healthy-eating fat chick, unmedicated mostly-stable bipolar."
She describes her boychick, born in March 2007, as a "male-assigned at birth — and so far apparently comfortable with that assignment, white, currently able-bodied, congenitally hypothyroid, cosleeper, former breastfed toddler, elimination communication graduate, sling baby and early walker, trial and terror, cliched light of our life, and impetus for the blog. Odds are good he will be the most privileged of persons: a middle class, able bodied...straight, white male."
For Daemyir, gender-neutral parenting is not an attempt to eliminate gender, "because the 70s'-era gender neutral parenting movement proved that's not possible."
But, she adds, she has concerns about the ways we designate and segregate gender in public, "starting with the idea that there are two-and-only-two genders — a construction, and a myth, in our society that excludes many."
To that end, Daemyir supports, among other changes, non-gender-designated single-stall bathrooms and an option for unisex washrooms and locker rooms....Daemyir does not think that eliminating all single-gender areas "is beneficial or safe either, necessarily, but ... we over-designate many of these things when it's simply not necessary, and actively harms a particularly marginalized population — people with non-binary genders."
The NPR correspondent did include a sidebar where physician Leonard Sax of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education offered a "lively defense of gender distinctions," but also warned that "ignoring gender has the ironic consequence of exacerbating gender stereotypes." But Weeks did not quote from one person who explicitly opposed the "gender neutrality" cause.
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Comments
→ Dope-smoking menstruating monkeys
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:16pm.
Yeah, gender is good to know.
ahahahaha
Submitted by helyanwe on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 7:56pm.
hahahahahaha...yep.
Where's the women's. . .
Submitted by rickbren on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:30pm.
. . . shower room!!!???
Go ahead and laugh, Cool,
Submitted by SickofLibs on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:32pm.
but this type of research can sometimes be valuable.
→ Yeah, SOL
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:37pm.
Our judges would have also accepted Satchmo and JasonC as specimens of sexual confusion.
Gift registry at a therapist's office
Submitted by JeffC... on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:31pm.
I read that Storm's parents tossed a coin to determine whether to dress Storm as a boy or a girl on a recent vacation. That's certain to come up at the child's inevitable therapy sessions. They should start prepaying into a therapy account.
Storm's older brothers also get to defy normal boy behavior. The article also mentioned that two little girls didn't want to play with the "girlish" brothers. The article makes it seem like it's the girls who have issues, not the parents.. Nothing like blaming a little girl for acting like a normal little girl when confronted by some adults' ridiculous experiment on their own children.
If Gender Is Just A Construct
Submitted by Greg Toombs on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:32pm.
If gender is just a construct, then who constructed it first?
Did it evolve naturally?
Or was it created? And, if so, by whom?
I think this is just another step
Submitted by Tugboat Phil on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 9:28pm.
down the ladder of sexual deviancy. If they can get sex identification to make no difference, it's just another step towards making no difference between adults and children.
The ultimate goal of liberals is to have legal sex with children and animals. Even then they won't be satisfied.
e-gad
Submitted by MidAmerica on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:36pm.
I'm so glad to live in fly-over country where this sort of idiocy is confined to larger cities and the goofy NPR type listeners.
Are we that gullible now...
Submitted by DumbCanuck on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:36pm.
...or are we supposed to be?
Group-think at its worst!
Well, I suppose if there are some people who can believe in same-sex "marriage", there are some people that can believe anything!
To all the kool-aid drinkers out there... When are YOU going to wake up!?!?
"Odds are good he will be the most privileged of persons: a middle class, able bodied...straight, white male."
That sounds like a lament to me.
"There... Are... Four... Lights!"
in our family
Submitted by MidAmerica on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:40pm.
My four year old granddaughters absolutely love to dress up in their princess dresses and their parents let them do it all they want. The grandsons want to crash toys and climb on things. (Well OK we are trying to discourage that a little bit)
>>>• Kathy Witterick and her
Submitted by seanrobins on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:40pm.
>>>• Kathy Witterick and her husband, David Stocker, are raising their 4-month-old child, Storm, without revealing the child's gender. According to the birth announcement from the Toronto couple: "We've decided not to share Storm's sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a stand up to what the world could become in Storm's lifetime (a more progressive place?)"
These parents are nuts, and horribly detrimental to this poor child.
sean robins
Darn blast it
Submitted by deadeyedan on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:50pm.
The gender-neutrality gig threatens to undermine the fun of a bumper sticker observed some time ago on Grand Av. in Bensenville, Illinois. It said:
"Telephones are a lot like women - they like to be talked to - they like to be held.
If you push a wrong button, you get disconnected!"
And of course as we all know, fellas, that it takes 43,172 right buttons to make up for one WRONG button. Eee gad.
ClimateGate - the revelation that the pseudo-scientists at East Anglia University know just as much about the atmosphere as Harvard law professors know about the Constitution - deadeyedan
Somebody's gotta keep the stats
Submitted by JakeMo on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 6:51pm.
If we didn't keep track of who is a boy and who is a girl, how would the government maintain all those statistics telling us how mean America is for not employing or educating exactly the right number of boys and girls in every field?
Besides, if we didn't know who was a girl,
Submitted by WhoIsJohnGalt on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 7:12pm.
how would we know whom to pay less?
I just love to tweak them...
Just think....
Submitted by MidAmerica on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 7:16pm.
....how much easier it will be to raise teenagers. Just don't tell them whether they are a boy or a girl until they are out of high school and avoid all those endless worries about unplanned pregnancies. Parents can just keep their kids gender a secret and then announce the information in their graduation card.
Gender neutrality? I guess the "its" are now jumping for joy
Submitted by Dave. on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 7:38pm.
-Dave
Vote for the American in November
Well if they are serious about gender neutrality
Submitted by Bhaal on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 7:56pm.
then everyone should just have number designator. Bob, Steve, Jane, Pat will kind of give it away. Parent #1 Parent #2. Child #1 Child #2. Third of Four. Number two! Make it so!
The absurdity is amazing. How
Submitted by Radical1979 on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 8:37pm.
The absurdity is amazing. How the hell do we reproduce without gender? And gender occurs in higher lever organisms, why are they trying to reduce us to a lower level, again?
But this is my favorite, "As history shows, one enterprise in which Americans excel is the breaking down of divisions." because any other time they're telling us how racist and divisive we are. Apparently we're only divisive when it suits the left.
At What Point Do We Call It Demonic?
Submitted by Tenebrous on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 10:20pm.
At what point do we call what NPR is doing demonic? I'd say right about now. It's past time to wrest them free from the government teat. Let people who want to support this societal chaos pay for it. Me, I'm physically sick -- and ready to go burn some copies of Das Kapital on their front lawns.
Visions and Principles blog
God will not be mocked.
Submitted by HockeyKid on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 10:24pm.
And I pray the children are spared permanent damage at the hands of the "parents".
"Beauty is only skin deep, but liberal's to the bone." - me
When I was in training I had
Submitted by stratman on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 10:25pm.
When I was in training I had a couple attending physicians who made it clear we were not to mention the race of the patient when giving report. As it turned out, all of the physicians were Liberals. (Could be a connection there.)
Race may have a bearing on potential diagnoses and outcomes. The race of an individual is just a piece of data that may lead one to a definitive diagnosis sooner and a more efficient plan of treatment (choice of medications). Data in Medicine should not be tainted with political correctness.
Additionally, avoiding race may also hinder therapeutic alliances with the patient when considering cultural influences of the patient in their perception of illness and what treatments they consider useful, including folk and traditional remedies the patient may believe are vital to their wellness.
The Left's assault on our Judeo-Christian society
Submitted by Ted Clarke on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 11:04pm.
Barrack Obama said he wanted to "fundamentally transform the United States of America".
Here's how Wikitionary defines the word "fundamental":
"A leading or primary principle, rule, law, or article, which serves as the groundwork of a system; essential part,"
Groundwork. Foundations. Essentials. That which comes before all else. Wow! We're talking big, important stuff here. And Obama doesn't merely want to "improve" or "modify" or "change" our country; He wants to "TRANSFORM" it!
This begs questions: What forms America's groundwork? What are its essentials? On what foundation is it built?
I think it's the Bible, as in Judeo-Christian philosophy...not Jewish theology or Christian theology.
And what are the fundamentals of that? I think it comes down to the very first words of Genesis which tell us God's very first actions. In the beginning, God drew lines between things. He drew a line between light and darkness, between good and evil, between God and humans , between humans and animals, between male and female, etc.
And in recent news there are three related stories that expose the Left's agenda to "fundamentally transform" our Judeo-Christian society:
The first is NBC's Stalin-like treatment of the words "under God". Here, they are erasing all of God's lines simply by evicting Him from the public square.
The second is PETA's campaign to equate microwaved meat products with microwaved human babies. Here, they are erasing the line God drew between animals and humans.
The third is NPR's advocacy for the "End of Gender". Here, the line God drew between males and females is being hushed away with the sweet and dulcet tones of a heavily medicated NPR host.
Add to all this the Left's obsession with moral relativism and multi-culturalism -- both of which erase the line between good and evil -- and you have a cocktail of poisonous influences that will "fundamentally transform" -- i.e. destroy -- the United States of America.
I can't believe there are
Submitted by Rusty Shackleford on Thu, 06/23/2011 - 11:13pm.
I can't believe there are still people out there who support the myth that there are no differences between the genders other than the conditioning society imposes upon us. Does this mean there are still people who think cats suck the breath from newborn babies? Do people still throw salt over their shoulders when they spill the shaker?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chris Matthews: The Joy Behar of MSNBC.
Bill Maher: The Joy Behar of HBO.
Paul Krugman: The Joy Behar of The New York Times.
It is amazing how quickly the
Submitted by MrSnuggles on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 12:13am.
It is amazing how quickly the science loving leftists will abandon all those scientific principles for fantasies such as this. Do they forget that we humans have chromosomes which determine our gender? Do they really want to disregard history and *gasp* evolution in order to satisfy their deviant desires?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Submitted by panzerakc on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 12:23am.
So, if we go to a gender-neutral society (I doubt my dogs will be impressed), does that mean there will be no more bashing of conservative, heterosexual, white men? There being no genders anymore and all.
Some years back
Submitted by Chaitealover on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 2:41am.
there was a trend to not give children gender-specific toys. Give trucks to the girls and dolls to the boys, it will make them free to be whoever they are, without forcing them into the roles society says they should fulfill.
Now we have a myriad of 20 and 30 somethings who have no idea if they are supposed to feel male, female, or both - any connection?
Doh!
Submitted by DontFeedTheTrolls on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 6:41am.
Well if we don't need gender we sure don't need color. End affirmative action now.
Duh, anyone who has raised a girl or boy knows....
Submitted by acaiguana on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 7:19am.
The difference is genetic and fixed.
Good luck with the other.
ACA
...
Quoted from: 'Acaiguana notes from the Underground' (Soon to be at theaters near you)
~World without end, Amen.
Submitted by Wrathful Brunette on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 7:37am.
If you want to see my two and a half year old son go crazy with excitement give him a glimpse of something like this. You should see him when the garbage truck comes rumbling down the street, it's like Christmas.
Girls? Give them a glimpse of this.
Yep,
Submitted by Boudin on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 7:48am.
I am a big fan of Gender, and there differences.
Boudin
Submitted by Radical1979 on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 3:25pm.
I'm with you, I wouldn't want to be with someone who was prettier than me. It's bad enough that my husband hasn't gone gray yet and I have to...never mind. But pretty soon I'm going to be painting his hair white as he sleeps.
Reflected in birth rates
Submitted by Student1776 on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 2:11pm.
Birth rates among European seculars and American seculars run from 1.1-1.6 children per family while birth rates among religious Americans run about 2.4-2.8 children per family. I suspect that gender and sex are not important to seculars, vitiated and androgenous, accustomed to dependence on the state as they are. In contrast Americans who believe in something other than the state, who take pride in running their own lives and not being dependents on the state have the vitality to reproduce. In the long run the seculars are demographically doomed.
Yes
Submitted by Question_Assumptions on Fri, 06/24/2011 - 5:54pm.
The gay and lesbian agenda goes far beyond reasonable protection and tolerance and they are asking to confuse sex and sex roles for the vast majority of children who fit normal and healthy sex roles in order to make a small minority (no more than 3%-5% of the population) more comfortable and they want to force people to not only tolerate or even accept but approve of their lifestyle and criminalize any dissent.
It's as if they demanded that all children learn sign language and communicate only in sign language so that the small majority who are deaf could be more comfortable. Yes, it would make deaf kids more comfortable and might even be functional, for the most part, but it would rob normal hearing children of expressing themselves normally and naturally with sound. Yeah, it stinks to be abnormal but that doesn't give one the right to demand that everyone else be abnormal and handicap themselves in order to make the abnormal normal.
See Harrison Bergeron, written in 1961. At the rate things are going, we'll be there before 2081.
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html