The New York Times again took on basic biology and sex traits in the....paper's special Design section (!), which devoted a full page on Thursday to “Free to be -- Making a space without gender cues, so children can develop their identities.” The online title was sillier, answering a question only the most left-wing gender-fluid parents are asking: “How to Raise a Child Without Imposing Gender.”
Michael Tortorello wrote about imposing gender neutrality from infancy, to avoid what was assumed (not even argued) to be harmful gender stereotyping that the human race has been thoughtlessly, "conservatively" burdening itself with for generations untold:
Elliot Claire: What kind of baby name is that? A girl’s name? A boy’s name? Both?
Mission accomplished, said Elizabeth and Sean Scotten, of Oakland, Calif., who became parents to Elliot Claire almost a year ago. “We loved the juxtaposition of a name that’s more traditionally masculine and a name that’s more feminine,” Ms. Scotten, 35, explained. As the baby grows up (it’s a girl!), she can use any combination of the two.
(....)
As for the nursery, the Scottens wrestled with a design question encountered by a generation of new parents, who, surveys suggest, hold more accepting views of gender nonconformity. How to create a room where a baby can grow up to become a boy, a girl or whatever feels right?
(....)
This was a change from 10 years ago, or even five, Ms. Hegg added. Then, the baby aisle strenuously separated products by gender -- often to mystifying effect. If cats are for girls, why are big cats -- lions and tigers -- for boys? What’s inherently masculine about an astronaut in a spacesuit?
No matter how new the concept may be, strict gender neutrality is now conventional wisdom at the New York Times, enforced from the news pages to articles on nursery décor (click “expand”):
They’re babies, doubters will say. A newborn doesn’t infer anything from the fire truck pattern on the crib bumper.
Here, the doubters would be wrong, or so a body of research suggests. Children don’t begin to categorize their gender until the age of 2 or 3, explained Harriet Tenenbaum, who studies gender identity at the University of Surrey in England. At that age, “it’s a real incipient understanding,” based on vague traits like hair length and height. (“They don’t have a great understanding of genitalia,” Dr. Tenenbaum added.)
But young children pick up cues from the toys they’re given, the words they hear, the books they read and the behaviors they encounter on the playground.
Dr. Tenenbaum pointed to a 2008 study that dealt with children’s rooms, in the behavioral science journal Sex Roles. The researchers showed photos of young children’s bedrooms to untrained college students and asked them to guess the child’s gender. The participants succeeded more than 90 percent of the time.
A parallel interview process revealed that parents who held more conservative gender views (say, disapproving of a boy wearing nail polish) also created the bedrooms that appeared more traditionally male or female.
The writer assumes this is prima facie bad, and doesn’t even deign to explain why overthrowing gender roles that maybe 95% of the population adheres to is so necessary.
Finally, researchers discovered, the children who lived in these kinds of bedrooms expressed more traditional views of gender in their own interviews.
Tortorello asked the question only extremely committed “gender-fluid” parents in Brooklyn are asking.
How to keep the pink and blue junk (and the gender biases they represent) out of the house?
While the paper preens as being beholden to facts and science, unlike those stupid conservative climate change deniers, The Times regularly drops in denial of obvious sex differences in every section, from the news pages to the entertainment pages and now nursery décor.
Reporting in August 2017 on transgender woman Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, convicted of leaking military secrets to WikiLeaks, legal reporter Charlie Savage was more concerned about Manning's hair length and access to women’s underwear in prison than the harm posed to national security.
