Those Baby Blues
Why I call my son ‘he’, against my better judgement.
Yes, it’s a parenting column in the pages of the Independent, care of “non-binary” parent and pronoun contester, Dorian Stripe:
It’s a question I’m asked occasionally: “why do you use gendered pronouns for your son?” It’s no surprise, as I move entirely in queer circles, and am a non-binary person who uses “they” pronouns for myself instead of “he” or “she.” So naturally people wonder why I’m not allowing my son that neutrality.
I’m not sure that wilfully disregarding your son’s biological sex, and actively challenging it with a hint of self-congratulation, is actually neutrality.
My son was born with a penis and testes. They were identified five months before he was born. Everyone around me had started to ask the fatal question, “boy or girl?” every time they saw my bump. My brain screamed “neither” – it’s nothing! It’s a bundle of cells that doesn’t even have fingers yet!
Here’s a typical foetus at four months, a nascent human being. Or as Dorian puts it, “nothing… a bundle of cells.” Note the fingers.
My employer bought me a weird, cutesy towel-tree in a pastel blue, with little cars and aeroplanes on it. I shudder to think what the girl towel-tree looked like.
Isn’t it just terrible when people buy you gendered baby gifts? The unenlightened fuckers.
I have a large, supportive biological family, who are (as the vast majority of people are) uneducated on trans issues and the nature of pronouns. While the majority of them support my right to parent how I wish, very few of them would respect “non-standard” pronouns – they would revert to using whichever pronoun they think matches his genitalia whenever I’m not in the room, and even when present, they would need constant correction.
Pronoun correction, it’s what brings a family together. Though when relatives do this kind of thing during pregnancy, I suspect they’re not cooing about foetal genitals as such, so much as the psychology, the maleness or femaleness, that they generally signify and prefigure. Those cooing relatives may be affectionately anticipating what kind of person that little “nothing” may become.
This gets to the heart of why I made this decision: using non-binary pronouns is exhausting.
Well, quite. And at this stage of the game, it does look like an affectation that’s more about the parent than the child. After all, gendered pronouns are only apt almost all of the time.
There is only a one in one hundred chance my son will be transgender. There is no need to force him through the neutrality at this young age… He is most likely to simply decide he wants to be a little boy, and that’s fine.
And yet,
I’ve put effort into buying dresses and tights, clothing with butterflies and unicorns as well as diggers and dinosaurs.
And,
undoing the gendered language used by other people he interacts with.
Because,
I want to upset people. I want to shake up their worldview.
How very selfless of you. Using your child as a political project.
If seeing a child in pink upsets you because you don’t think they should be, you’re going to be upset. And to be honest, I don’t care. Our non-binary existence upsetting someone is the least important part of my day.
“Our non-binary existence.” Isn’t that rather jumping the gun? What happened to that “one in one hundred” business?
Oh, and in case you were wondering,
My son is now old enough to choose his own toys and express strong preferences… These days his favourites are cars, trains and dinosaurs.
There we go.
Ok, so Dorian is a uterus person, therefore a gendered mother.
That is a very narrow minded cis-view, if xe identifies as a man xer could very well be a father.
On gender and paradox:
Ergo:
So yes, gender is a one-way filter, despite the bald-faced contradiction. Contradiction only makes it more special.
I recently enjoyed my annual ‘Equality and Diversity’ training, only the best pseudo-lobotomy for our staff.
The decaying flesh of archaic verbiage cast onto the fire this year included ‘Lesbian’ (Surprised? But what if they prefer ‘Gay’ bigot!), ‘Oh God’, ‘Lady’, ‘Deaf and Dumb’ (to be replaced with the lightening accurate ‘Hearing and Speech Difficulty’) and the truly vile ‘Old Person’.
However the rose of the collection must be ‘Wheelchair bound’ because as they explained it was deeply unfair to imply that people who had no use of their legs and were dependent on wheelchairs . . were dependant on wheelchairs. As you might imagine this produced much compulsive coughing and testing of chair straps in the audience.
Munchausen by proxy syndrome. Case closed.
I know the reason he likes cars is because we travel a lot; trains because his mother is an avid steam train aficionado; dinosaurs because palaeontology makes me scream with delight.
Hmmm, so even something as ephemeral and slight as a child’s choice of toys is genetically determined. I thought these were the people who were constantly telling us that everything, even sexuality, is socially constructed. Am I alone in thinking that they haven’t thought their position through very carefully?
‘Only certain people can wield it.
A “Queer Studies” department at a university is perfectly OK
“Get out of my face, you pinko queer!” is not’.
That’s grand.
On that note (and with reference to my own origins), I would like to suggest that the very same individuals involved in this ‘discipline’ consider a sideline in area studies for Wales, and they call themselves the exponents of the ‘Sheepshagger School’.
And they then introduce themselves to the locals at a pub in Tonypandy.
I’ll buy myself some popcorn.
I’ve put effort into buying dresses and tights… undoing the gendered language used by other people he interacts with.
Er, won’t this deliberate misgendering of a boy cause the same kind of problems that transgender people complain about?
Expanding on what I said earlier . . .
What’s missing from this account? Why isn’t this person (I thought it was a self-emasculated father but it appears to be a dyke mother) saying things like “I love my little boy and want him to be happy”?
There’s none of that. The baby boy isn’t a person at all. He’s an accessory, to be customized at will to suit the egotistical whims of his hateful abusive “mother” and her hateful abusive friends.
If child welfare agencies really gave a damn about protecting children, they’d be trying to rescue this baby boy from a lifetime of hell.
Er, won’t this deliberate misgendering of a boy cause the same kind of problems that transgender people complain about?
Well, I don’t think I’d have been thrilled to grow up being continually referred to as androgynous or being dressed in girl’s clothes. Or hearing continual reminders that being thought male was a bad thing. But the boy’s mother describes them both as being “non-binary,” which is beyond presumptuous and dogmatic, and veers into psychodrama. Again, it seems the little boy is regarded by his mother as a political project, an experiment, and maybe an attempt to validate Dorian’s own anomalous gender status.
Or hearing continual reminders that being thought male was a bad thing.
That. Times a hundred.
“My son is now old enough to choose his own toys and express strong preferences… These days his favourites are cars, trains and dinosaurs.”
And on the black day he figured that out there were many tears cried into a pillow, let me tell you.
Wait until the kid discovers Airfix.
When you care more for your child which is a gift from God than you care for your friends PC allowances for your child then you may still have a chance to become a Man
move along nothing to see here just a bunch of people thinking with and about their dicks