A couple who have been trying to raise their child free from any ‘gender constraints’ have now revealed that their child is male.
Sasha Laxton has been brought up with his gender kept a secret from all but his closest family, although the secret can no longer be kept now that he has started school at the age of five.
His parents reportedly wanted to avoid what they perceive as ‘gender stereotyping’. After he was born, they gave him a name that suited both boys and girls and referred to him as ‘the infant’, rather than as their son or daughter.
As Sasha grew older, he was encouraged to play with dolls as much as Lego and was allowed to wear both boys’ and girls’ clothes. His parents have now posted a video on the internet showing him saying that it’s “silly” to talk of differences between boys and girls.
Criticism
There has been much criticism over the effect this type of parenting may have on children.
Melanie Phillips has commented on the case, writing: “Sexual and gender differences lie at the very heart of what it is to be a human being.
“Denying those differences to a child not only threatens that child’s own sense of identity and well-being, but also starts to unravel what it is to be a person.
“Dressing a boy as a girl and pretending he can choose his gender is not merely bizarre and cruel. It is part of a wider agenda to re-order our society.”
Storm Witterick
Storm Witterick, who was born in Canada in January 2011, has also attracted widespread publicity after his parents committed to raise the child in a gender free environment, suggesting that the child could choose its own gender when it was old enough.
Commenting on the case, Dr Harold Koplewicz, a U.S. child psychiatrist, said that 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.”
Changing attitudes
The two cases are seen as part of a wider push in some circles to question the importance of gender, and to suggest that gender differences are artificially constructed by society.
The Council of Europe recently drafted a new definition of gender, stating that it now means: “the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men.”
Last Autumn Australia announced that citizens would be allowed to list their gender as X on their passports if they did not want to be categorised as male or female.
And a secondary school in Thailand said that 10-20% of its boys regarded themselves as transgender, and therefore that they provide them with separate toilets. The school suggested that we should have four genders: male, female, males who want to be female and females who want to be male.
Closer to home, and after a sustained campaign by a ‘sexual rights’ pressure group, Hamleys toy store in London decided to become gender-neutral last December, banishing pink and blue themed floors and removing the signs indicating which toys are for boys and which are for girls.
California – Setting the Trend
Pioneers of this new trend include the powerful and influential California Teachers' Association, which recently held a conference during which the attendees received materials advocating ‘gender liberation’.
According to the materials, male-female distinctions must be eliminated in order to ‘liberate’ children from unnecessary male and female stereotypes.
The conference literature included these instructions:
- Do not assume anyone's gender, even people you may have met in the past. A person's external appearance may not match their internal gender identity.
- You cannot know the gender or sex of someone by their physical body, voice, appearance or mannerisms.
- Pay attention to a person's purposeful gender expression. We consider it polite to ask: "What pronoun do you prefer?" or "How do you identify?" before using pronouns or gendered words for anyone.
- One way of acknowledging the needs of all people is to designate restrooms as gender neutral. Each of us can decide for ourselves in which bathroom we belong.
Yet Fay Voshell, writing in the American Thinker, stated:
“Elimination of gender distinctions means entering a ‘Brave New World’ in which everybody belongs to everybody else, and all belong to the state. Proponents of the abolition of gender remind one of the Emperor who wore no clothes. They are deluded by fatuous intellection and dystopian phantasms that defy rationality.”
And Patrick Fagan, a family scholar at the US-based Family Research Council, said that the use of a social construct definition of gender is “evidence of thought so divorced from reality as to be a form of mental illness, possible only to those who have spent years being miseducated in the upper levels of the modern university.”
Links
Resources
Christian Concern: Storm Witterick
LifeSiteNews: New European convention defines “gender” as social construct