Insightful writing! Underscores a lot of how I talk to my kids about gender (although luckily, they inform me just as much as I inform them!). Really looking forward to yr thoughts on sports. It's my sense that the best approach there is to entirely re-structure ALL OF SPORTS from the bottom up, so that it looks nothing like it does now. Remove scholarship money from sports. Remove all money from sports. These things could help us think about competition differently and think about teams differently. Of course, I don't see that as a popular or likely scenario!
I don’t have issues with people being who the are. Never have - never will. I do understand that the issue with sports has to do with the fairness of competition. There are excellent articles written by well educated people that discuss the issues. Sometimes things are not as simple as they seem. I always try to read what unbiased experts say on both sides of a subject.
Interesting article...and I'm moving on to part 2 next. But before I do - I'm not sure why signaling is or should be required. Because if you go to India, Germany, Spain, Norway, and Russia (where people traditionally wear their wedding rings on their right hand), you're going to be misguided.
There is plenty of gender overlap in sports performance. It makes much more sense to create sports divisions determined by height, weight, wingspan, etc. than it does to break it into men's/women's leagues.
This is really helpful, thank you Gabby. I have been thinking so much about this lately. I'm soon to teach my oldest about sex and it dawned on me that I need to include gender identity (and the issues of that) and all the different physical attractions and even surrogates. I might even be missing something! But I want to do a thorough job. I was taught one thing, as you would probably guess.
I have two children, for now they both identify as female. When my oldest was 2 she said often "I'm a boy" and we rolled with it. Then we discovered that at nursery school there were discussions around boy passions and girl passions and my daughter's passions aligned with traditional boy passions and a boy said "you must be a boy" and my daughter was like"guess so!". This was 6 years ago. The school was in a church. We stopped attending because I just felt like why assign gender to interests? What is this really?
Next kid, new state, looking at a well known school that appeared to be more open, equal. During the tour they notice my daughter's nail polish and said it would not be allowed at school should she attend because they try to avoid gender stereotypes. I asked if a boy could wear nail polish and they said yes, of course. I don't wear nail polish and have wildly different tastes than my youngest child but nail polish is something she loves. If people make assumptions about a woman who wears nail polish, that's the person's problem, not the nail polish wearer. I know this doesn't necessarily relate but it really got me thinking about gender identity and how we try to solve the problem of oppression incorrectly so often. Not allowing a child to paint their nails is not real rebellion or protest. Just end all shame and oppression around our creative self expression and everyone hold the door open for others when you can. We absolutely need to protect the rights of trans people and trans kids. And we need to stop hating women. My god, can we please stop hating and punishing women and those that identify with traditionally assigned female characteristics.
You banned FlamingoMallet for writing that? Wow, for asking people to be open minded you sure are hypocritical. Nothing they wrote was rude. Get a life.
Your point about signals for who you're interested in dating makes me think of the Betans in Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorkosigan" books - have you ever read her books? (I think you'd like them!)
Insightful writing! Underscores a lot of how I talk to my kids about gender (although luckily, they inform me just as much as I inform them!). Really looking forward to yr thoughts on sports. It's my sense that the best approach there is to entirely re-structure ALL OF SPORTS from the bottom up, so that it looks nothing like it does now. Remove scholarship money from sports. Remove all money from sports. These things could help us think about competition differently and think about teams differently. Of course, I don't see that as a popular or likely scenario!
I don’t have issues with people being who the are. Never have - never will. I do understand that the issue with sports has to do with the fairness of competition. There are excellent articles written by well educated people that discuss the issues. Sometimes things are not as simple as they seem. I always try to read what unbiased experts say on both sides of a subject.
You are a gift!!! So very grateful to your words and voice!
Interesting article...and I'm moving on to part 2 next. But before I do - I'm not sure why signaling is or should be required. Because if you go to India, Germany, Spain, Norway, and Russia (where people traditionally wear their wedding rings on their right hand), you're going to be misguided.
Maybe we should just chat.
There is plenty of gender overlap in sports performance. It makes much more sense to create sports divisions determined by height, weight, wingspan, etc. than it does to break it into men's/women's leagues.
This is really helpful, thank you Gabby. I have been thinking so much about this lately. I'm soon to teach my oldest about sex and it dawned on me that I need to include gender identity (and the issues of that) and all the different physical attractions and even surrogates. I might even be missing something! But I want to do a thorough job. I was taught one thing, as you would probably guess.
I have two children, for now they both identify as female. When my oldest was 2 she said often "I'm a boy" and we rolled with it. Then we discovered that at nursery school there were discussions around boy passions and girl passions and my daughter's passions aligned with traditional boy passions and a boy said "you must be a boy" and my daughter was like"guess so!". This was 6 years ago. The school was in a church. We stopped attending because I just felt like why assign gender to interests? What is this really?
Next kid, new state, looking at a well known school that appeared to be more open, equal. During the tour they notice my daughter's nail polish and said it would not be allowed at school should she attend because they try to avoid gender stereotypes. I asked if a boy could wear nail polish and they said yes, of course. I don't wear nail polish and have wildly different tastes than my youngest child but nail polish is something she loves. If people make assumptions about a woman who wears nail polish, that's the person's problem, not the nail polish wearer. I know this doesn't necessarily relate but it really got me thinking about gender identity and how we try to solve the problem of oppression incorrectly so often. Not allowing a child to paint their nails is not real rebellion or protest. Just end all shame and oppression around our creative self expression and everyone hold the door open for others when you can. We absolutely need to protect the rights of trans people and trans kids. And we need to stop hating women. My god, can we please stop hating and punishing women and those that identify with traditionally assigned female characteristics.
You banned FlamingoMallet for writing that? Wow, for asking people to be open minded you sure are hypocritical. Nothing they wrote was rude. Get a life.
Your point about signals for who you're interested in dating makes me think of the Betans in Lois McMaster Bujold's "Vorkosigan" books - have you ever read her books? (I think you'd like them!)