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Posted
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 8:15 AM
| By
Dana Stevens
Hanna’s post about the Swedish couple who are attempting to raise their child “gender-free” (not
telling anyone its birth sex or permitting the genitals to be seen by
anyone but a select few intimates) has had me thinking all day about
the chicken-and-egg problem of gender identification. Do I think the
category of gender is more constructed than the dominant culture gives
it credit for? Definitely. Does the parenting of this couple horrify
me? Completely.
Hanna, your analogy (to a “militant feminist friend” who tried
unsuccessfully to make her daughter play with trucks) doesn’t quite
hold up; in terms of the violence visited on the kid’s sense of self,
the Swedish family’s choice to conceal the fact of gender altogether seems infinitely worse. Being told by your parents that you should ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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