When Beck Laxton and Kieran Cooper had an offspring, they decided that their Baby Sasha should not be influenced by society's prejudices and preconceptions when it comes to gender:
They referred to their child as "The Infant" and only allowed him to play with "gender-neutral toys" in their television-free home.
For the first five years of his life Sasha alternated between girls' and boys' outfits, leaving friends, playmates and relatives guessing.
But the couple have finally revealed his sex after it became harder to conceal when Sasha started primary school.
Yesterday Miss Laxton, a web editor, said that she thought gender stereotyping was "fundamentally stupid".
"I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping," she said.
"Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes?
The gender of Sasha was finally revealed (he's a boy) when he started school: Link - via Arbroath
Overall, you should understand that Gender, largely, has no meaning. This is because what is considered "masculine" and "feminine" in one generation is not necessarily true in another. Being "clean", for instance, was largely considered a feminine trait. It's sort of neutral now, but we still think of girls as "clean and pretty" and boys as "rough and dirty".
And no, doing something so "your kid won't get beat up in school" is a terrible excuse to do anything. Don't blame the victims of bullying. That's just enabling the scum to kick your kids around.
Sheesh, I learned all of this in Catholic school. I thought at least someone else here would know the difference.
Naiveté? Really? You don't think it's the job of parents and educators to steer children away from making each others lives miserable? Isn't that why schools across the country have instituted zero-tolerance rules for bullying?
You, my friend, are the one that has your head in the ground (or somewhere a bit darker).
@Raf3: Your naiveté astounds me. Children are notorious for mistreating those that are different in ANY manner from the social group they belong to, and this child's parents are evidently just as naive. It's tough enough for a child to go through the teasing, taunting and harassment of such differences that cannot be avoided, and it's another to bring this on a child for no good reason whatsoever. So yes, I DO blame the parents for putting their child through this. In some ways it's not much different than those parents in Ohio who named their son Adolf Hitler.
>The parents should be put against a wall.
Good thing that "The Infant" will probably do just that. before his killing spree starts. Come on, if that dude doesn't turn into a serial killer, who will?
His heroic deeds will probably involve doing weird things to his victims' genitals. Maybe some gross crap about exchanging their sexual identity. So he'll probably need a male and a female victim every time.
You go, Sasha. :D
The parents should be put against a wall.
Transgender people would tell you otherwise.
FYI: I believe most of us on the "left" would consider this a really counter-productive (dare I say stupid?) approach to raising a healthy child (as a father with a daughter in college).
But, so as not to disappoint your need to put people in one of two boxes, I will say that I plan to buys LOTS more Girl Scout cookies this year.
Still, the parents are proud enough of their little social experiment that they took it to the tabs. That's depressing.
But it makes a good story for the Mail and Telegraph!
You simply can't avoid the rest of the world in raising a kid this way. It's simply not possible, and the efforts to do so are silly.
I work hard to be sure my daughter doesn't feel obligated to like "girly" things, and now she loves building stuff, repairing the house, football and the like. And she also loves barbie, Disney princesses and pink clothes.
In other words, I let her make the choices.
And I think these parents are fundamentally stupid. They cannot hope to counter gender stereotyping by simply hiding the boy's wiener. All they probably achieved was fundamentally messing up the kid for the rest of his life. Damn, people like that make me so angry (just like parents who would name their baby "apple").