[quote]Cortes wrote:
[quote]DBCooper wrote:
[quote]Dr. Pangloss wrote:
[quote]csulli wrote:
What I’m wondering is at what age do you trust your child to be able to know where they stand from a sex and gender role standpoint? The original topic was about kids. If your 6 year old son wants to wear a dress to express himself or whatever, it would seem logical to me to tell that child “No, you’re wearing boy clothes.” Because I know at least when I was like 6, I probably thought eating chocolate for every meal of the day was a great fucking idea. I think the kid ought to at least be in high school before I would trust them to actually know how to feel about this issue. I mean hell, wouldn’t they even need to start puberty first or something?[/quote]
I think the underlying premise to your question, and to other’s arguements, is that there is something harmful in allowing a 6 year old boy to wear a dress. In this case, it’s not like allowing them to eat chocolate cake for every meal, or watch 4 hours of TV a day, or any other activity which can either be shown to be harmful, or which reasonable people could agree would be harmful through some generally recognized mechanism of action. For example, allowing a 7 year old to watch Robocop might be seen as a parental choice, but I think most can agree that that level of violence is inappropriate for a 7 year old.
There is no demonstrable harm from allowing a 6 year old boy to wear a dress. To bring sexuality into the discussion only muddles it. Many times a young boy wearing a dress is just that and not some glimpse into his sexuality.
As a humorous aside, last Xmas my daughter wanted to know why our parish priest was wearing a violet dress during Lent. [/quote]
To build on this, any harm that does come from wearing a dress is a result of people’s responses to wearing the dress, not the actual act of wearing the dress itself. The response is what results in harm and the response is the behavior that should be stopped.
By asking the behavior that LEADS to the response to be stopped instead, it creates the impression (especially in the minds of young children) that the response is appropriate and the behavior that provokes it is not okay. If a parent asks that the action be stopped rather than the response to it, even if they support the child’s choice of clothing, it leads the child to believe that their own parents also think that it is okay for their kid to be made fun of.[/quote]
Some of us don’t feel like making our children object lessons for utopian society.
Having been picked on and teased myself, once for the clothes I was wearing, in fact, I can tell you that it is one of the worst, most traumatic experiences a child must endure. Most children will have to endure it no matter how rigidly they conform, and that’s natural. But taking a child and allowing him to engage in behavior that is going to rain down hell on him at school from virtually all of his peers, making him into a pariah when social acceptance is THE most important goal in life at that stage, is one of the most egregious form of abuse I can imagine.
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First of all, you already ARE making your child an object lesson for your concept of a utopian society by deciding who he gets to be instead of letting him find out on his own.
Allowing a child to engage in behavior that is going to rain down hell on him at school, eh? You know, when I was in high school all the drama people got made fun of, even the ones that weren’t really weird simply for their association with the whole thing. The abuse wasn’t comparable to what someone cross-dressing would receive, but it was very, very significant nonetheless.
Now, if my kid wanted to participate in plays or the choir or something like that, which would also garner a lot of ridicule from his classmates, I wouldn’t tell him that he cannot do it because people make fun of him. That is absolutely ridiculous to base what a kid can do on whether or not he’ll be made fun of. And who the hell says “social acceptance” is THE most important goal at that stage? Are we raising lemmings or self-confident individuals capable of making their own decisions about their life? Because THAT is the ultimate goal, period, in a democracy. At that age children should already be learning how to make their own decisions and come to some sort of awareness of who they are.
There’s some trial and error in that process and if it means wearing a dress and getting made fun of, so be it. There are all sorts of activities that a kid can engage in that get him turned into the butt of his classmates’ jokes, but do you discourage all of them as well, or only the ones that raise gender role issues?