Irish politician raising baby gender neutral with 'they' pronouns

I noticed this too, it reads like a very strange way to refer to your own child.

Brilliant. Conduct a social experiment on your very own child.

Try to disassociate their innate sense of self from their realities. Put 'gender' back in the 1950s as literally a choice between blue and pink.

I don't think it's a great idea to raise your child within a cultish ideology, for one thing, they may disagree with you.

I hope so too. The thing I think they haven't counted on is that it's mandatory in a referendum for both sides of the debate to get equal air time on the public broadcasters. If this referendum does include something based around limiting biological sex, this could be a massive misstep fir them. As all of a sudden "no debate" is actually illegal. The absolute shitfit the TRAs threw last year due to a few days of women discussing being called "people with a cervix" on Joe Duffy, will be nothing compared to how they react when RTE legally has to give massive amounts of time to the other side. It could prove very emboldening for people. Especially when we don't have to even stand up publicly to be harassed. Just tick a box in private.

I remember reading an article a while ago about how gender neutral parenting had left a young child unhappy and confused. Children look to us to make sense of the world and one of the early things they learn is the difference between the sexes.

I remember DD at 2 or 3 chatting to my mum in the kitchen. "You have boobs, mummy has boobs, grampy doesn't have boobs" and my mum telling her, well yes, we're women, women have boobs.

But anyway, Paul sounds like he's at the stage of parenting where you are at the best parent you're ever going to be. When I had a newborn I was definitely raising them screen free, sugar free and they would play happily with only organic painted wooden toys. It's gone as well as you can imagine.

Brilliant 😂😂😂😂

Puts me in mind of this horrible read.

pitt.substack.com/p/true-believer

And the three year old replies with “I want more biscuits” what 3 year old is gonna understand that bollocks. All they care about is toys, fun and causing happy chaos.

Reading the article, apart from using the 'them' pronoun, it just seems like normal parenting. Allowing the kid to choose what it is they like and not letting their sex dictate the paths they're encouraged to take in life.

It's just that the rest of us plebs are doing anyway just made to sound a bit more fancy. I'll bet of us here are only giving our girls access to pink clothes and toy washing machines while our boys get to play with the army gear.

Completely. The reference to the contribution that mothers make to society in the constitution is being aimed at solely because it relates to sex not gender. The thing is I actually do think articulate commentators could have a big impact in favour of retaining the wording, the Irish mammy remains a potent symbol. I think a lot more people are also now aware of self Id being slid in to legislation on the back of marriage equality without debate and frankly it’s not a position the majority of the country would have supported. I think and am hoping this could be a major misstep by the government in introducing this referendum, I don’t think it’s going to necessarily the way they want or expect it to.

i don’t disagree; I was starting with PM’s position and rolling my eyes at that. Parallel to that, we have the upcoming gender equality referendum and I am already composing letters in my head around the centrality of “gender” rather than sex as the crux of the discussion. Gender has been hijacked and if we are not careful, the legislation will completely tilt the focus away from male/female and get caught up in confusion, and I fear that vocal elements will muddy the waters to de-centralise female rights.

😂

Ha ha ha ha! The reality is that the misogyny ingrained in Irish society has never really been challenged, not in any significant way. I say that as an Irish woman. The victories Irish women have fought for haven’t expunged that. The misogyny in our culture means that gender ideology can slide right in there. There have been huge developments don’t get me wrong - the life of a girl in Ireland now in terms of what she is allowed to do, how she is expected to behave is very far removed from my own childhood thankfully - but there’s still a much more patriarchal society in play here than in other European countries. As my friends and I often discuss if you are a reasonably intelligent woman here you are expected yes to excel at school, university, your career but you are also still expected to marry, produce a family, keep a lovely home and make sure you and your children are well presented as a minimum. The ‘good girl’ is still prized above all else. It’s easy for Paul and his partner to say they aren’t playing the game but they are. I mean what was the point in him saying we aren’t gendering the baby but making sure none the less that everyone knew the baby was male. I did wonder if he would have taken the decision to release that bit of information if the baby was female.

What’s depressing imo is that PM perceives there to be limitations to being a boy or a girl. It strikes me as anti-feminist to refuse to acknowledge that sex is a protected characteristic. The women’s movement in ireland needed so much grit and determination to roll back the marriage bar, the ban on contraception, the ban on abortion, and now to pretend it’s immaterial is strikingly disingenuous and can only come from someone who blithely disregards the hard-won rights of the last thirty years.

as someone on Twitter points out, eejit is a gender-neutral term and appropriate in this case!

Lol! Or even better he joins the Burkes of Castlebar at age 16.

I see Juniper all suited and booted in some new free market capitalist party , after doing his MBA.

Or possibly coming out as a devout Catholic. Or Pentecostalist.

I foresee Juniper going non contact with his parents at 16 and changing his name to Peter.

You see what I find so ridic about the ridic scenario is that he is the TD for Dublin South West and lives in Tallaght. I know many great people from Tallaght, but much like my own working class part of Belfast this will NOT be something people there will be doing anything other than laughing at. Oh he’ll get all the blow hards on Twitter applauding him but his actual constituents? I couldn’t see it.
It was so depressing reading his comments today because he is so close to actually getting it. I’ve watched him over the years and he isn’t the sharpest tool in the box. He’ll be absolutely devo’d if the child grows up to be, dare I say it, a typical young boy who loves diggers and kicking a ball.

My parents brought me up gender neutral in the 80s. Not with this silly they/them language, that wasn't a thing back then, but in practice it meant no Barbie dolls or Disney princess movies, no dresses or long hair, no playing tea parties and no toys with girls on the box.
I hated it and became magnetically attracted to anything pink and sparkly by about age 6 and wanted to be a fairy princess.
It's all just very silly and any choice you make for your child is "limiting" them including calling them "they/them".

I notice he had no problem conforming to tradition and giving the little boy his surname though.

The problem is that gender stereotyping of babies and young children happens quite subconsciously. Even when carers think they are treating male and female children the same, studies show that they don’t. Boys are played with more boisterously, etc etc.

So unfortunately, as everyone knows the child is a boy, the whole exercise is utterly pointless.

I find it very uncomfortable reading him refer to his newborn baby as 'it' quite a few times, and 'the baby', 'the child', it comes across like he's very disassociated from his son.

This is exactly what I thought.

This man is 40 years old. Obviously not the sharpest star in the sky!

what happens when Juniper identifies as a cat when he’s 3. Are they going to put him out at night?

Or a super hero, throw him out the window to teach him to fly?

After-all Juniper can be anything Juniper wants.

I can imagine the conversation with the other kids in preschool. ‘Are you a boy or a girl or Wha?’

I do see what he means. Even if you raise your child in the toys are toys and clothes are clothes mindset the rest of the world will put gender stereotypes onto them. They will still go to school/play group/parties and be faced with ‘girls can’t play football’ or ‘dolls aren’t for boys’.

I still thinks it’s a bloody silly way to raise a child and it won’t last.