Theory: like parenting toddlers

[oxalisRed]

It's stuck me time and again, a lot of the discussion about centering women's rights is not dissimilar to parenting toddlers and enforcing boundaries. Bear with me...

MN, obviously, has been built on an audience of women who over time have become/ want to be/ stopped actively parenting, mothers. We're all aware of the pressures, societal and personal, that motherhood induces; aware of the limits and miracles that our bodies can perform.

Then we're actively parenting toddlers whose lives we're guiding, we're teaching them everyday how to become their own person but setting limits and boundaries for their own safety.

"I want to do what I want to do" is a phrase uttered by my toddler that has stuck with me - of course she did, who wouldn't want their cake and to eat it?

Now women are yet again defending (hard won) boundaries that protect us against people who basically act like toddlers. Who cannot or choose not to behave with reason, who want everything even though it would be a cost to safety (predominantly ours).

Is it because we're mothers that we understand this fight so well, the fundamental importance and absurdity of it?

Many of the younger women I've spoken to (not yet mothers or never plan to be) see no issue with changing the boundaries that protect women - I wonder if that's because they've yet to experience a 3 year old demanding so much chocolate that it would make them sick?

Jordon Peterson said in an interview that he was baffled by people believing you can change sex. He said that children under the age of three or four might think that, but it's absolutely crazy for an adult to think it.
He's not wrong on that.

I agree with the 'parenting toddlers' analogy but I also think that for many women having children makes them experience a lot more sex based inequality. Speaking personally, before I had children I was adamant that in my industry being female did not put me at a disadvantage. I truly believed that the playing field was level and that my generation would be the ones who brought about equal representation in the board room etc. I would definitely have argued that a trans person was at more of a disadvantage in the workplace that a woman. I did argue that allowing trans women in to female toilets etc was harmless.

Having children made the scales fall from my eyes. I experienced the lack of support for the needs of pregnant women, was made to wait years for promotion (on the basis that obviously I could not apply for a promotion unless I would be in the office for the full business year before and after my application), had male bosses decline career enhancing projects on my behalf because I had a baby to look after (passing this off, when questioned, as a caring move- and instead sending a man who also had a baby at home) and much more. It made me question everything I thought I knew/believed about how society treats women and girls.

In an age when it is possible to watch someone giving birth on TV, I can't see how anyone can't realise what it entails. And there's a whole website called Mumsnet where you can find out just about anything you want to about becoming a mother.

I am sorry, but comments like this are why the subject isn't spoken about properly, which has huge implications for maternity and postnatal care.

It is one thing to watch something on TV or read about it, but another thing entirely to live through it.

I would agree with you in general.
Apart from setting boundaries, another thing a parent is aware of is how difficult it is to grow up feeling confident and secure and therefore the last thing any adult should be doing is adding to a child’s confusion with complicated ideas beyond the understanding of their age.

One thing that is worrying though imo, and which doesn’t seem to correlate with your hypothesis, is the instances where parents seem to truly believe children are in the wrong body but say it has all been the (very young) child’s decision.

I saw a link on Mumsnet for example of an American mother who said their baby boy ‘told them’ they were a little girl at the age of 18 months. She also said that Jesus had given her a little girl.

There is an Australian soap character who had fully supported his child transitioning with puberty blockers.

In the U.K. an acquaintance told me his little boy of 4 had transitioned to become a girl.

(None of these were DSD cases.)

@Packingsoapandwater

In an age when it is possible to watch someone giving birth on TV, I can't see how anyone can't realise what it entails. And there's a whole website called Mumsnet where you can find out just about anything you want to about becoming a mother.

I am sorry, but comments like this are why the subject isn't spoken about properly, which has huge implications for maternity and postnatal care.

It is one thing to watch something on TV or read about it, but another thing entirely to live through it.

Yes indeed.

I was assessed for PTSD by the hospital psych team after the birth I had.

Comments like “you can watch it on TV” read to me like claiming you know what living on a frontline war zone is like after watching the news.

It really is pretty daft I’m afraid to suggest that watching something on television or reading about it is the equivalent of actually experiencing it yourself.

I would agree with OP.

Also, going through the physical reality of something (pregnancy and parturition) is very different from reading about it or even watching it in reality, never min on TV. As a young adult I hung out a lot with a bloke who was paraplegic. This gave me a much better idea about stuff like wheelchair access and some things like spasticity, but honestly, I have no idea how it was to live in his body and make a life after his accident. Similarly, I had no real idea how gruesome periods could be until one of my DDs was virtually passing out each month - and even so, I have to stitch together my experiences of the odd painful period and menopausal flooding to have any idea of what it was like.

Pregnancy and childbirth really alerted me to the fact that I am a female mammal and that there is no getting away from that. Sex can't be changed and I know this viscerally.

I just don't get the disconnect. Cannot understand it.

Good fences make good neighbours.

My experience of severe nausea and vommitting in pregnancy alerted me to the fact of being a woman. Also ivf and experiencing maternity discrimination in my male dominated industry. I've also played a lot of sport with men throughout my life. I am far better at racket sports than my partner but we have a really decent game together simply because of his advantage being a man. Any mixed league I've been in, I've languished at the bottom with the other ladies! The benefit being, I always get a good work out! I don't understand how people can have children and not recognise that females are different to males. Very odd.

For me I can pinpoint the moment when it hit me that gender ideology was nonsense, and that was when I was sat by my newborn's change table crying uncontrollably and the realisation of how much I hated every single thing about birth, breastfeeding and babycare, and that no way did I identify with this shit.