Good US article - The Real Risks of Gender Education; On creating fragile children

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/the-real-risks-of-gender-education

Thought-provoking. I like the phrase 'snowplow parents' - ... parents believe their job is to clear obstacles out of their children’s way rather than to equip them with the skills to navigate those obstacles. We are terrified of our children’s suffering and teach them to be terrified of it, too.

This is a key point:

I don’t believe that our current gender revolution has created more space for these naturally gender-nonconforming children. While some advocates of gender-affirming medicine and gender-identity ideology insist they are saving the lives of vulnerable children, in practice much of what’s taught to kids today about gender—especially the conflation of gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—suggests to masculine girls and feminine boys that they need to “fix” themselves through medical or psychological interventions that have some irreversible effects, without guaranteed benefits.

One thing that strikes me - I often see US people talking about butch lesbians being challenged in restrooms, and it's mentioned here. The author of this piece also says her young daughter is simply not recognised as female because she has short hair. I find this very alien. Are we a bit more tolerant and less rigid over here?

I often see US people talking about butch lesbians being challenged in restrooms, and it's mentioned here. The author of this piece also says her young daughter is simply not recognised as female because she has short hair. I find this very alien. Are we a bit more tolerant and less rigid over here?

I doubt the veracity of most of the claims that are made on MN that resemble this. I haven't seen the US stories about this so I don't know why such challenges or mis-identifications would be more frequent or if it just seems that way because it's a larger population but a tiny % of a big population is a big number, IYSWIM.

I am not in the US but Canada. I have seen girls with short hair mistaken for boys on occasion in recent years. I think it's largely because short hair has been somewhat less common on girls, and maybe more so, that the hair styles a lot of the girls wear are quite similar to the boys too. (Which wasn't so much the case with the short hair styles girls had when I was a kid.)These girls also seemed to be dressed in ways that didn't make it clear one way or the other.

I've never seen anyone challenged in a bathroom, but then Canadians tend not to speak up about such things, whereas Americans seem more forthright.

Good article. Thanks for sharing. I am a bit confused about people feeling uncomfortable when corrected regarding a child's gender - it doesn't seem to happen where I am. My son often gets mistaken for a girl because he has long hair, usually at football, and when I say he's a boy they don't seem upset. Maybe we are more accepting of gender non conformance in the UK?

Interview with the author here :

Maybe it's the era I grew up in (70s & 80s UK) - in the mid 80s it was common for girls to have shorter hair styles similar to the boys, and my brothers and I dressed pretty much the same a lot of the time as young teens.

That's what I was wondering. I can see it could be confusing with pre-pubescent children, but I really can't understand how anybody could mistake an adult woman for a man, even if she did have short hair, no make-up, gender neutral clothes (e.g. t-shirt and jeans) and flat shoes. Gait is unmistakeable, especially in combination with voice, height, width of hips and shoulders, and the things we scarcely notice consciously, like size of hands and feet relative to the body, presence or absence of Adam's apple, bone structure of face, receding hairline, hair on face and body.