Irish politician raising baby gender neutral with 'they' pronouns

[Jumpersaurus]

This guy loves publicity but this is just beyond farcical.

"The role that they will perceive for themselves, the type of play that they will perceive for themselves by saying ‘you’re a boy or you’re a girl’. Just let them decide for themselves.
“You want to dress in pink? Fire ahead. You want to dress in blue? Fire ahead. You want to play football? Brilliant. You want to go dancing? Amazing... it’s just not to limit."

He's so close to catching on how ridiculous gender stereotypes are, so so close.

"Obviously, the vast majority of parents do gender their child and I’ve no criticism of that whatsoever, no judgment. But it is true that if you put the label, boy or girl on your child, you definitely increase the chances of them going down one road or another.”

Glad he isn't criticising the rest of us who are 'gendering' our children, whatever that means! Who knew the words we use to denote young humans were just labels 🤷‍♀️

www.independent.ie/news/td-paul-murphy-on-raising-new-baby-gender-neutral-were-describing-juniper-as-a-baby-but-it-is-male-42385502.html

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.

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

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!

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.

😂

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.

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.

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.

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.

Puts me in mind of this horrible read.

pitt.substack.com/p/true-believer

Brilliant 😂😂😂😂

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.

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.

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

The Burkes are Pentecostalists afaik?

As for the name Juniper , I actually quite like it. Not sure it works in Tallaght mind you.

Florence is a boys name in Cork and Kerry in certain families. It's all very culture bound? Being a boy Florence is Dublin or Belfast would be hellish.

I rolled my eyes so hard at this I nearly fell out of bed this morning. Such idiocy.

Whatever they's gender, children remain the property of the father, I presume.

Silly man.

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.

**

The thing is, this sounds daft and a bit harmless, but I think it's going to be very confusing for a child.

'“Obviously, the vast majority of parents do gender their child and I’ve no criticism of that whatsoever, no judgment. But it is true that if you put the label, boy or girl on your child, you definitely increase the chances of them going down one road or another.”'

Your child is irrevocably on one road or the other; they will never change sex. Sex isn't a 'label', that would be gender, and it's not a label so much as a set of stereotypes, traditions and expectations. Their pronouns refer to their sex.

If you want to express this in genderwaffle: Your child is born into a highly gendered world, rightly or wrongly. How will they feel to hear virtually everyone else around them referred to by their sex, with 'he' or 'she', yet with them being 'they'?

I'd suggest they will feel confused, and othered, and out of step.

A pattern I've noticed over and over again, and now because someone I know is bringing up a girl "gender neutral "
If the child is a boy, GN seems to mean pink and sparkly and barbie
If the child is a girl, it seems dungarees and footballs are the toys required.
I bought my friend a pretty dress for her girl, girl noticeably wants to wear it, it's pretty and frilly and definitely not jeans or dungarees, not allowed, cant wear it right now cos getting dirty in the garden, would ruin dress. Never seen that dress again.

I do think that when these children get older a fair few will rebel. It just seems so mean to do this to a child. Let them be children. If that means a girl wants to wear jeans and boots and dungarees and nary a dress in sight (me as a child) then fine, still a girl. If a boy wants to do ballet fine, still a boy.

Ffs

Actually I think if there was a politer version of 'it' that we could call everyone until we knew their sex, it would be better. A bit like how letter start with Dear Sirs, but gender neutral. That would be better than using them and they and save all the pronoun hokey-cokey.

'When a lot of people ask is it a boy or a girl, really, they mean, is it male or female?'

Yes, mate. that's exactly what they mean.

Yes, this.
To use the terminology of the Cass report, I don't think this is a neutral act by Juniper's parents.

I noticed the father uses male and female to mean biological sex, but boy or girl exclusively to mean gender. I know we've had the same with 'woman', but I hadn't seen this redefinition of language applied to babies before.

When a lot of people ask is it a boy or a girl, really, they mean, is it male or female?”

kids are evolved to notice signals and assess them and go through various phases of embracing, rejecting, playing with and accommodating the ideas they see around them, in the media, from peers, from family, general society.

Possibly the best way of dealing with it, as a parent raising kids, is just not taking it all so bloody seriously. Other than the fact of their sex, most of it is not all that important.