Storm

[quarrel]

You may have heard the news about a couple keeping their newborn baby’s gender a secret to all but immediate family members. Several of my friends have Tweeted (or the equivalent) about it, entirely in a positive light. Yesterday, my brother-in-law waxed eloquent about it on Facebook. He and his friends were universally disparaging and mostly hostile toward this, to paraphrase, "wacko left-wing bullshit".

I shouldn’t be too surprised. He and my sister are quite conservative. They were against sending their own daughters to school to be forcibly subjected to Obama’s potential socialist indoctrination speech back in September 2009. They think the only people who object to TSA body scans & patdowns are selfish assholes who’d rather see hundreds of innocent people die to terrorist bombs if it means they get through security thirty seconds faster themselves. But I want to know if there’s an actual reason they think this child-raising plan won’t work besides “It’s obvious why not. What’s wrong with you?”, so I decided to risk getting banned from yet another internet forum and ask.

I haven’t gotten a direct response yet. The coherent replies in the thread revolve around the idea that The Goal (protect the child’s gender identity development from harmful societal pressure) can be achieved without The Plan (hide the child’s gender from other people); that The Goal cannot be achieved with The Plan because The Plan cannot be sustained long enough to matter; that The Plan is, in fact, counterproductive to The Goal because it will attract more focus than normal to the child’s gender; and that The Plan has the significant drawback of pissing everyone off. Basically, it’s all downside and no upside. Other, less-useful posts thought the parents were trying to hide the kid’s gender from itself or criticized the parents’ entire nigh-disciplineless child-rearing approach.

We’ll see if anything good comes out of it. The best outcome I can reasonably expect is to be told I can’t possibly understand since I don’t have kids.