Coercively assigning sex roles
I was coercively assigned a sex role at birth. As soon as medical personnel saw that I didn’t have a penis, the process of putting me and keeping me in a very narrowly-defined box began. From then on I was coercively stopped from doing or being things associated with boys and coerced into doing and being things associated with girls. I fought many bitter, painful battles over years of being forced into that box. A handful of those battles I won; most I lost, because the full power of adults was brought to bear to keep me in my proper sex role.
It’s intensely frustrating that in the intervening years experiences like this have continued for girls and boys. But worse, rather than meaningful progress toward simply allowing children to live their lives outside of any box, there is now a very powerful movement that claims that forcing children into the other restrictive sex role box is the solution. The problem, these people claim, is not that the person was coercively assigned a sex role at all, it’s that they were coercively assigned the incorrect sex role, and that (of course!) can be fixed by adopting the other sex role.
It should be obvious on the face that this is a completely false solution that could only have been created by people who don’t have the best interests of children in mind. Rather than finding ways of accepting and nurturing children who don’t conform to sex roles, society has significantly increased the sex role pressure.
A girl who simply wants to play football, build robots, and wear jeans and t-shirts will still be under constant pressure to adopt the proper sex role attire and behaviors for females. That’s bad enough, but in addition to that, she will be derided and bullied by other children for being “gay” (regardless of her actual sexual orientation) and pressured by adults to consider herself a “transgendered” person who needs drugs, intensive psychotherapy, and other medical intervention to fit her into the other socially-approved sex role.
No sooner have we made very small incremental progress against homophobic bullying than adults – in the service of their own fears and cowardice — find another way to coerce these children into boxes. And in ways that do even more long term damage.
It’s obvious that those children need us to advocate for them. Sex roles are not only anachronistic, but uniquely harmful to individuals and society and we must find ways to stop adults from forcing children into them.
‘Transing’ children is certainly child abuse, and I’m appalled that so many who consider themselves radical are not opposing this practice. This essentialising of gender functions to set up kids deemed ‘trans’ on a precarious life path involving the distressing inability to deal with accurate social recognition of one’s sex, and possible longterm intake of poisonous hormones, if not serious surgery as well. And, as you so accurately point out, it also sets up a greater number of children, those who don’t have the ‘trans’ identity thrust upon them, to be harmed by the belief in sex-role stereotypes – stereotypes for children which have markedly increased over the last few decades. It is profoundly anti-female.
Thank you for pointing out that gender – the socially-enforced sex roles – *is* coercive. In fact, that which is individually desired or felt, while not being socially enforced, is not in fact *gender*.
As a preschool teacher with 100+ satisfied customers over 8 years, there was one 3 year old Korean adoptee who refused to speak, but he would don dress up clothes and I’d play records while the children “did their work” or had open free time. I would play Tchaikovsky and this tiny silent boy would nobly lift his chin, and then his arms and dance in front of the mirror for the entire LP (the old days, but I kept record player a long time as I had a lot of vinyl). This beautiful dancer was ridiculed by his parents when they picked him up if he was wearing a skirt. They demanded that I prevent him from wearing dress up clothes (ie skirts) which he preferred. I begged them, I told them how happy he was to dress up and dance, and I literally went out on a line and asked them please, could he dress up only while at school? They relented, as long as he was dressed in his civilian boy clothes when they came to pick him up. I also begged them to consider dance for him, as they’d provided for his two older also-adopted Korean born sisters.
Over the years this boy did play soccer and was a pretty happy kid, and I never saw him in public in female clothes. But, my daughter was a grade or two above and she reported that he was out and gay, a very happy and out, lovely young man. And, he danced in the local ballet company.
The thought of “transing” this young spirit grieves me. And, these were “liberal” parents….but they thought that the 3-5 year old age was some sort of testing ground for gender roles and that parents should helpl a child fit into the right one. And, these were educated people. It is just so dang hard to be a parent. But, I think they relented enough so that their son had outlets for his true spirit, it wasn’t stamped out.
This boy didn’t want the hair and makeup thing, it was really just wearing costumes and dancing, expressing his body through dance. And, yes, he became a very lovely gay young man.
I’ve been talking to “civilians” who know nothing of the trans issues, and most people take a long learning curve to understand why there isn’t instant SNAP obedience to “what the boy thinks in his head is his sex”….and, there is something so knee-jerk liberal about standing up for LGBTQ that questioning some of the current faux trans logic takes a while to get through to them.
Keep up the good work revealing the coercing of rigid, binary sex roles on behalf of all of us.
Thank you for continuing the discussion, liberationislife. This is an excellent point: “In fact, that which is individually desired or felt, while not being socially enforced, is not in fact *gender*.” Exactly, they’re mutually exclusive. You can’t “freely choose” something that is socially/culturally coerced. Since gender *is* socially/culturally coerced, it can’t be freely chosen. Conversely, simply desiring or feeling something that doesn’t fit into a socially-approved box couldn’t, by definition, be related to “gender” (e.g., “gender identity”).
We have to just keep saying these things over and over until the light bulb goes on for more and more people. The other side has done such an excellent job of propagandizing and butchering words and meanings, we have our work cut out for us.
That’s a great story, survivorthriver, thank you for sharing that. It’s such a good illustration of the difference between the natural unselfconsciousness of children and the fears adults have. And of course, adults have learned those fears over their own lifetimes of experiencing what happens when people step out of boundaries, color outside the lines, stand out in the crowd, etc. (We have so many terms, metaphors, and analogies for this experience, it’s obviously a source of great tension and drama for humans.)
I’m so glad you found a way to talk to those parents, to reach them. That is exactly what we have to do, but it’s hard to push against the entire cultural training we all get. I know that one step has to be compassion for the parents; their fears are based in reality. My mother’s fears for me were based in knowing exactly what was coming down the road, headed directly at me, and she was naturally afraid for me and wanted to protect me. And she was right in that way. But in the face of that, rather than get the kid back in the lines, we have to find other ways of cultivating the strength and resilience in children who are different so they can continue to be something other than the scripted actors of pre-approved roles.
What you said here is especially important for us to think about:
“And, these were “liberal” parents….but they thought that the 3-5 year old age was some sort of testing ground for gender roles and that parents should helpl a child fit into the right one. And, these were educated people. [...] I’ve been talking to “civilians” who know nothing of the trans issues, and most people take a long learning curve to understand why there isn’t instant SNAP obedience to “what the boy thinks in his head is his sex”….and, there is something so knee-jerk liberal about standing up for LGBTQ that questioning some of the current faux trans logic takes a while to get through to them.”
The liberal enterprise to accept everything and anything people claim to be “choosing” is yet again falling the hardest on girls and women. The boy in the news lately is “choosing” a sex role stereotype foisted on him by adults. In some ways, that sex role stereotype is his to play with as long as it feels good. And that is exactly what liberals are responding to: Why can’t this child just do what feels good? We know that’s a completely false question, but it’s very hard to get that across in a simple sound bite. As you say, it’s a very long learning curve to really get that that is a false question.
And finally, you said this, which really sums up why we have to keep working on this issue:
“The thought of “transing” this young spirit grieves me.”
Exactly.
“rather than get the kid back in the lines, we have to find other ways of cultivating the strength and resilience in children who are different so they can continue to be something other than the scripted actors”
That’s it in a nutshell.
The Korean boy and our family lived in a very liberal community, a rich rural suburb off a metropolitan city. I mean, this is the bastion of liberal values.
Not many South Koreans adopt out their boys, mostly the adoptees allowed to go to the U.S. are girls. Right, I mean, any of you know differently? As a third child of this adoptive family, they did not receive the boy until after he wasa two years old. I always wondered if they had gaydar and even then thought him non-agressive or something? Anyway, he came so late in his life that to have further traumatized him by denying him his costumes seemed cruel.
That was what I finally had the parents language about their son, that he was very creative and costumes are an accepted part of some parts of our life like drama and dance….and, this is a close knit community so he had a lot of parents support and the community sports and its a very artsy fartsy community annd very very liberal. A lot of lesbians btw with families now!
Anyway, I had one other example, a girl.
This wild child was evaluated and later drugged for ADD. But, inmy preschool she was bold, physical and impulsive. She had a genius for loving physical activity and exploration. She loved story time, and did play dolls with other girls, but she was restless. She was described as “hyperactive” when she justs did not have one whit of interest in quiet activities. And, she was rebellious and did not care for her physical appearance. She loved tousled and dirty hair, loved rolling on grass, crawling through under-cover of shrubbery….and she didn’t perform submission very well for her parents. She ultimately made it through the school system, and was drugged for whatever personality diagnosis they made up about her.
i wonder what the mood drugs did to this girl? i wonder how they dumbed her down. She’s quite a flamboyant teen dresser, not feminine, bold and diffferent.
I believe that the trans of children question is nestled under a superordinate evil – Big Pharma. They are drugging the bat shit out of our kids! Trans is only the latest and most profitable way for profit for drugging our kids for “diagnoses” in the new DSM-V.
Transing, thanks to Big Pharma nad Frankendokters is the profit goal of sold-out psychiatry’s night mare wet dream now unleashed on the class of persons – children – overall.
Mood drugs for children is child abuse in some if not all cases. All kinds of psychiatric abuse and institutionalized child abuse should be eliminated.
This girl wasa gender non-conformant, and they drugged her for being boisterous and rebellious. I think it was a gender function that got her drugged up.
This is heart-breaking. Years ago, teaching children in Thailand, one bright but over-anxious little boy was always being taken out of class by his (high achieving, very Westernised, professional) parents. They were taking him to psychiatrists to have him ‘evaluated’ for transgenderism. I asked what made them suspect he might be in the ‘wrong’ gender.
Apparently in playschool he had been lifting up the girls’ skirts to look at their knickers.
Which somehow suggested to them he might be ‘really’ a girl.
He was five.