The Top 40

Shouldn't it be important for a boy to accept his own body as it is? Shouldn't it be important for a boy to like his own body? Shouldn't it be important for a boy to want to embrace the typical roles that boys and men embrace in their society?

I was in education for many years and our usual role as teachers of children (and professors working with university-age students) is to help them understand who they are and to learn to work effectively and enjoyably with others (as well as learning what is academically important). Children exhibit confusions of many sorts--they may mistake the alphabet letter "b" for "d" or misidentify words; they may assume whales are fish, rather than mammals. But we correct those mistakes. If a child is confused about clothing or behavior that relates to gender, why not simply correct that child's misconception?

Correcting a confusion in a child can take hours, days, even months or years. I think here how long it takes to teach a child to read or to learn to multiply numbers. Why not put the same amount of effort and time in to help a confused child learn his appropriate gender role? to learn to like his sexual self? to learn to rejoice in his own physical body and its usual way of being clothed in his particular society?

Because, Gloria, everything you describe is an effort to help the children. These parents are much better at putting themselves first, and they see this persecution they are inviting upon their children as a badge of pride for themselves. Their children are tools for personal advancement. Social shoe-horns.

Fortunately, very peculiar people tend to have very few children. This is a good thing. The bad thing is that they have a lot of time for politics.

It harms me not, what concern is it of mine? Or is the other trying to convince me that such things mean the end of reality as we know it?

The first message this poor kid is getting in life is, "Don't worry honey, just be who you are. We'll make the world adapt to you." And they can force a PC kindergarten to accommodate the boy. But they cannot change human nature. When he shows up to school in a dress, the boys will laugh at him, and the girls will pick on him. The teacher will be forced to browbeat the class into "tolerance" with endless anti-bullying rules regulating what the other kids can and cannot say, do, or think. The teasing will continue on the sly. The parents will threaten to take action. A victim, soon to be an activist is born.

JWM

Poor kid suffers from a certain missing something, and it isn't even his fault. His dad has no balls.

Likely trajectory: The kid commits suicide someday, possibly after shooting a bunch of his classmates or co-workers, depending on his age at the time he self-destructs, and the media will blame it one society at large and on Republicans in particular.

Mike James,

Good to see you here; we both posted on the C&S post that's linked. So I'll share my insights from that location, to wit:

These "parents" should be put in stocks in the public square. What they're doing is publicly pre-grooming their own son for pederasts, which inevitably will no doubt be blamed on the Catholic Church, Republicans, Sarah Palin etcetcetc.

Gender confusion, in this case unquestionably induced, WILL result in vulnerability to Sodomites. The Modern Couple here have offered their own flesh and blood on the altar of Political Correctness, for a brief period of notoriety among the notorious.

May God damn them to hell.

I hope I've made my feelings clear.

Parents too clueless and weak to tell their children "no." They (the parents) should be shamed by their peers. That nobody is keeping up the shaming anymore is what's wrong with our society. The kids suffer most, but we all suffer in the long-run. And the long-run has arrived.

No son of mine will ever do this.

Once my kids turn 18, they can do whatever they please, and if what they please is a sin, then to hell with them -- they are responsible for the disposition of their immortal souls.

Until then, however, I am responsible for their eternal destinies, and with that in mind I will enforce my own narrow personal morality upon them -- with a (figurative) mailed fist, if necessary.

Mike James - Demonstrably untrue. He's a father, after all.

I'd like to play devil's advocate here. I believe it was Isaac Asimov who brought this up. "So you want to be sure of the gender of a total stranger a block away. Why? What did you have in mind?"

Added to that the fact that conventions in dress are a social construct. Three examples: Scottish kilts; the fact that pink used to be a boy's colour until the early 1920's (at least); and the fact that the sarong is male attire in the areas where it's commonly worn (notably Sri Lanka).

What this kid needs to be taught is how to live in the closet. All the faux tolerance is just cruelty.

Fletch,

Asimov is a poor citation, having been most proud of being the head of the American Humanist Association, arrogant about his Mensa vice-presidency, and dying of HIV complications contracted during a (wink,wink) "blood transfusion."

But aside from that, and recognizing that I'm being hooked by a profoundly un-serious person, I'll just point out that all of the "social constructs" like wearing pink and kilts and pareus (not sarongs, please) were in societies where forcing boys to dress like a girl would have been frowned upon if not fatal.

Advancing your sophistry in a serious moral argument is not cute, English spellings or not.

A few times I have seen shows geared toward teens, and they all seemed to have obligatory bi or gay characters.

If someone wants to walk around backwards, cross dress or drink gray water, that's their choice.

When their proclivities get themselves injured or killed, forbid them succor via taxpayer dollars.

You make your own bed, if it happens to be the Procrustean model, tough.

If someone age 18 or over and paying their own bills wants to walk around backwards, cross dress or drink gray water, that's their choice

That's right. He's definitely got his b's and d's mixed up.

Out here in the Heartland, we'd smack that boys lilly-white ass and make him get his man clothes on before one of the girls saw him. If the girls out here saw his him dressed like that they'd kick the @#$! out of him and tell him man up.

And, don't start blabbering about animals doing that homo !@#$. Every farmer knows when bulls start humping each other, there something wrong with their feed/nutrition. Most likely, that's what's wrong with that lilly assed kid in NY.

And, what the hell is with you commentors? You sound as flaky as that kids parents. Your problem (and that kid's, too) is you need to get off your asses and go do some real man or woman's work. Do something productive until you sweat and you're tired. Good hard work leaves little tolerance for plain stupidity.

It is just a difference in methodology ... They're vegetarians and we're meat eaters.

WTF? Why don't the parents just find some rich pedophile who will pay them some real money to take the little queer off their hands. Win-Win. The kid finds his highest and best use, and the parents get a new car.

When will enough be enough. For the progressives it will never be enough until we all wear green dresses. I for one am part of 1/3 that will stand up for our constitution. Geoff C. Queen Anne.

When will enough be enough. For the progressives it will never be enough until we all wear green dresses. I for one am part of 1/3 that will stand up for our constitution. Geoff C. Queen Anne.

@Alan

"It harms me not yet. . ."

FIFY

Rob De Witt "Asimov...and dying of HIV complications contracted during a (wink,wink) 'blood transfusion'."

You got anything to back that up, Rob?

I've never heard anything in the sf community about Asimov being gay or bisexual--quite the opposite--and I've known a lot of professionals in the field.

Criticize his politics all you want, but don't pull "facts" out of your ass.

Asimov had triple-bypass surgery in 1983, with lots of blood transfusions from the then-contaminated New York blood supply. (Here's a big thank's-a-lot-moron to every gay sf writer who supported the culture of promiscuity.)

There is a significant segment of our society that thinks it should be a secured right to perform cultural experiments upon your own children, that is to say, you are perfectly within your rights to ignore the broad consensus of what is considered to be successful and moral child-rearing, and provide an environment for your children that pleases yourselves. This societal segment even goes so far as to equate exercise of your rights with moral behavior. I offer as proof, the latter-day vociferous defense of same-gender couples raising children.

The choice these days of what is allowed to be visited upon the child, and what is beyond the pale, seems arbitrary, and definitely not always grounded in the duty of every parent to provide for a child's fair head start to life's race.

Do be unsparing, though, in truthfully documenting the results of such alternative behavior. For we learn by examples. Stories of success, and stories of heart-wrenching tragedy, keep us on the straight and narrow.

Everybody starts out with a passel of problems. Some people just get jerks for parents. To be human is to rise above the mud and create beauty. The jerks will get to explain themselves to St. Peter, and I reckon that conversation won't go very well.

They should just tell the boy to wait until Halloween.

What's wrong with a boy wearing a dress? For one thing, it will make his ass look fat.

"We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any “value” higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end."

Christ and Nothing, by David Hart