The Antisocial Socialist

This post goes out to the wonderful kore_on_lj. All the hugs, bb. I hope some of this makes you smile.

( In which I review the worst episode yet! And two others that aren't as bad )

A lot of people seem to be all "lol hippie" or, worse, insistent on the idea that these parents, who refuse to disclose the biological sex of their infant, are abusing it.

Standard disclaimer applies: I am not a parent, do not ever wish to be a parent, and a large part of the reason why is that whatever you do as a parent (okay, whatever you do as a mother; let's be realistic here) is held up for scrutiny by others.

But I really don't see what's all that bad about this, besides the unfortunate choice of "Storm" for the baby's name. The main objection seems to be: "They are conducting a social experiment on the child." All parenting is social experimentation. In terms of gender, most of us are the control subjects, but that doesn't make our development any less constructed. All of you outliers who, like me, were biologically female but refused to play with dolls and would rather pretend to be astronauts than domestic servants, know what I'm talking about. It's proven that adults react differently to children coded as girls than they do to children coded as boys—I'm genuinely interested to see the results of this particular experiment.

Certainly, they are forcing a certain ideology on their children. Like every other parent in the world. Children are raised to believe in religion, or to not, to have a certain political leaning, or to think that politics is dull and boring. I was raised protesting "war toys." Given my gleeful experiences playing 80s video games and target shooting at UofT, this bit of indoctrination obviously didn't stick (sorry, Mom). Other bits—the anti-war and anti-Free Trade Agreement marches–clearly did.

Is the parenting in the Witterick/Stocker family abuse? I think not. They're providing a stable, loving home for their child. Unlike these shitty parents, they're not financially screwing their child or telling it that it's going to hell. Yes, the kids will probably turn out to be socially awkward on account of being homeschooled by hippies, but I went to public school, and I turned out socially awkward anyway. I was coded as female from birth and still got horribly bullied. Most of us do.

Last night I was at a party, and the hosts had a bunch of pets, including a bunny, a cat, several toads, some anoles, and a gigantic salamander. With the mammals, of course, it was quite easy to determine gender. With the reptiles and amphibians, less so. The gigantic salamander was named "Smith." I found myself immediately coding it as male (I also tend to code dogs as male and cats as female until I'm told otherwise), and uttering the less-than-coherent: "AWWW he's so CUTE! Or...she?" To which the hosts replied: "We don't know actually. It's a freakin' salamander. We call it Smith." Everyone there just accepted this and moved on to discussions of what neat things it did and what it ate and how it was covered in mucus, despite the inherent awkwardness of referring to a living creature as "it."

We as a culture just aren't comfortable doing this with children, despite the fact that a small baby is just as gender ambiguous as a salamander. We feel distinctly creeped out if it's not immediately obvious that the little lumpish alien-shaped thing has one of two genders. "Is it a boy or a girl?" is the first question we ask expectant parents. (Not me—I ask what they're naming the sprog, because that's more interesting.) Anyone who argues that children instinctively gravitate towards the performance of one gender is being entirely stupid—if a child is told by strangers that she is "pretty" and "sweet," she will probably gravitate towards toys that are coded as "pretty" and "sweet."

This is our hang-up, though, and it's, in itself, as much of a form of abuse as what Witterick and Stocker are doing. Just ask any little boy who's been picked on for gravitating towards "girl" things. The difference is that it's routine, and it's outsourced to the culture rather than the family, but it's no less inherently destructive if one's gender does not turn out to match one's coding. So while the parenting of little Storm seems weird and artificial, it's no less weird and artificial than what "normal" parents and their communities inflict on children. If we can't deal with a freshly-made human wearing green or red or orange, the problem lies with us, not with the child or its parents. It comes down to us, as a culture, not knowing how to relate to people as people without the convenience of gender shorthands.

I wonder if the "ZOMG CHILD ABUSE" reaction would be the same if the parents had, say, refused to disclose the child's ethnicity.

Boo on the Star for outing the child's gender in the photo caption, by the way. Are there no editors?

So yeah. I am on antibiotics and can't drink. On St. Patrick's Day.

If you are drinking tonight, have a pint for me.

---

In other news, there was an anti-war demo today that sucked even for an anti-war demo. The Humanist people organized some sort of human peace symbol but I missed it, and another dork went around writing peace symbols on Sick Kids Hospital like he was some kind of genuine subversive. I want to take a peace symbol and ram it up some hippie's arse.

The whole experience was redeemed by the dude in the Guy Fawkes mask who went around tipping his hat to everyone. Cheers, mate.

Apparently, we're all a bunch of Maoists. Digital Maoists. According to Some Guy, subsuming one's identity into an electronically aggregated mass is akin to Mao's China.

Go read this article. It's sillier than all those people claiming that the interwebs would bring us grassroots democracy and maybe ANARCHY. It's wonderful because it combines so many of my interests—crypto-Maoism, old media-types who fear and mistrust teh intarwebs, and a prime opportunity for Boomer*-bashing—all in less than 500 words. Some choice bits:

Now Lanier has taken on another role: dyspeptic critic of the surging trend of digital collectivism, an ethic that celebrates and exploits the ability of the Web to aggregate the preferences and behaviors of millions of people.

Yes, the intarwebs are just one big collective. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. That's why everyone on the internet now likes furry pr0n.

IM IN UR INTERNETZ

COLLECTIVIZIN UR TUBEZ

In a recent essay posted on the Web site Edge.org, Lanier disparages the recent spate of efforts that rely on conscious collaboration (like the anyone-can-participate online reference work Wikipedia) or passive polling (the so-called meta sites like Digg, which draw on user response to rank news articles and blog postings). To Lanier these represent a rejection of individual expression and creativity.

If you collaborate with other people in a cooperative manner, the terrorists communists win! He's also against open-source software, if you were wondering.

But my favourite bit is this:

If you look at the history of youth cultural movements, they tend to go one of two ways," he explains. "One is in the direction of individual expression and creativity; the best example is the '60s. The other way is to lose themselves in the collective, binding themselves into a gang—as in the Cultural Revolution.

My generation's mindless trend-following is better than your generation's! Because we smoked marijuana! And grew our hair long! We were such rebels. Our generation changed the world forever, which is why it was back to lock-step conformity once we all sold out, bought SUVs, and those annoying Gen Xers came along with their world-weary cynicism and OMG short hair.

Hat-tip to rohmie, who knew this would make my day.

* No, I don't mean you.

Oh for fuck's sake. I hope these people and most of these people aren't trying to call themselves feminists, at least. Because they're sadly deluded if they're determining who's a woman and who isn't by what bits someone was born with.

I could go on about these privileged, self-congratulatory hippies and how disgusted they make me. Or why this is ridiculous and arbitrary. springheel_jack covered that more eloquently than I could.

I ask, instead, for anyone who thinks that this is perfectly groovy to ask themselves the following:

• Who else talks about gender and sexuality in terms of "natural" and "unnatural"?
• Who else likes to define people on the basis of genitalia?
• Who else is freakishly obsessed with other people's uteri?

Yeah, that's right, you bigoted nutjobs. Your ideological allies are the Christian Taliban. Put that in your clay pipe and smoke it.

CUTE WARNING!

Below this cut are pictures of kitties, puppies, rainbows, and hippies. Your head may explode from cute.

No, I'm not kidding.

( Don't say I didn't warn you! )

...was more fun than it's been in a long, long time. I think I'm now the subject of many rumours on the Toronto Left. Go me!

However, my deep, dark secret was revealed...

(Gaybortion!)

Later, I will try to post the pictures that someone took of me dancing with a 70-something-year-old tattooed, naked guy. If the photographer obliges and e-mails them to me. A good night was had by all.