Anonymous asked: Heyyy I hear you're planning to not be the kind of asshole who mutilates an intersex baby for your convenience! I've forgotten the right url to link you to, but did you know currently adult intersex people generally think you should assign a gender socially (but be willing to be wrong) without doing anything surgical? Skyler's still a good name but you probably want to go with "he" or "she" until Skyler can express a preference.
I didn’t know that! Does it make a difference that there are several nonbinary people in my social circle and a Skyler (…although I’m tempted to bump Skyler to the middle name slot and use Raziel as a first name since it seems ambiguously gendered) would have people using alternating and gender-neutral pronouns available as role models?
As a non-binary trans person I feel a strong need to counter this with a plea to not socially gender children (at least intersex ones) unless/before they personally express a desire for it, if one is able to get away with it without suffering stigma, and homeschooling in the rationalist community seems to be pretty much the place one would be able to get away with it. Please please do consider the fact that those people are older and from what’s effectively a completely different culture and their suggested coping strategies might not be optimal for Raziel’s flourishing in better environments.
Latest studies suggest almost 1% of the population are trans and something like 5% have some kind of gender issues, that number seems to be just growing bigger every time, and intersex children are especially disproportionately likely to end up something else than people presumed. If being systematically scorned for doing something unusual is taken out of the picture, I’m having a really hard time imagining what would be the benefits of gendering children instead of just letting them be whatever they are and express themselves however they do. Children are not …close-minded adults, and the mythical gender confusion arising from not given a ready-made set of priors is really just mythology perpetuated by adults who feel invested in not having their conceptualizations challenged. It’s kind of pascaly in the “1% this saves your children from a lot of disutility and otherwise doesn’t do much unless the people arond you decide to punish you for it” aspect and I’m biased as a gendering survivor (my self-conceptualization was dramatically impaired for years if not decades by it but thanks to pure unfair luck it didn’t cause much lasting harm, as I was mostly able to keep my hardware in the neotenic androgyny my firmware is compatible with, even with the delay in access to modification having been raised in a binary-gendering environment caused) but I seriously think gendering children is likely to err on the side of defaulting to status quo biases and the alternatives haven’t been explored enough.
4 months ago · tagged #parenting cw #dysphoria cw · 10 notes · source: luminousalicorn · .permalink
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