Concentrating on the Essentials

Sweden has its share of problems — unassimilated Third World minorities, a skyrocketing rate of immigrant crime, demographic decline, and a sclerotic welfare state, just to name a few — but it’s heartening to find out that some Swedes are concentrating on truly important issues:

Swedish Parents Keep 2-Year-Old’s Gender Secret

Meet Pop, a two-and-a-half-year-old Swedish child whose parents are refusing to say whether the apple of their eye is a boy or a girl.

Pop’s parents, both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few — those who have changed the child’s diaper — nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.

Well, this is a nice little social experiment. We’ll find out if the feminist theorists are right.

Can you imagine using your own kid as a guinea pig to test radical sociopolitical doctrine on? If it turns out that Betty Friedan’s ideology is flawed, the child’s life may be ruined. But you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs…

The article continues:
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“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It’s cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

The child’s parents said so long as they keep Pop’s gender a secret, he or she will be able to avoid preconceived notions of how people should be treated if male or female.

Pop’s wardrobe includes everything from dresses to trousers and Pop’s hairstyle changes on a regular basis. And Pop usually decides how Pop is going to dress on a given morning.

Although Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl, Pop’s parents never use personal pronouns when referring to the child — they just say Pop.

“I believe that the self-confidence and personality that Pop has shaped will remain for a lifetime,” said Pop’s mother.

But what if you’re wrong?

You assume that your ideological enlightenment has rendered your judgment superior to the accumulated experience of thousands of generations of human beings, not to mention millions of years of biological evolution that have hard-wired certain attributes into the neuronal programming of the human brain.

You think you can just wish away all these millennia of human culture and biology with a single triumphant gesture of political self-righteousness. But what if you can’t?

The Local had to go all the way to Canada to find a voice of sanity:

But while Pop’s parents say they have received supportive feedback from many of their peers, not everyone agrees that their chosen course of action will have a positive outcome.

“Ignoring children’s natures simply doesn’t work,” says Susan Pinker, a psychologist and newspaper columnist from Toronto, Canada, who wrote the book The Sexual Paradox, which focuses on sex differences in the workplace.

“Child-rearing should not be about providing an opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child’s needs as an individual,” Pinker tells The Local.

“It’s unlikely that they’ll be able to keep this a secret for long. Children are curious about their own identity, and are likely to gravitate towards others of the same sex during free play time in early childhood.”

Pinker says there are many ways that males and females differ from birth; even if gender is kept ‘secret,’ prenatal hormones developed in the second trimester of pregnancy already alter the way the child behaves and feels.

She says once children can speak, males tell aggressive stories 87 per cent of the time, while females only 17 per cent. In a study, children aged two to four were given a task to work together for a reward, and boys used physical tactics 50 times more than girls, she says.

But Sweden has “gender equality consultants”, and they are experts on the reprogramming of children for the purpose of modifying the gender-norming process. Notice, however, that this one feels compelled to qualify her support for the situation:

But Swedish gender equality consultant Kristina Henkel says Pop’s parents’ experiment might have positive results.

The experiment might have positive results. The child might not be psychologically damaged. Pop might grow into a healthy adult.

But then again, he/she/it might not.

So why do it at all? To generate discussion!

“If the parents are doing this because they want to create a discussion with other adults about why gender is important, then I think they can make a point of it,” Henkel says in a telephone interview with The Local.

If you can bear it, there’s more, much more, in the original article. Some of it is critical, but most of the common-sense criticism has to be imported from Canada.

This is a malignant case of narcissism expressing itself as child abuse: a willingness to sacrifice the well-being of one’s own child for the sake of ideological purity.

Decades from now, when they are in their old age and Sweden is living out its multicultural Ragnarök, Pop’s parents can say to themselves:

“OK, so Sweden as a nation has ceased to exist. So we’re surrounded by crime, poverty, and degradation. So our child grew up into a neurotic basket case.

“But at least we refused the oppression of socially-constructed gender attributes!”

That will no doubt be a great comfort to them.