Denying children a gender is just cruel
AS FAR as I’m concerned, once you’re an adult you can do what you like with your body. Dye your hair green, cover yourself in tattoos, stick a ring through your nose and declare yourself a transgender alien. The choice is yours. What you cannot do, however, is impose your choices on others. Especially children. This week, an eight-month-old Canadian became the first person to be registered ‘gender unknown’ on its health card. According to the parent — a non-binary trans person called Kori Doty — this is because they are going to wait until the infant has developed the ‘sense of self and command of vocabulary to tell me who they are’. Tip: check their nappy. Seriously, though, how could anyone be so selfish — not to mention stupid — as to think this a good idea. Small children don’t like choices: they thrive on certainty. Dare I say it, binary concepts: good, bad, big, small, happy, sad. Boy, girl. Simple, clear ideas that make them feel safe in a scary world. If you cannot understand this, then you’re probably not ready to be a parent. What makes this situation even more heartbreaking is that in claiming to offer a life ‘outside of the restrictions that come with the boy box and the girl box’, this parent is not ‘liberating’ their child but simply subjecting it to an equally oppressive — albeit cranky — set of restrictions. Namely, theirs.