Reading this article about a Swedish preschool trying to eliminate any mention of gender resulted in more than a few eye-rolls from me. In fact, I found it so ridiculous, it inspired this week’s Top Ten Tuesday post. Please take a moment to read the article first.
Top Ten reasons this makes me crazy…
1. This should be obvious, but I guess it isn’t anymore: boys and girls are different. As a little boy I used to babysit would tell me when I changed his sister’s diaper, “Boys have a wiener and girls have a vajama!” LOL
2. Along with the weiner and vajama, countless hormonal differences exist between males and females. Deciding that we should pretend these differences don’t exist is delusional—and damaging!
3. Can’t these people see that they, too, are guilty of the very thing they’re supposedly rejecting? They’re just pushing kids to fit a different kind of gender identity…one that they decided was better. More of that “we’re open-minded as long as you believe what we believe” garbage mentality that sadly saturates today’s culture.
4. Why is it so hard to understand that even though boys and girls are different, that doesn’t mean that all boys are the same or that all girls are alike? Isn’t that obvious? Let each individual be who they were created to be, for Pete’s sake!
5. No matter how much someone wants to pretend this isn’t true, it is: most boys will gravitate toward cars, weapons, balls, etc. while most girls will gravitate toward dolls, kitchens, etc. when left to their own devices. Even when they are barely out of infancy.
6. There is nothing wrong with #5! There was also nothing wrong with my little sister asking for a football uniform for Christmas when she was in kindergarten, or her preferring soccer to Barbies.
7. This baloney that we all need to just homogenize into one big bowl of tasteless, uniform nothingness is so absurd, I struggle to find words for it.
8. On the school’s policy of calling everyone “friends”: Suppose I give you an orange and a banana. I say that from now on, we’re no longer calling them oranges and bananas, but simply fruit. Though they are colored and shaped completely differently, with totally different flavors and textures, though one can be juiced and the other cannot, you can no longer prefer one to the other. It’s all fruit. It’s all good. We’ll just pretend they are the same. WHAT is the logic in that?
9. I love being a girl. I’ve always loved being a girl. I’ve never wanted to be a boy or do anything boyish, aside from what my sons have encouraged me to do with them, like playing with cars or building Bionicles. I would never feel drawn to do those things on my own. Never have. So if the little-girl me was a student in that school, I would be receiving the message that liking myself for how I was created was wrong.
10. Fighting so hard against nature must feel like a slap in the face to God.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
-Psalm 139:14
I just wish that more people knew that full well.
You know, I saw a blog post about that school and was also disturbed by it. Why anyone would want to raise children in a vaccuum when those children will eventually grow up live in the world which will likely not be kind to people raised to be genderless.
Crazy people.
And science has shown that male and female fetuses are exposed to different hormones in utero. Guess what that means! Yes, indeedy, it means that girls’ and boys’ brains really are different. Not necessarily better or worse, but different. Why is that such a bad thing?
Bravo! Kari, you are so on the mark with this one.