gender contortions

My buddy Scott posted some thoughts in response to NPR's "The End of Gender?".  I was working on a response in the comment box, and realized it got waaaay to long, and decided to write a follow up post (hint: read Scott's post first, it's way better).

Great thoughts, Scott.

I also found NPR's implicit argument in this article to be quite interesting--why does Leonard Sax have an after-thought-sidebar rather than an actual place in the article itself?  Before I address some of the ideas Weeks brings up, I'd like to look at some other comments from the original article.

Dean Spade, the assistant professer at SU School of Law wants to do away with much if not most gender distinctions, yet insists that we hold on to gender distinction in cases of gender-based affirmative action programs. A great thought, but how does it play out practically?  Say Corporation X needs to make a female hire but the best woman for the job identifies as a male?  What if there's a man that identifies as a female in the running?  If gender is meaningless then the job should go to the man-who-identifies-as-a-woman, leaving any serious discussion of gender-based affirmative action left alone in a single-sex bathroom.

It seems that (Mr.? Mrs.? Ms.? Nr?) Spade is running around the kitchen smeared in frosting and cake crums wondering where the hell the cake ran off to.

Professor Eliot posits toward the end,

Also, if parents did not buy into the gender stereotyping of children's toys and clothes, kids would stay open-minded longer during childhood. The goal is to keep girls physically active, curious and assertive, and boys sensitive, verbal and studious.

To me, this sort of bare statement posing as fact brings a whole slew of questions (I'll try to limit them):

1. Is this the goal? The goal of which group, broader society, or the gender-neutral community?

2. If it is the goal, why must an attempt at achieving this outcome be expressed through gender-neutrality rather than say, practices of general human flourishing?

3. Given this statement, I'm left wondering, what sort of narrow ideas about gender does Eliot hold?  If girls are acting like girls they won't be physically active, curious, or assertive?  If boys are acting like boys they'll run around acting like neanderthal cavemen? 

Thank God that when it came to racial stereotypes President Obama had the foresight to ask us to do away with slander rather than race,

eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.

Ms. Eliot, it seems, would rather we embrace slander, and reject gender. 

Taken together, it seems as if the professor wants to paint a picture of those who hold to gender distinction as idiots who want their daughters to be lazy and boring and their sons to be brutish and stupid.  Either that, or Ms. Eliot is herself so narrowly confined within her own ideas about gender that the only solution in her mind is to get rid of gender altogether.

Dr. Sax asks us to consider that,

Ignoring gender won't make it go away. On the contrary: Ignoring gender has the ironic consequence of exacerbating gender stereotypes.

along with the idea that,

You will find that white, black, Spanish-speaking doesn't matter on this parameter; affluent or low-income doesn't matter; urban or rural doesn't matter. Gender is far more important, more fundamental, than any of those other parameters. On many parameters relevant to education, such as attention span, a white boy from an affluent home in Bethesda or McLean has more in common with an African-American male from a low-income home in Southeast D.C. than he has in common with his own sister, a white girl.  

I think the thing most troubling to me is that we seem to be once again shackling ourselves to a new fate in the name of freedom.  What exactly is freeing about having a core part of your identity ignored or kept secret by your parents? Why would a parent feel the need to make their child feel abnormal about being normal?  And what the hell does any of this have to do with progress?