Impressing a Gender Identity

[Teflor Lyorian]

Here's a question for you particularly smart folks: should it be a crime for parents to impress a gender identity upon their child that is counter to what would be biologically indicated?

Parents already impress upon their children the majority of their identity. Is it wrong for parents to impress something upon their children that they are not?

[kiryan]

From a state perspective, I think as long as it is not shown to cause damage to the child, it would fall under parenting. How is teaching them their gender identity any different than teaching them not to lie other than the relative acceptance of each doctrine by the general public.

Assuming someone comes at it from a perspective that one makes a child more successful and the other is just arbitrary... gay women are shown to on average have something like 15% more income when controlling for many factors. Would it be any different to teach your child to grow up gay?

From a personal perspective yes. I don't accept gender identity confusion as an issue of confusion but rather one of mental health. There would be no reason to teach an alternative gender identity other than experimental or to purposefully cause a mental health issue.

[Corth]

I suppose that could be considered a form of mental or emotional abuse. Is this something that you have seen happen?

[Teflor Lyorian]

There have been cases, but the question is whether or not teaching children (that won't know any better) to deny their own genetics does overall harm their physical or mental health. The other question is if parents have the right.

[Ragorn]

I don't know, honestly. Emotional abuse is hard to characterize. Anecdotally, I know of a couple case studies where children were raised in a gender-confused enviroment, and they suffered some pretty significant emotional problems later in life. I haven't read any rigorous studies on the subject, though.

Bottom line: If it can be proven that gender confusion fucks up kids, then it should probably be illegal to do it. Parents do not have the right to knowingly raise their children in a way that will be harmful to their well-being.

[kiryan]

while we agree, I'll play devil's advocate.

what if it just had an 80% chance of resulting in something that affected their well being?

what if it wasn't gender identity, but it was training their kids to win the spelling bee / geography day at the expense of normal school experience?

what if it was participation in an extreme contact sport... or football?

what if it was filling their head with dreams of playing pro basketball that leaves them inadequately prepared for life?

what if it was not teaching them table manners?

clearly we allow parents to "teach" their kids a lot that may not be in their child's best interests... A child's best interests are probably the mechanisms that allow it to participate in our system... so teaching them anything not mainstream could be detrimental to their well being... should we go there?

For example my cousin... her grandma taught her dad taught her that you can do whatever you want. You can fight the government, steal from the government and social programs, you don't have to obey the law if you don't agree with it. She's in jail now... her brother not far behind. They can not have "relationships" with normal people.. they live on the fringe of society both economically and socially... and it was predictable. Can we make that illegal?

[Ragorn]

I think it's a yucky pit of grey areas. The thing about developmental psychology is that it's very hard to isolate one aspect of a child's upbringing for scrutiny. It's hard to determine whether Dad's push to make Junior win the 5th grade spelling bee caused permanent damage. And even if we do have near-conclusive evidence that a form of parental behavior has negative consequences, then you have to push to criminalize it and deal with the rights issues.

I have my own personal opinions about child development, but I'm not really qualified to make a call about exactly where the cutoff should be.

[kiryan]

Its probably reasonable to just infringe upon parental rights where there is a large, clear problem... There is probably no bright line of this is good or this is bad.

however, we should realize and acknowledge that we are infringing upon parental rights and it should meet a very high test... which would not be a simple majority in a state or federal branch of government. I'd almost argue that the only appropriate place to take away a person's right... is in the US constitution. It should meet a very high standard if its going to infringe upon rights.

[Ragorn]

Now I'll play devil's advocate.

So would you support a constitutional amendment that would make it illegal for parents to deny their children's sexual orientation?

[kiryan]

support i doubt it.

argue that its unfair less strenuously.

I wouldn't be nearly as vocal about healthcare if public opinion was polling at 66% pro and 30 states ratified it... and 26 states hadn't filed lawsuits to stop it... despite thinking its fundamentally unconstitutional.

[Teflor Lyorian]

I feel that it would be kind of hard to identify a child's true orientation, while sex is simple to determine.

[kiryan]

I'm more nurture than nature. If I wanted to raise a child to be gay, I'm quite sure I could.