Not that long ago people would have 4 or 5 kids squeezed into that same space. At least until a childhood disease took one or more of them.
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Not much longer before that the entire family across several generations would share one room. I suspect this is still the norm in most of the world. We here in Western society are just good at ignoring the majority of the worlds population.
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You are absolutely correct. Unfortunately, judging by the ubiquity and ever increasing extravagance of gender reveal parties, the majority of people would look at you like you told them water isn’t wet if you told them no one knows the gender of an infant.
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Ah, yet another example of how fucked up Canada really is, but yet everyone still wants to live there.
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It’s because down south we’re visibly fucking up so bad that nobody notices Canada, assumes it’s still some perfect utopia. They seem to have gotten some stuff really right, but they’re also getting a lot of things really, really wrong by copying the wrong parts of the world.
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I knew Dandelion before he changed his name. It used to be Triffid.
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You might now know the gender of an infant, but you can make quite a good guess based on the sex. As long as you are prepared to change your opinion on the matter as needed, any reason for a party is a good reason.
(I.e. quit being a sourpuss and fight the fights that need fighting, not the trivial bullshit, that baby couldn’t care less about the whole concept of gender as a baby is more or less genderless)
On the topic at hand: Co-ops are hell Never again. The. Constant. Bickering. Drove. Me. Nuts!
Making a “guess” of a baby’s gender is the beginning of a thorough indonctrination by way of making the choice long before the concept of gender and all of its cultural imposition will be understood by the baby.
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You’ll make that guess anyway. It’s only natural to assume your newborn baby is a girl or a boy, depending on the the parts between the legs, just wait till you are a parent yourself. People are predisposed to make guesses about the future. Especially if these guesses have a proven track record of more than 90% correct. It is completely unrealistic to expect parents not to ‘guess’ the gender at birth. If you will devote your energy to fighting that guess, that’s a lifetime of energy wasted. Energy that could have been spent on fights actually worth fighting, such as the acceptance of people wanting to change their (assigned/perceived) gender at a later stage. Or the fight against the dogmatic assignment of certain traits to certain genders (‘pink’ vs ‘blue’ in the toy stores for example).
In an (abstract) ideal world people would maybe assume nothing about their children at birth, and let them completely determine their own personality without any influences from the outside. In the real world that’s never going to happen.
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Free Dictionary says: " Some people maintain that the word sex should be reserved for reference to the biological aspects of being male or female or to sexual activity, and that the word gender should be used only to refer to sociocultural roles. […] Linguistically, there isn’t any real difference between gender bias and sex bias, and it may seem contrived to insist that sex is incorrect in this instance."
I agree with that position. Linguistically, gender and sex were born synonyms. The meaning of “gender” that you assert is very modern and could be considered a subclass only used in determinate circumstances. In common conversation, unless you are discussing academic topics, it’s perfectly legitimate to use gender and sex as interchangeable.
Maybe, but boys are more likely to have Grudies…
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You don’t know what I’ll do, or have done, thanks.
You also don’t know my parental status. Yes, babies are generally boys or girls, but as you admitted above, that’s sex, not gender.
90% of statistics are made up in internet conversations.
Again sex and gender are not the same.
This misses the point of what I said above. Choosing a baby’s gender for it is participating in all of those assignments and cultural beliefs.
If you believe that, then nothing will ever change.
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So true. Lucky kids might have slept in a dresser drawer - until they grew out of it.
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I don’t strictly disagree - I have been vocal about how the term “gender” is etymologically a poor fit in the context of sociology, gender studies, etc as it is currently used. But people usually find it less risky to overload existing words with conflicting meanings and the confusion that predictably results, than the practices of loaning obscure words or coining new ones.
But I would also argue that drafting rules for a housing cooperative is not “common conversation”, and that they do have some obligation to precision if they want to avoid misunderstandings and/or legal problems.
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In regards to the BBS, it ain’t the idea, it’s the source.
I don’t even know what you’d call ‘doubling down on the mansplaining,’ but that was sure a prime example of it…
Don’t you just love it when random strangers deign to condescend to you?
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This is usually solved by using a phrase rather than forcing a meaning change on an existing commonly understood word, which by it’s nature creates an “us and them” between those adopting it and those less cutting edge. “Gender identity” would work, but I’m sure would be shot down, likely as carrying intimations of choice rather than inherent trait.
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We did it once in the Bay Area. We figured maybe that was a bad example – maybe the people were just ultimately bad apples, so when we moved to Portland, we checked out a few more co-housing situations. One of them was okay – the people were really cool, but we were looking for a 3 br. unit and they didn’t have one. Another was really run down and the people looked very unhappy and we asked them “is this a good situation” and a couple of them shrugged their shoulders and said basically “no comment.” Finally the last one seemed perfect – perfectly sized house, great community gardens, and an incredibly fancy meeting house, but as we got to know some of the people, we realized there was this schism in the community – one half would not talk or work with the other half; on further inquiry, we found there was a series of really horrible altercations culminating in one of the members killing her neighbor’s cat.
We. backed. away. slowly. and never looked back.
What the fuck is with that guy? Does he even live here or pay rent? Nobody knows.
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So… Essentially, dicks get all the good places to live in Toronto. Oh, how I miss Rob Ford.
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Which has a rather large statistical overlap. I’d say 90% is on the conservative side.
I prefer to keep my fights realistic.
I just don’t think it’s possible to make parents not have expectations about their newborns about lots of things, including gender. And to me parents are allowed to have expectations, as long as they are able to change them along the way.
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I do, I do. 
I wasn’t trying to be condescending. I’m sorry if it looked that way in text.
It’s just that when people have a ‘gender reveal’ party, they mean a ‘sex reveal party’ most of the time. But sex is a dirty word, so they put the more sophisticated sounding ‘gender’ on the card.
It’s a nonsensical thing to give a party, but you can’t blame parents for telling all their friends ‘it’s a girl’ or ‘it’s a boy’. Especially when (like friends of mine) you already have 3 boys and you’d really like a girl as well. Of course there’s always the chance that the girl would indentify as masculine, or something in between. And they would love and support her/him/(them, which I linguistically hate, but I get the appeal) just as much. It’s just that that’s not on most young parents minds at that time.
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