2012-02-18

Raise Boys and Girls the Same Way



I'm super into this philosophy. Skip the double standards, skip the gendered expectations, and just parent. Anyone can raise a good boy or girl, but it takes someone remarkable to raise a good person.

Isn't it funny how most parents-to-be say they don't care whether it's a girl or a boy, but then once they give birth, they completely care and raise the kid according to its genitals? "We just want it to be healthy," they say. Because they wouldn't love it if it weren't? Maybe that's a legitimate wish if the parents have been boozing throughout the pregnancy.

"We don't care whether it's a boy or a girl, as long as it has ten fingers and ten toes." This is bogus, too. My cousin was born with twelve fingers, two thumbs on each hand. She was fine, but they had the extra digits amputated anyway to make her more normal. I don't think the bonus fingers made her a mutant, I think they made her a baby from the future. If humans evolved opposable thumbs to become the top creature on earth, just think of how many thumbs we'll need to stay dominant when the aliens finally arrive.

Those aliens are totally going to laugh at us, by the way. They're going to use all forty of their thumbs to point at us and laugh about how silly it is for humans to automatically divide our species into two classes of people based on a body part. And my cousin the Future Baby isn't going to be able to do anything to stop it because she was raised to be just a girl. And a ten-fingered girl at that!

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