Over the past year we have all heard enough about Bruce Jenner than we really would have liked. To be honest I didn’t think anyone in that family could get more publicity than the Kardashians already did and I had had my fill of them (please note the name Kardashian is in autocorrect in Word, seriously not kidding.)
From the ‘rise’ of newest ‘female’ Kardashian link we have been inundated with gender ideology and things are becoming dangerous.
As a result I have had to have conversations students in both my Religious Studies classes and Biology about gender, sex and the bits in between.
Lovingly making corrections to the ideas that have been pushed on them and now seem like normal ideas.
Corrections about Gender
Firstly, if a scientist was to unearth the remains of Jenner in 100,000 years he will be categorised as male. There is a reality that sex is binary, it is not fluid. 99.8% of the population is born either male or female, their chromosomal arrangement determines if they are male or female.
People might then say, well sex might be binary but gender is fluid, it is a construct made up of our feelings. This idea is one that is of concern especially when applied to children.
There are more and more stories of apparently wonderful parents who support their four, five, six year old in wanting to be the opposite sex. A parent deciding that their child, from the age of four will be called Daniel and not Danielle is a worry and I believe the beginnings of child abuse.
Secondly, there is a reason that individuals younger than 18 don’t have voting rights, it is based on the lack of maturity, awareness and experience to make good, solid, informed decisions. Yet somehow we have parents who listen to their three year olds say I want to be a boy and think this is a good decision.
At the age of four there are many children whose basis of decision around nutrition is colour, they are the ones who won’t eat anything unless it is yellow. Or shape, for the next three months parents spend time cutting food into triangles in order to get their child to eat.
Or that they want to be a fire truck when they grow up. What parents learn is that while they may need to give into an idea temporarily for a greater good, they don’t make permanent life changes based on their child’s current fad and start the plan to turn them into a big red engine. Continue reading
- Jane Bourke is a Catholic Secondary School teacher who specialises in Science and Religion. This article is from Restless Press.
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