“as fundamental as gender”? I think that is simplifying the concept a bit. Where does the fundamental notion of gender come from, other than physical and biological attributes? Which I don’t believe are the sole factors in determining personality and behavior.  I think this family is challenging the roles and challenging the way males and females are treating differently.  By challenging it., they can observe how that contributes to their development.  It isn’t easy being a girl or a boy, especially when you don’t “fit” into the accepted notions of what that is. And it seems that there is a dismissal of how much damage this “fundamental” notion of gender has done to girls and boys. Don’t blame media because the media doesn’t exist in a vacuum and those concepts came from people.  Media represents what we value and makes us value it more. Given the amount of gender violence against and woman get paid significantly less, I’d say, our society can do with a little poking and prodding at these concepts or at least get people thinking about the assumptions we have made about gender. 

The couple did not refuse to release the gender of their newborn, but its sex. This article lacks a basic understanding of the difference between the two while flippantly disrespecting the transgender community and the complexities of gender.

Well said.  Also disturbing that the child’s younger brothers (both under the age of six, I think) were clued in to the child’s actual sex and are also to keep it a secret.  Good luck with that!

I’m pretty sure that kids being raised a certain way never stopped them from growing up and being transgender. They are being overly cautious. Why not just raise the baby normally and when it decides they know who they want to be just support it. No matter what, the world and society will always be their to tell you who to be and judging you. EVERYONE has to deal with that. You can’t escape it.

I find this opinion piece very odd and difficult. I’m not sure what parents who raise their child in a gender neutral way have to do with the general attitude of permissivenes the author is also concerned about. It is as if he has taken everything he views as progressive parenting and thrown it all together for comment. After all, we know nothing more about these parents. They may believe in corporal punishment, they may belong to a very rigid sect (albeit not of the evangelical Christian sort), they may be anything but permissive in general.

Interestingly,  I don’t think Becoming Chaz is as much about gender maleability as about the fact that some people feel as if they are born in the wrong body. In fact, transgendered people generally feel very strongly related to a gender — just not the one that their body displays. If it were all malleable, they’d adjust to their physical attributes.

I’m betting the author has simply been carried away by the “ick” factor. He doesn’t like the way Storm’s parents raise their child, he doesn’t like Lady Gaga, and he doesn’t like the fact that some people do feel like they are born in the wrong body. So he’s crafted a grand theory to address it all. I want to ask people who condemn transgendered people because they say “God doesn’t make mistakes” what they think about children born with congenital heart problems. I don’t know that God makes “mistakes” but sometimes there are problems, problems that may be in our power to fix.

This piece reminds me of a definition I’ve occasionally heard of conservatives. They are people who have “an inordinate fear of chaos.” The last line gives this author away.

So here’s another possible reaction. What if parents didn’t try to deny the obvious — the gender of their child, but used the appropriate pronouns, he or she. And what if they bought dolls and firetrucks, and let their kid play as they liked. And what if they simply listened hard to their child– if the child has a pronounced sense of being in the wrong body (rare, rare, but it happens, that is who transgendered people are) then parents can take appropriate steps to help that child. And  what if they also simply told their child about the limits of the way gender works itself out in our society. Limiting some people (the girls who want to be engineered but are told no, for example.)

And what if we tried to raise our children to be kind (so there would be limits involved) but we didn’t beat them or shame them. Honestly, that may be the way Lady Gaga raises her kids, if she has kids. Or this other family. We don’t know what sort of rules or guidance these other parents employ.

To summarize, the idea that these parents are simply a part of the “anything goes” ethos of our society is to view the world as simplistically as Archie Bunker once did. He too had some hankering back to some distant ideal of “the way things are supposed to be” but very little insight into what is actually happening in front of him, with all of its infinite variations.

The writer obviously has not looked into the facts of this matter, but has relied on distorted media comments.  The child is not considered genderless, and the couple has no intention of raising the child as such. They simply are not, for now, letting others know the gender so that the child will not be affected by presuppositions re gender roles.  Get you facts straight before engaging in such rants.