NOM BLOG

Canadian Ethicist: With SSM, Genderless Parenting; Now, Genderless Children?

 

Prof. Margaret Somerville, founder of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law writes in the Vancouver Sun about the "genderless child" being raised by parents in Canada:

With same-sex marriage, we saw the advent of arguments for "genderless parenting" - the idea that all a child needs is love and it's irrelevant whether the loving persons are male or female. Now we have "genderless kids." Kathy Witterick and David Stocker, the parents of Jazz (5), Kio (2) and four-month-old Baby Storm want to rear and love each of their children, not as their daughter or son, not as a girl or a boy, but as just their child.

... I suggest that we might also gain insights from asking: Are the parents doing this for the kids, as they claim, or are they doing it for themselves? My guess is that they would say and probably believe it's for the kids, but that the main motivation is their own ideological and political beliefs. When the "best interests" of the children and adults beliefs in such regard are concordant in such regards, there is no problem, but when they clash there is. The situation is very similar to a physician asking a patient to participate in a medical experiment. Long ago, as a protective measure, we started to teach patients to ask doctors who approached them to be research subjects: "Are you doing this for me doctor or am I doing it for you?" These kids need someone to ask their parents that question for them.

... There is also arrogance in ignoring millennia of human wisdom of what we need to become as fully actualized persons as we can be.

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