Sweedish Couple Refuses to declare child's gender

[Selene]

I am so not ready to even try to understand socialists and or gender feminists. :pinch:

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July 1, 2009

Swedish parents keep 2-year-old's gender secret

Published: 23 Jun 09 16:24 CET

Online: http://www.thelocal.se/20232/20090623/

A couple of Swedish parents have stirred up debate in the country by refusing to reveal whether their two-and-a-half-year-old child is a boy or a girl.

* Tax agency ready for June 1st ID card rush (29 May 09)

* Sweden rules 'gender-based' abortion legal (12 May 09)

* Swedish gays made to wait for church wedding (3 May 09)

Pop’s parents [see footnote], both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few – those who have changed the child’s diaper – nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

The child's parents said so long as they keep Pop’s gender a secret, he or she will be able to avoid preconceived notions of how people should be treated if male or female.

Pop's wardrobe includes everything from dresses to trousers and Pop's hairstyle changes on a regular basis. And Pop usually decides how Pop is going to dress on a given morning.

Although Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl, Pop's parents never use personal pronouns when referring to the child – they just say Pop.

"I believe that the self-confidence and personality that Pop has shaped will remain for a lifetime," said Pop's mother.

But while Pop’s parents say they have received supportive feedback from many of their peers, not everyone agrees that their chosen course of action will have a positive outcome.

“Ignoring children's natures simply doesn’t work,” says Susan Pinker, a psychologist and newspaper columnist from Toronto, Canada, who wrote the book The Sexual Paradox, which focuses on sex differences in the workplace.

“Child-rearing should not be about providing an opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child’s needs as an individual,” Pinker tells The Local.

“It’s unlikely that they’ll be able to keep this a secret for long. Children are curious about their own identity, and are likely to gravitate towards others of the same sex during free play time in early childhood.”

Pinker says there are many ways that males and females differ from birth; even if gender is kept ‘secret,’ prenatal hormones developed in the second trimester of pregnancy already alter the way the child behaves and feels.

She says once children can speak, males tell aggressive stories 87 per cent of the time, while females only 17 per cent. In a study, children aged two to four were given a task to work together for a reward, and boys used physical tactics 50 times more than girls, she says.

But Swedish gender equality consultant Kristina Henkel says Pop’s parents' experiment might have positive results.

“If the parents are doing this because they want to create a discussion with other adults about why gender is important, then I think they can make a point of it,” Henkel says in a telephone interview with The Local.

“You can talk about there being a non-stereotypical gender; if you are a girl you can do the same as a boy, and if you’re a boy you can do the same as a girl.”

Henkel also says a child's sex can deeply affect how they are treated growing up, and distract them from simply being a human being.

“If the child is dressed up as a girl or boy, it affects them because people see and treat them in a more gender-typical way,” Henkel explains.

“Girls are told they are cute in their dresses, and boys are told they are cool with their car toys. But if you give them no gender they will be seen more as a human or not a stereotype as a boy or girl.”

She says that without these gender stereotypes, children can build character as individuals, not hindered by preconceived notions of what they should be as males or females.

“I think that can make these kids stronger,” Henkel says.

Anna Nordenström, a pediatric endocrinologist at Karolinska Institutet, says it’s hard to know what effects the parents' decision will have on Pop.

“It will affect the child, but it’s hard to say if it will hurt the child,” says Nordenström, who studies hormonal influences on gender development.

“I don’t know what they are trying to achieve. It’s going to make the child different, make them very special.”

She says if Pop is still ‘genderless’ by the time he or she starts school, Pop will certainly receive a lot of attention from classmates.

“We don’t know exactly what determines sexual identity, but it’s not only sexual upbringing,” says Nordenström. “Gender-typical behaviour, sexual preferences and sexual identity usually go together. There are hormonal and other influences that we don’t know that will determine the gender of the child.”

Both Nordenström and Pinker refer to a controversial case from 1967 when a circumcision left one of two twin brothers without a penis. Dr. John Money, who asserted that gender was learned rather than innate, convinced the parents to raise 'David' as 'Brenda' and the child had cosmetic genitalia reconstruction surgery.

She was raised as a female, with girls’ clothes, games and codes of behaviour. The parents never told Brenda the secret until she was a teenager and rebelled against femininity. She then started receiving testosterone injections and underwent another genetic reconstruction process to become David again. David Reimer denounced the experiment as a crushing failure before committing suicide at the age of 38.

“I don’t think that trying to keep a child’s sex a secret will fool anyone, nor do I think it’s wise or ethical,” says Pinker. “As with any family secret, when we try to keep an elemental truth from children, it usually blows up in the parent’s face, via psychosomatic illness or rebellious behaviour.”

But with a second child on the way, Pop's parents have no plans to change what they see as a winning formula. As for Pop, they say they will only reveal the child's sex when Pop thinks it's time.

Footnote: Pop is not the child's real name but is the name used in Svenska Dagbladet's interview with the child's parents from March 6th.

Lydia Parafianowicz (lydia.parafianowicz@thelocal.se)

[Michelle]

They named it "Pop" and are going to raise it as a genderless creature?

That poor kid is going to get hell in school.

[Selene]

They named it "Pop" and are going to raise it as a genderless creature?

That poor kid is going to get hell in school.

Pop is not the child's real name but is the name used in Svenska Dagbladet's interview with the child's parents from March 6th.

[Michelle]

They named it "Pop" and are going to raise it as a genderless creature?

That poor kid is going to get hell in school.

Pop is not the child's real name but is the name used in Svenska Dagbladet's interview with the child's parents from March 6th.

AH. OK. That's at least a little bit more reassuring. I should read all of a post before responding from now on.

I suppose it is futile to point out that one can raise a boy as a boy or a girl as a girl without stamping their heads with blue or pink.

Edited July 1, 2009 by Michelle R

[kiaer.ts]

Wonderful, yet another set of "parents" who regard a child as a fashion accessory. They and the New Jersey parents of little Adolf Hitler deserve a long vacation on a small island somewhere. Children become aware of gender at a very early age, and this child will very soon discover that his parents think there's something wrong with him, if he is not already so aware. What they are doing is no less abuse than the NYC parents who starved their baby to death on a vegetarian diet. It is all well and good to keep up these absurd leftist pretenses about yourself as an adult. Do the "parents" hide their own genders? You can see the essential grotesqueness of the act when you see its effects when forced upon a child.

[ginny]

This has me thinking as to when a parent's acts cross the line into the illegal and when does the state have a right to intervene. We can all agree the poor kid's going to be a mess. Can this be considered deliberate abuse on the part on parents?

After some thought, I vote yes. I believe the field of psychology has advanced enough to make an objective case that these parents are nuts and unable to make proper decisions concerning their child. But damn it, I really hate to get the state involved in parenting.

Ginny

[Selene]

Ginny:

"But damn it, I really hate to get the state involved in parenting."

Why, the state does such an excellent job at any undertaking...

Look at the record:

The War on Drugs is so successful that we have to increase funding every year.

The numbers provided by the educational bean counters in NY City shows, proves. that the chillin are getin more educated.

The governments economic policies are working...we have less unemployed than we would have had; we saved jobs that would of could have been lost.

I mean just look at how well the government does its job.

Wow, I have become infected with x-ray logic. How subjectively selfish of me.

Adam

[kiaer.ts]

This has me thinking as to when a parent's acts cross the line into the illegal and when does the state have a right to intervene. We can all agree the poor kid's going to be a mess. Can this be considered deliberate abuse on the part on parents?

After some thought, I vote yes. I believe the field of psychology has advanced enough to make an objective case that these parents are nuts and unable to make proper decisions concerning their child. But damn it, I really hate to get the state involved in parenting.

Ginny

I expect reality should take care of the issue once the kid begins to talk in complete sentences, goes to school, etc. If the "parents" "parenting" has so messed up the kid by then, the fact of their abuse should be obvious. The state, after a complaint by relatives or specialists, would then get involved to the extent of placing the child in the custody of some hopefully more rational guardians. The state would not become the parents nor would it micro-manage the child's upbringing. Or one would hope.

[Selene]

This has me thinking as to when a parent's acts cross the line into the illegal and when does the state have a right to intervene. We can all agree the poor kid's going to be a mess. Can this be considered deliberate abuse on the part on parents?

After some thought, I vote yes. I believe the field of psychology has advanced enough to make an objective case that these parents are nuts and unable to make proper decisions concerning their child. But damn it, I really hate to get the state involved in parenting.

Ginny

I expect reality should take care of the issue once the kid begins to talk in complete sentences, goes to school, etc. If the "parents" "parenting" has so messed up the kid by then, the fact of their abuse should be obvious. The state, after a complaint by relatives or specialists, would then get involved to the extent of placing the child in the custody of some hopefully more rational guardians. The state would not become the parents nor would it micro-manage the child's upbringing. Or one would hope.

Ted:

With all due respect, either you, or folks you know, have had adequate or better than adequate interactions with NY's CPS - child protective services than the cases I have been involved with. Perhaps I get a skewered perception because the cases I get involved in are adversarial from the start of my involvement.

However, objectively, there is a condescending arrogance by workers, supervisors and senior administrators that is palpable. Moreover, these are generally people who do not have children and basically do not have a life.

Moreover, their agenda is clearly to strip parental authority and replace that authority with the state's "raise your kids this way rule book" which:

1) does not exist; and

2) even if it did, it would be government issue and therefore, have no value at all in the real world.

Adam

[thomtg]

This has me thinking as to when a parent's acts cross the line into the illegal and when does the state have a right to intervene. We can all agree the poor kid's going to be a mess. Can this be considered deliberate abuse on the part on parents?

After some thought, I vote yes. I believe the field of psychology has advanced enough to make an objective case that these parents are nuts and unable to make proper decisions concerning their child. But damn it, I really hate to get the state involved in parenting.

Ginny

Ginny, I would take the report of Pop's parents literally: their decision was "rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction." This is a clear and direct case of philosophy being the motivating factor of social activity. If there is a conclusion to be made from this report, I would say that Sweden is a society in profound decline.

As Ayn Rand has written many times, if you want to change a society and its culture, change its philosophy. So before they change their ways, Pop's parents will need to discover that their feminist philosophy is false. But until then, I think they are quite consistent in their effort at trying to lead virtuous lives.

By contrast, your prescription of getting the state/society involved in Pop's parenting, takes an intrinsicist view of morality. Your assumption is that somebody somewhere somehow knows what's good for the child, and so the parents must be commanded to follow those precepts whether they know it or not. Values are objective, not intrinsic nor subjective. That's the least Objectivists should agree on.

[kiaer.ts]

This has me thinking as to when a parent's acts cross the line into the illegal and when does the state have a right to intervene. We can all agree the poor kid's going to be a mess. Can this be considered deliberate abuse on the part on parents?

After some thought, I vote yes. I believe the field of psychology has advanced enough to make an objective case that these parents are nuts and unable to make proper decisions concerning their child. But damn it, I really hate to get the state involved in parenting.

Ginny

I expect reality should take care of the issue once the kid begins to talk in complete sentences, goes to school, etc. If the "parents" "parenting" has so messed up the kid by then, the fact of their abuse should be obvious. The state, after a complaint by relatives or specialists, would then get involved to the extent of placing the child in the custody of some hopefully more rational guardians. The state would not become the parents nor would it micro-manage the child's upbringing. Or one would hope.

Ted:

With all due respect, either you, or folks you know, have had adequate or better than adequate interactions with NY's CPS - child protective services than the cases I have been involved with. Perhaps I get a skewered perception because the cases I get involved in are adversarial from the start of my involvement.

However, objectively, there is a condescending arrogance by workers, supervisors and senior administrators that is palpable. Moreover, these are generally people who do not have children and basically do not have a life.

Moreover, their agenda is clearly to strip parental authority and replace that authority with the state's "raise your kids this way rule book" which:

1) does not exist; and

2) even if it did, it would be government issue and therefore, have no value at all in the real world.

Adam

I'm sorry, did I endorse NYCPS as the obvious paragon of how to handle such matters? Are you insisting that children simply have no rights because no one is ever in a position to say that the way in which they are being raised amounts to objectively verifiable abuse? If these parenst are as bad as we can imagine, surely the abuse will be obvious. Surely a mechanism will exist to have them declared unfit parents, and surely other guardians can be appointed. None of this need involve NYCPS.

[Selene]

Ted:

The reference, and that was all it was Ted, a reference, which was based on where you reside and grew up.

I know I did not state that you endorse NY CPS.

I know I did not "insist" or state or imply that "...children simply have no rights."

Your post states that:

"Surely a mechanism will exist to have them declared unfit parents, and surely other guardians can be appointed."

What is the standard used by the mechanism to declare parents unfit, Ted?

The word "guardians" implies what, Ted?

Child Protective Services implies what, Ted?

Essentially, as I stated at the start of this thread, I am not sure how I feel about these parents.

Adam

Post script:

Folks:

Can anyone give me the philosophical assumptions/tenets of the "feminist philosophy"?

[kiaer.ts]

Ted:

The reference, and that was all it was Ted, a reference, which was based on where you reside and grew up.

I know I did not state that you endorse NY CPS.

I know I did not "insist" or state or imply that "...children simply have no rights."

Your post states that:

"Surely a mechanism will exist to have them declared unfit parents, and surely other guardians can be appointed."

What is the standard used by the mechanism to declare parents unfit, Ted?

The word "guardians" implies what, Ted?

Child Protective Services implies what, Ted?

Essentially, as I stated at the start of this thread, I am not sure how I feel about these parents.

Adam

Post script:

Folks:

Can anyone give me the philosophical assumptions/tenets of the "feminist philosophy"?

Other than your obvious emotional distress, not much is clear from your questions. For instance, what does "The word "guardians" implies what?" mean? Surely you are familiar with the notion of parents or those who are legally appointed to stand in their stead. I'm not quite sure why you want to lay your distress at my feet here. I do sympathize with your obvious distaste for a bureaucracy with which you have wrestled. Please detach yourself from the issue sufficiently so as not to treat people on this thread as if they were indistinguishable from the justified objects of your wrath.

As for standard? You yourself said that there is no book. That is correct and proper. A civil action can show negligence even if every possible form of negligence is not codified in advance. This is civil law, not criminal law. As I have said, if this kid is truly messed up, a prima facie case can surely be made to that effect by some teacher or relative who has contact with the kid. Just as we can show that a child is malnurished even if no statute declares the exact contents of his diet, we can show he is being mentally abused even if no statute declares a child's specific catechism and curriculum. If these parents are abusing this child the effects will be broad, not restricted to just the matter of his telling people his own gender. In other words, when people truly go nuts, they don't restrict their insanity to just one narrow point of feminist ideology. There is no need for us to codify a standard ahead of time. In a few years, the fitness of these "parents" will be obvious to those who are directly involved.

[Selene]

Ted:

De facto the process to establish unfitness is codified. Second, it is not fully civil law, nor fully criminal law which creates the problem.

Much of the process is "administrative". This veneer permits the process to operate with quasi-criminal penalties, but civil standards of proof which

has never worked well.

Additionally, the funding stream is structurally organized to continue to increase the budget regardless of performance.

We do a better job on potholes than children.

"This is civil law, not criminal law."

Your argument on guardians/adoptions on another thread were cogent and made sense. However, it is not implementable with the current system is empowered and funded.

Adam

[kiaer.ts]

Ted:

De facto the process to establish unfitness is codified. Second, it is not fully civil law, nor fully criminal law which creates the problem.

Much of the process is "administrative". This veneer permits the process to operate with quasi-criminal penalties, but civil standards of proof which

has never worked well.

Additionally, the funding stream is structurally organized to continue to increase the budget regardless of performance.

We do a better job on potholes than children.

"This is civil law, not criminal law."

Your argument on guardians/adoptions on another thread were cogent and made sense. However, it is not implementable with the current system is empowered and funded.

Adam

Ah, yes, administrative "law." I suppose I should have said "this should be civil law." From what I understand, administrative law is the bastard child of regulatory bureaucracy. That "additionally, the funding stream is structurally organized to continue to increase the budget regardless of performance," is the case probably tells you all you need to know about the de facto state of NY law.

[Selene]

Correct Ted:

:thumbsup:

"The Statist has also constructed a Fourth Branch of government - an enormous administrative state - which exists to oversee and implement his policies. It is a massive yet amorphous bureaucracy that consists of a workforce of nearly 2 million civilian employees. It administers a budget of over 3 trillion a year. It churns out a mind-numbing number of rules that regulate energy, the environment, transportation, housing, agriculture, food, drugs, education, etc, Even the slightest human activity apparently requires its intervention clothing labels on women's dresses, cosmetics ingredients, and labeling. It even reaches into the bathroom, mandating shower head flow rates and allowable gallons per flush for toilets. It sets flammability standards for beds. There are nearly one thousand federal departments, agencies, and divisions that make laws and enforce then." [footnotes omitted] Liberty and Tyranny, Pages 54-55.

Yes.

2,000,000 Federal bureaucrats or "good Germans".

3,000,000,000,000 [Three trillion dollars].

1,000 Federal Agencies.

Add the 50 State numbers and for laughs the county, City, Township, Village and Boards and we have reached the tipping point.

Now O'Biwan is adding Czars who are not advised and consented to by the Senate, they are paid by O'Biwan and they serve at the pleasure of the marxist.

Adam

[Michelle]

Gender feminists hate the idea that there are biological and neurological differences in-between the sexes. This is one reason why they tend to hate transsexuals. The existence of the transsexual tends to negate their 'gender as social construction' rubbish.

[Michelle]

Also, note how these self-alleged "defenders of women" will hassle, ridicule, and denounce women who are either overly feminine or desire to be housewives.

[Mikee]

Now O'Biwan is adding Czars who are not advised and consented to by the Senate, they are paid by O'Biwan and they serve at the pleasure of the marxist.

Adam

Not to mention the new "civilian service corps" or whatever it's going to be called, agents of which are going to be "interned" into virtually every govt agency, presumably to report directly to O'Biwan.

Does anyone remember from the campaign O'Biwan's intention to make HR people in businesses employee's of EDD rather than company employees. Still paid by the company, of course.

[kiaer.ts]

An interesting aside.

The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, from which English, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, the Celtic and Slavonic languages and others derived has a three way grammatical gender distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter nominals, i.e., nouns, pronouns and adjectives. This distinction evolved from an earlier animate/inanimate distinction.

Originally PIE evolved from the Eurasiatic family of the lake Baikal region of Siberia (other living daughter branches of Eurasiatic include Uralic (e.g., Finnish, Hungarian, Lapp and Samoyed), Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, Japanese), Yukaghir (NE Siberian hunter-gatherers), Nivkh (dog-breeding fisherman of Sakhalin and the Amur river), Chukchi-Kamchatkans and Eskimo-Aleuts. The Eurasiatic languages as a whole lack any gender distinctions, but do often distinguish between active and passive roles of nouns in verb phrases. For instance, while we distinguish between the subject and object of a verb, and treat subjects of both transitive and intransitive verbs as belonging to the nominative case: "The wallpaper (nom.) hangs" and "The handyman (nom.) hangs wallpaper (acc.)" other language families such as Basque distinguish between agent and patient where all verbs have a patient which undergoes the action of the verb and some verbs express an agent which is the unaffected cause of the change expressed by the verb. Agent/patient languages treat the subject of intransitive verbs as logically equivalent to the direct objects of transitive verbs. For instance, "Mary (pat.) dies." but "John (agt.) kills Mary (pat.)" or "The house burns (pat.)" but "The fire (agt.) burns the house (pat.)."

In agent/patient languages, verbs and nouns are often obligatorily marked for active or passive status. For instance, there would be two verbs meaning for the English meaning "burn" just as English itself obligatorily distinguishes bewteen kill (trans.) and die (intrans.). In an active/passive language there would be two different verbs to distinguish between "The fire burns brightly" in which it is the fire that burns and "The fire burns the house" in which it is the house that burns. And it is very interesting that there exist noun couplets in PIE such as "pyr/fire" vs. "ignis" and "hydor/water" vs. "aqua." Such pairs showed that the PIE language originally distinguished between water and fire as passive substances and as active agents.

Indeed, the earliest "gender" distinction in PIE was between nominals seen as animate versus those seen as inanimate. Animate nouns could be either patients or agents, but inanimate nouns could only be patients. The accusative case, which in neuter nouns is the same as the nominative case, originally signified passive inanimacy while the nominative case marked animate agents. The accusative case was the default, while the nominative case was distinguished by an ending, usually "-os" or "-is" which originally indicated the instrument, not the subject of a sentence. Old nouns ending in -r like water and fire are remnants of the old inanimate class.

This is interesting in the pronominal system because early on there was no distinction between masculine and feminine nominals. Bot were subsumed under the animate class, and opposed to the inanimate or now "neuter" class. Latin adjectives that us "-is " endings for both masculine and feminine nouns but "-e" endings for neuter nouns show this older two-way opposition. Indeed, there is no feminine gender in Hittite, just the distinction between common (i.e., animate or both masculine and feminine) and neuter or inanimate nouns. Likewise, we have the distinction between "quis/who" and "quod/what" which distinguishes between animate and inanimate but not between masculine and feminine.

And down to this age, proper English always uses "he" as the default animate pronoun. This is not sexism, it is the result of the fact that "he" expresses animacy while "it" expresses inanimacy. The form "she" developed from the form "he" in PIE times. The Old English pronouns were he/heo/hit for he/she/it which shows that originally she <- he or heo <- he. The basic meaning of "he" is not masculine, but rather animate.

The feminine gender in PIE derived from the coincidental fact that the word for woman, "*gwena-" ended in an /a/ as did many collective (neuter plurals in /-a/ like "data") and abstract nouns ending in /-(t)ia/. (FYI, the word "*gwena" became "queen" English and is also seen in such words as the Greek "gyn-ecology" or the Russian word zhena meaning wife or the Welsh name Gwen.) Proto-IE formed when a dialect of Eurasiatic speakers invaded the Causcasus from the Russian steppe. The Caucasian languages have anywhere up to eight gender distinctions. When speakers of languages like Circassian and Chechen switched to what would become PIE they took a coincidental correspondence of /-a/ endings in the word for woman and certain abstracts and collectives and made it into a newly distinguished feminine gender. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_g...nguage_families

Now, it is interesting that by coincidence, in Swedish as well as some other modern IE languages, the distinction between masculine/feminine has been blurred, leading to a grammatical distinction between common (animate) and neuter (inanimate) nouns. Swedish has two forms for "the" but the distinction is not between masculine and feminine as in French or Spanish but between common and neuter. This loss of the distinction has not spread to third person pronouns, han/hon/den for he/she/it.

So, when speaking Swedish, it remains just as difficult as in English, if not moreso, to avoid using gender distinctions. It's even worse in Semitic languages where even the forms for "you" express gender. So the Swedes, who are being outbred by Arab speakers, will find their quest to become gender neutral (or should that be gender common) ever more difficult as there country's demographic nature changes. And there are languages like Chinese which have no spoken distinction of gender in their pronouns, using "ta" to mean he, she or it. But in the meantime, since their child is animate, but of otherwise unknown gender, it is proper to refer to him using the default animate pronoun, which is he.

[thomtg]

An interesting aside.

The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, from which English, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, the Celtic and Slavonic languages and others derived has a three way grammatical gender distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter nominals, i.e., nouns, pronouns and adjectives. This distinction evolved from an earlier animate/inanimate distinction.

[...]

Now, it is interesting that by coincidence, in Swedish as well as some other modern IE languages, the distinction between masculine/feminine has been blurred, leading to a grammatical distinction between common (animate) and neuter (inanimate) nouns. Swedish has two forms for "the" but the distinction is not between masculine and feminine as in French or Spanish but between common and neuter. This loss of the distinction has not spread to third person pronouns, han/hon/den for he/she/it.

So, when speaking Swedish, it remains just as difficult as in English, if not moreso, to avoid using gender distinctions. It's even worse in Semitic languages where even the forms for "you" express gender. So the Swedes, who are being outbred by Arab speakers, will find their quest to become gender neutral (or should that be gender common) ever more difficult as there country's demographic nature changes. And there are languages like Chinese which have no spoken distinction of gender in their pronouns, using "ta" to mean he, she or it. But in the meantime, since their child is animate, but of otherwise unknown gender, it is proper to refer to him using the default animate pronoun, which is he.

This is one "aside" that makes a great point about the use of "he" or "him" for animate, third-person singular pronouns. One should not feel defensive therefore to say: "Every child in my classroom held his embroidery hoop and started cross-stitching"--and not "Every child in my classroom held his or her ..."

[Selene]

Ted:

Great post to me. Aside away!

"The Eurasiatic languages as a whole lack any gender distinctions..."

"Latin adjectives that us "-is " endings for both masculine and feminine nouns but "-e" endings for neuter nouns show this older two-way opposition." <<<<as in an herbalist? or I am on the wrong track?

"And down to this age, proper English always uses "he" as the default animate pronoun. This is not sexism, it is the result of the fact that "he" expresses animacy while "it" expresses inanimacy. The form "she" developed from the form "he" in PIE times. The Old English pronouns were he/heo/hit for he/she/it which shows that originally she <- he or heo <- he. The basic meaning of "he" is not masculine, but rather animate."

Excellent aside for me. This qualifies a linguistic dissonance that I have always felt since the Politically Correct Thugs tried to push that he/she crap.

The best was when I broke up a meeting of the Washington FAUS [Federal Arterial Urban System] funding compliance discussions. Two gender specific gender feminists attempted to force the meeting to write into the contract language for roadway contracts "person hole" for "man hole".

Understanding my penchant for biting satire and crudeness, they got quite upset with the meeting and the rejection and they attempted to have me disciplined for my remarks through some political hooks that they had.

Adam

[kiaer.ts]

Ted:

Great post to me. Aside away!

"The Eurasiatic languages as a whole lack any gender distinctions..."

"Latin adjectives that us "-is " endings for both masculine and feminine nouns but "-e" endings for neuter nouns show this older two-way opposition." <<<<as in an herbalist? or I am on the wrong track?

"And down to this age, proper English always uses "he" as the default animate pronoun. This is not sexism, it is the result of the fact that "he" expresses animacy while "it" expresses inanimacy. The form "she" developed from the form "he" in PIE times. The Old English pronouns were he/heo/hit for he/she/it which shows that originally she <- he or heo <- he. The basic meaning of "he" is not masculine, but rather animate."

Excellent aside for me. This qualifies a linguistic dissonance that I have always felt since the Politically Correct Thugs tried to push that he/she crap.

The best was when I broke up a meeting of the Washington FAUS [Federal Arterial Urban System] funding compliance discussions. Two gender specific gender feminists attempted to force the meeting to write into the contract language for roadway contracts "person hole" for "man hole".

Understanding my penchant for biting satire and crudeness, they got quite upset with the meeting and the rejection and they attempted to have me disciplined for my remarks through some political hooks that they had.

Adam

Funny, the word "man" is originally inclusive of both genders. It is likely cognate to the word "mind" and is ultimately related to a root found in the word moon which means to measure. English has lost the word wer- as in werewolf which is cognate with Latin vir and refers to males with the connotation powerful. There was also the word "guma" which you will see in Tolkien which means human and which is cognate with the Latin homo and the greek chthon. It's original meaning was earthling, and it is even cognate with the word adam of the same meaning. The word guma survives in the modified forms goon and bride-groom with m>n in the first and an added /r/ in the second. Feminists should have no problem using the word man, and should be delighted that the OE words for man and woman, guma and cwene survive as goon and queen.

Yes, Thomas, aversion to "he" as the default animate pronoun is an ignorant modern innovation.

[kiaer.ts]

An interesting aside.

The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, from which English, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, the Celtic and Slavonic languages and others derived has a three way grammatical gender distinction between masculine, feminine and neuter nominals, i.e., nouns, pronouns and adjectives. This distinction evolved from an earlier animate/inanimate distinction.

Originally PIE evolved from the Eurasiatic family of the lake Baikal region of Siberia (other living daughter branches of Eurasiatic include Uralic (e.g., Finnish, Hungarian, Lapp and Samoyed), Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean, Japanese), Yukaghir (NE Siberian hunter-gatherers), Nivkh (dog-breeding fisherman of Sakhalin and the Amur river), Chukchi-Kamchatkans and Eskimo-Aleuts. The Eurasiatic languages as a whole lack any gender distinctions, but do often distinguish between active and passive roles of nouns in verb phrases. For instance, while we distinguish between the subject and object of a verb, and treat subjects of both transitive and intransitive verbs as belonging to the nominative case: "The wallpaper (nom.) hangs" and "The handyman (nom.) hangs wallpaper (acc.)" other language families such as Basque distinguish between agent and patient where all verbs have a patient which undergoes the action of the verb and some verbs express an agent which is the unaffected cause of the change expressed by the verb. Agent/patient languages treat the subject of intransitive verbs as logically equivalent to the direct objects of transitive verbs. For instance, "Mary (pat.) dies." but "John (agt.) kills Mary (pat.)" or "The house burns (pat.)" but "The fire (agt.) burns the house (pat.)."

In agent/patient languages, verbs and nouns are often obligatorily marked for active or passive status. For instance, there would be two verbs meaning for the English meaning "burn" just as English itself obligatorily distinguishes bewteen kill (trans.) and die (intrans.). In an active/passive language there would be two different verbs to distinguish between "The fire burns brightly" in which it is the fire that burns and "The fire burns the house" in which it is the house that burns. And it is very interesting that there exist noun couplets in PIE such as "pyr/fire" vs. "ignis" and "hydor/water" vs. "aqua." Such pairs showed that the PIE language originally distinguished between water and fire as passive substances and as active agents.

Indeed, the earliest "gender" distinction in PIE was between nominals seen as animate versus those seen as inanimate. Animate nouns could be either patients or agents, but inanimate nouns could only be patients. The accusative case, which in neuter nouns is the same as the nominative case, originally signified passive inanimacy while the nominative case marked animate agents. The accusative case was the default, while the nominative case was distinguished by an ending, usually "-os" or "-is" which originally indicated the instrument, not the subject of a sentence. Old nouns ending in -r like water and fire are remnants of the old inanimate class.

This is interesting in the pronominal system because early on there was no distinction between masculine and feminine nominals. Bot were subsumed under the animate class, and opposed to the inanimate or now "neuter" class. Latin adjectives that us "-is " endings for both masculine and feminine nouns but "-e" endings for neuter nouns show this older two-way opposition. Indeed, there is no feminine gender in Hittite, just the distinction between common (i.e., animate or both masculine and feminine) and neuter or inanimate nouns. Likewise, we have the distinction between "quis/who" and "quod/what" which distinguishes between animate and inanimate but not between masculine and feminine.

And down to this age, proper English always uses "he" as the default animate pronoun. This is not sexism, it is the result of the fact that "he" expresses animacy while "it" expresses inanimacy. The form "she" developed from the form "he" in PIE times. The Old English pronouns were he/heo/hit for he/she/it which shows that originally she <- he or heo <- he. The basic meaning of "he" is not masculine, but rather animate.

The feminine gender in PIE derived from the coincidental fact that the word for woman, "*gwena-" ended in an /a/ as did many collective (neuter plurals in /-a/ like "data") and abstract nouns ending in /-(t)ia/. (FYI, the word "*gwena" became "queen" English and is also seen in such words as the Greek "gyn-ecology" or the Russian word zhena meaning wife or the Welsh name Gwen.) Proto-IE formed when a dialect of Eurasiatic speakers invaded the Causcasus from the Russian steppe. The Caucasian languages have anywhere up to eight gender distinctions. When speakers of languages like Circassian and Chechen switched to what would become PIE they took a coincidental correspondence of /-a/ endings in the word for woman and certain abstracts and collectives and made it into a newly distinguished feminine gender. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_g...nguage_families

Now, it is interesting that by coincidence, in Swedish as well as some other modern IE languages, the distinction between masculine/feminine has been blurred, leading to a grammatical distinction between common (animate) and neuter (inanimate) nouns. Swedish has two forms for "the" but the distinction is not between masculine and feminine as in French or Spanish but between common and neuter. This loss of the distinction has not spread to third person pronouns, han/hon/den for he/she/it.

So, when speaking Swedish, it remains just as difficult as in English, if not moreso, to avoid using gender distinctions. It's even worse in Semitic languages where even the forms for "you" express gender. So the Swedes, who are being outbred by Arab speakers, will find their quest to become gender neutral (or should that be gender common) ever more difficult as there country's demographic nature changes. And there are languages like Chinese which have no spoken distinction of gender in their pronouns, using "ta" to mean he, she or it. But in the meantime, since their child is animate, but of otherwise unknown gender, it is proper to refer to him using the default animate pronoun, which is he.

Here is a map of the Eurasiatic language family according to the theory of Joseph Greenberg. (I disagree with his inclusion of Ainu an extinct language Japan, and I, with most specialists, classify Korean and Japanese as belonging to the Altaic subbranch. Gilyak is another name for Nivkh.) Greenberg is attacked by many American historical linguists but their criticisms are based on skeptical arguments with faulty epistemology. The Eurasiatic languages share far too many similarities in their morphology and basic vocabulary for the relationship to be based on chance. For instance, all these languages share an m/t contrast in their pronouns for me and thee. They all have /k-/ stem pronouns for who/quis and they all use /n/ for verbal negation. (The Semitic, Kartvelian (Georgian) and Dravidian language families are related to Eurasiatic in a wider group called Nostratic.) The Eurasiatic people were hunters and fisherman who were the first to breed work dogs. They lived in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia about 8-10,000 years ago. The Indo-Europeans were a branch that moved SW across the Steppe lands, who domesticated the horse, and who absorbed technology such as the use of wagons and metal from the peoples of the North Caucasus who themselves spoke a Dene-Caucasian language related to the languages of the Basques, the Chinese and even the Navajo! Studying historical linguistics can extend our knowledge of man back to the end of the last ice-age and even before.

[Selene]

Thom:

This is one "aside" that makes a great point about the use of "he" or "him" for animate, third-person singular pronouns. One should not feel defensive therefore to say: "Every child in my classroom held his embroidery hoop and started cross-stitching"--and not "Every child in my classroom held his or her ..."

Agreed, but for my "goon" class it would have to be:

"Every child in my classroom held his M-16 disassembled and started reassembling the weapon while blind folded"