Slate: Don't Let the Doctor Assign a Gender to Your Newborn

Remember when I said that we should expect more attempts to erase the differences between men and women, and that the conflict in our culture over sexuality is, at root, a disagreement over “whether human nature is something in particular or a sea of possibilities bound only by what we can imagine for ourselves”?

Well, Slate has kindly illustrated that for me in its article “Don’t Let the Doctor Do This to Your Newborn”:

It's a strange hypothetical scenario to imagine. Pressure to accept a medical treatment, no tangible proof of its necessity, its only benefits conferred by the fact that everyone else already has it, and coming at a terrible expense to those 1 or 2 percent who have a bad reaction. It seems unlikely that doctors, hospitals, parents, or society in general would tolerate a standard practice like this.

Except they already do. The imaginary treatment I described above is real. Obstetricians, doctors, and midwives commit this procedure on infants every single day, in every single country. In reality, this treatment is performed almost universally without even asking for the parents' consent, making this practice all the more insidious. It's called infant gender assignment: When the doctor holds your child up to the harsh light of the delivery room, looks between its legs, and declares his opinion: It's a boy or a girl, based on nothing more than a cursory assessment of your offspring's genitals.

Male and female aren’t particular things. They aren’t real. And they certainly have nothing to do with what genitals your baby has. They’re merely a doctor’s “opinion,” and he’s stepping completely over the line by forcing his opinion on the baby.

According to the author, Christin Scarlett Milloy, “assigning” a gender to your child is potentially damaging:

We tell our children, “You can be anything you want to be.” We say, “A girl can be a doctor, a boy can be a nurse,” but why in the first place must this person be a boy and that person be a girl? Your infant is an infant. Your baby knows nothing of dresses and ties, of makeup and aftershave, of the contemporary social implications of pink and blue. As a newborn, your child's potential is limitless. The world is full of possibilities that every person deserves to be able to explore freely, receiving equal respect and human dignity while maximizing happiness through individual expression.

With infant gender assignment, in a single moment your baby's life is instantly and brutally reduced from such infinite potentials down to one concrete set of expectations and stereotypes….

And there it is. We cannot stand to have any sort of ruler over us. We are gods, able to create even our own being by our will and desires. We answer to no one and nothing. No reality of what it means to be human defines us—not even our own bodies. We define all. We create all. We transcend all.

It’s madness.

Comments

[e]

So, I'm assuming that Slate now holds that doctors can rearrange actual DNA and replace that Y chromosome with an X, and vice versa?

Foolishness!

[DGFischer]

I hate to sound like some downer Eeyore on the subject, but there is something stunningly wrong with this statement:

>> The world is full of possibilities that every person deserves to be able to explore freely, receiving equal respect and human dignity while maximizing happiness through individual expression.

Each man and woman is evidence against this unrealistic tad of optimism. I, for one, would never have made it as a mother (no matter how contrived and artificial this position in life is crafted). I would never have been a football player, at least beyond my physical self that would have gotten injured in one of the initial plays of such a short-lived career. I am acutely aware of what I know, and the massive reams of knowledge and information that I do not know and find quite beyond my knowing. Experience teaches us our own limitations.

Milloy seems such an unbridled cheerleader of a type of humanism that knows few definitions due to a sad state that definitions are in ways limiting. It confuses the slogan "Be all that you can be" with "You can be all things." The first statement is honest exhortation. The second is just plain silly.

[DGFischer]

One last thought I forgot. In the last portion:

>> while maximizing happiness through individual expression.

Such happiness still will need moral content. The Marquis De Sade sought happiness by his methods. The life of fulfillment allows a lot of rotters to engage in lots of rottenness. Where does ethics, the life of character work into this scheme?

Oh, wait! Those would be deemed obstacles to happiness. Carry on if we must.

[Jim Pemberton]

And here is where liberalism trades on libertarian ideology, extreme as it is.

Actually, this is also a good example of how those who claim to be objective in science show their true subjective colors. Doctors and midwives since women have been giving birth have noticed the gender of a newborn based on objective criteria. Now we are supposed to believe that gender isn't objective? Tell that to the parents who want to know what genitalia their baby has so that they can function within their culture's expectations and within gender-specific needs that have been observed since, well, people have been having babies.

I guess they expect that we should ditch cultural norms in favor of some new culture that has never existed before and for which no one has any expectations, except for the fact that we can expect some backlash for not getting on board. To those who would remove the comfort of social familiarity in favor of an anti-ethical agenda: I for one will see your backlash and raise you some well-balanced kids.

[DR84]

If this means much, the comments on Slate were universally negative to this article. I am somewhat notorious over there for continuing to defend marriage as a union of a man and woman, so I am well aware that that is a highly "progressive/liberal" crowd. I say that in the modern sense of that movement, not in the sense of what it actually means to be liberal and/or progressive. At least at this point this Slate writer's ideas are not at all well received.

[SteveK]

This is what people must do if they are to maintain consistency regarding marriage, human nature, purpose of life, etc. But of course, once you take the position that every individual determines their own reality, you immediately legitimize everything.

[The Great Suprendo]

That article is bonkers.

I could be more constructive than that, but I dont think it warrants it.

It reminds me of Monty Python's "Life of Brian" Loretta sketch.

[Jared Totten]

I suppose even "it's a human" would be too presumptuous until the...thing?...grows up enough to self-identify as homo sapiens...

[Mike Westfall]

> It's called infant gender assignment...

I thought what happened was that the sex of the baby was objectively determined and reported.

So what really happens apparently is that the baby is genderless until a doctor arbitrarily assign it a gender.

Interesting.

But stupid.

[SteveK]

"Woohoo, it's a boy!"...
oops, what I meant to say was "It's an infant!"...
oops, sorry, I mean "It's a human!"...
Dang it, how insensitive of me!...
"Congratulations, it's a thing!"

[Louis Kuhelj]

This is simply an indication that the state of mental health in this country is sub-par. Why would any publication parade those in need of treatment around as their writing staff? I would put the entire management team into sensitivity training for not showing compassion for the mentally ill, which is evidenced by the content of the article in Slate publication.

[JBerr]

Is this for real? For a minute I thought is was sarcasm. You must be kidding.

[WisdomLover]

It's not really remarkable that an insane liberal would say something like this. This has been taught here and there in colleges and universities for over 20 years.

I was once a teacher's assistant in a course that every humanities major and every honors student of any major at my university was compelled to take. In the very first lecture of the class, the professor (who it saddens me to say, was a member of the Philosophy Department...I avoided her courses like the plague) came out and tried to convince students that gender was an arbitrary societal assignment.

She did so by showing the faces of two young children and asking the class which was a boy and which a girl. She slowly revealed more and more of their appearance...they were both dressed in cute sailor outfits. At no point was the gender of either child obvious. In fact, had I been forced to guess, I would have gotten it wrong. Finally you saw that one had long hair and was in a skirt, while the other had short hair and was in shorts. The inference, this genius supposed, was obvious.

Well, I was just a grad student so my options were limited. But in my teaching group, I ran the same proof using pictures of a sack of sugar and a sack of arsenic trioxide. Thus proving that you could use either in your coffee, if it weren't for the societally imposed toxicity-assignment made by the skull and crossbones on the sack of arsenic. I also wrote up my 'proof' and posted it on the bulletin board for the 'core' course. The lecturer I was lampooning did not take it well. Fortunately she moved up to an Ivy-League institution the next year, where she is now tenured.

Perhaps the Slate author took one of her classes. Unlike the sad loss to my Alma Mater's philosophy department, the Slate author is himself a gender confused individual. So, it's possible also that she made all this up himself from pure wishful thinking.

[Quasi-Paul]

I keep expecting someone to finally announce: "the emperor has no clothes."

[Sam Harper]

This reminds me of a line from Little Big Man. "A two legged creature will believe anything." ~Allardyce T. Meriweather

[Amy]

Great story, WL.

[SteveK]

Great story, WisdomLover. I don't know why the professor got upset at your argument when the logic is the same.

[GreekLogic]

Jared's comment excellent. Sometimes my 3-year-old acts like a cat. I suppose now I need to find a doctor who will help me fulfill her desire to be a cat. 'Self-identified homo sapien' is a ridiculous contradiction of terms.

I find it extremely ironic Milloy is making a case against "imposing limits on helpless infants" so that they can grow up to be whatever they want to be since he is a transgendered "female" who can't (for obvious reasons) completely be what he wants to be: a woman. His sex actually has set a limitation on what he can accomplish.

[WisdomLover]

I don't know why the professor got upset at your argument when the logic is the same.

I think she got upset because the logic is the same. It showed that the argument she used to open the entire course was idiotic.