Barney The Transphobe
Condemning Our Kids to Life on Mars or Venus
By Natalie Angier The New York Times
Contributed by Bobby G and Andee W
As a mother of a 2-year-old child, I am rather too intimately acquainted
with a large, purple TV dinosaur named Barney.
I know the lyrics to a number of the show's exhortatory songs (my
personal favorite: "It's time to CLEAN UP! CLEAN UP! 'Cause we want to do our
share!"), and I've attended to the carefully selected multisociocultural
cast.
The rotating group of children has included whites, blacks, Chinese,
Koreans, Hispanics, Arabs, kids in wheelchairs, a blind girl, a boy with a
hearing aid, chubby kids, identical twin kids.
But if there is one thing I have never seen amid the peppy junior
rainbow
coalition it is a child whose sex is at all ambiguous, who is not, in
other words, clearly and unmistakably either a girl or a boy.
Virtually all the girls have long, luxurious hair, the boys short.
And though the girls do wear pants, they as often wear dresses,
accoutred
with nifty striped knee socks or prim white anklets.
Such stylistic options are obviously not open to the Barney boys, who
are
close to horror-struck when they pay an imaginary visit to Scotland and
meet a male bagpipe player wearing a kilt.
"Don't worry," the man assures them.
"This is just for special occasions; normally I dress just like you."
In recent months, it has become almost fashionable to toss around terms
like "transgender" and "meta-sexual." A fall issue of the liberal digest, Utne
Reader, is emblazoned with a picture of a man with breasts and a woman
without.
"It's 2 A.M.," a cover headline says.
"Do you know what sex you are? Does anybody?"
The media has given wide play to the cause of intersexuals, or
hermaphrodites, who reject the notion of the binary sex code and all
surgical attempts to enforce it. Glam rock and its androgynous spoofery is
back, sort of.
We love gender-benders, cross-dressers, and gays when they're
well-behaved.
They're so interesting and cute, and they remind us of how complex and
interdigitating the concepts of maleness and femaleness can be.
How far we've progressed; how nuanced is our thinking!
Except, that is, when it comes to our children.
For our children, the categorical distinctions we make between male and
female remain inviolate, more so, in a sense, than ever before.
After a brief period in the 1970's and early 1980's of questioning
infant
apartheid by pink and blue, the world has "rediscovered" just how
different boys and girls really are. And if you're a parent, you can't get
away from the drumbeat of La Difference.
On commercial television, the advertisements for boys' toys roar, "Smash
'em, hate 'em, annihilate 'em!" while the jingles for girls' toys are so
taffy-sweet you'll go running for the dental floss.
It's not just the crass media.
Everybody reinforces the old truisms.
I go to a party of standard, middle-class Nature Conservancy donor-card
types, and an older boy takes away my daughter's cup of milk.
I jokingly warn my daughter, "You've got to watch out for those older
kids."
No, the boy's mother says.
It's because he's a boy.
A moment later, an older girl grabs away my daughter's cup of milk, but,
um, that doesn't count.
I take my daughter shopping at the local food co-op and wend my way
through aisles of bulk organic kasha and woven hemp shopping bags, and still the
store clerks must comment on how "good" and "nice" little girls are.
"If my son were here," one said, "he'd be pulling everything off the
shelves!" Later, when I get home and my daughter sends an avalanche of
books crashing to the floor and clobbers the cat with a wooden block, I
consider calling the clerk and offering a child swap, but, hey, my
daughter's longish hair is awfully pretty.
Behind the mounting insistence that boys will be boys and girls will
behave,
by birth and by genotype, is, I believe, the rising popularity of fields
like behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology, which habitually
reach sweeping conclusions about deep human nature on the basis of the
scantiest of data. Geneticists find behavioral differences between two
sets of girls with a chromosomal condition called Turner's syndrome, and
the next thing you know they're speculating grandly about a gene for
social graciousness, which girls have but boys don't.
Evolutionary psychologists distribute questionnaires to college students
about what qualities they find attractive in the opposite sex, and the
male students say they like kind, funny, intelligent, considerate,
attractive women; and the female students say they like kind, funny,
intelligent, considerate, industrious men; and evolutionary psychologists
conclude, "Ah ha! Men and women really are different after all -- men want
comely mates, women want ambitious mates, and it has been thus since that
mystical, all-powerful Stone Age."
So if women aim to please, and men aim to get ahead, we may see such
behaviors as the fruits of sexual selection, the need for each sex to
respond to the desires of the other. Which, when scaled down to suit our
pre-sexual children works out roughly as: boys are naturally aggressive,
girls are naturally solicitous.
On average, of course; scientists are always careful to speak of
averages
rather than absolutes.
But still, there you are, and there's my girl, deemed "nice" by nature,
and
there's the boy gestating in the belly of a friend of mine, who will, a
mother of sons assures my friend, "be a radical change" from the daughter
my friend already had.
Barbara Mackoff, a psychologist in Seattle and the author of "Growing a
Girl: Seven Strategies for Raising a Strong, Spirited Daughter" (Dell;
$12.95), points out that we are now using our children to fight the old
battle of the sexes. "The new question is, Who has it worse, boys or
girls?" she said.
"Who is more shortchanged by society?"
On the one hand, girls are said to suffer a crushing loss of
self-confidence
at puberty, and thus to be at a disadvantage relative to boys.
On the other hand, a new line of argument says that boys are worse off,
for
they suffer from comparatively higher rates of conduct disorder, are more
likely to be put on medications like Ritalin, and have a higher risk of
being truants and high school dropouts.
"It's a new war, but the weapons we're using are the same ones we've
always
used in the battle of the sexes, and it always comes down to nature versus
nurture," Dr. Mackoff said.
"Those who argue that boys are shortchanged by this culture insist that
boys
will be boys by nature." As an example, she cites another recent book,
"The Wonder of Boys" (Tarcher; $24.95), in which the author, Michael
Gurian, insists that boys are rambunctious and high-spirited not because
they watch too many crush 'em, mush 'em TV commercials or any other such
"politically correct" reason, but because, yes, testosterone makes them do
it.
Well, some similar psycho-irritant -- estrogen? choler? Saturn in
retrograde? -- makes me resent the persistent emphasis on sexual
dialectics, particularly when it is writ small and applied to my daughter
and her peers.
Are there "innate" sex differences? Possibly, on average, with a
staggering
amount of overlap.
Ho hum!
"There are so many conflicting theories about sex differences that may
never
be resolved," Dr. Mackoff said. "But we don't have to deny that sex
differences may exist, or tackle that problem to the ground, to recognize
that the biggest difference between girls and boys is in how we treat
them.
There is where our effort and focus should be.
As long as we dwell obsessively on sex differences, we're going to put
limits on our kids and shortchange every one of them."
Let me tell you a few things about my girl.
She loves to play with toy animals and insects and already can name as
many
species as the average zoology student. She loves books about practically
anything.
She's fascinated by mechanical vehicles: cars, trucks, planes, vans,
ditch-
diggers, cherry pickers.
She likes dressing up in her mother's shoes and wearing her mother's
lipstick.
She can throw a ball beautifully but is not much of a climber.
She can draw a perfect circle.
She keeps asking us when we're going to take her to the dentist.
From birth, she has struck me and my husband as being straight down the
middle, neither girlish nor boyish by any standard template.
Of course, she is only an N of one, as scientists say, an anecdote, and
not
proof of anything. Eventually, the science of human nature and of sex
differences may get so sophisticated that it actually has something useful
to tell her about herself.
And maybe someday Barney will come to work in a skirt.
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