This is interesting.  If you ever want an odyssey through middlebrow America, scroll through the comments section.  Even the mildly supportive people are completely clueless.  I can’t believe how few people understand sex versus gender.

With respect to confusion, any departure from the child-rearing script will leave apparently leave your kids “confused.”  I’ve never gotten this.  Childhood, and particularly adolescence, is incredibly confusing.  Life is confusing; consciousness and existence themselves continue to befuddle philosophers.  I don’t see the great evil in confusion, since everyone has to make their own decisions and come to their own conclusions about any number of things in life, and “confusion” seems like a too-convenient excuse for anything that people disapprove of.  Momentary disorientation is not the same thing as a crippling, lifelong state of anxiety and psychic vertigo.

Allow “Heather Has Two Mommies” in the library?  No–that will confuse Janie.  Knowing that there’s such a thing as a lesbian will be so extraordinarily bamboozling that Janie will not be able to do long division, or breathe.  You know what’s confusing?  Why people feel the need to suppress reality.  Their motives confuse me.

As far as gender being an abstract concept, people seem to think that this kid will grow up to be Nell.  It seems clear to me that the parents aren’t keeping anything from their child.  They’re just cognizant that, no matter how much they themselves refrain from pushing gender roles, the bombardment of messages–overt or subtle–is relentless.  Normativity is an assault on all five senses.  They want this child to live as free from that aspect of culture as is feasible.  Maybe they’re obsessive purists, and maybe they’re levelheaded and kind.  Impossible to tell.

I don’t think this kid is going to grow up ignorant of what a penis is, or whether or not what s/he has is actually called a vagina.  If anything, I’d bet these parents feel comfortable discussing sex with their kids at an early age.  If Pop is a boy who wants to wear dresses, they’d probably be okay with that.  This is to be applauded.

I can’t see this eccentricity of parenting as being any worse than home-schooling, which tends to produce robotic drones with impeccable grammar but it nonetheless widely tolerated and even encouraged.  The paranoia that this child will be teased in school is kind of hilarious.  Kids tease everyone, and the only way to avoid it is to order your kids to be just like everybody else, or, failing that, be extremely popular.  The same people who obsess over excessive mommying of boys and a culture of “Everyone’s a Winner!” retreat to their fainting couches whenever alternatives to the mainstream emerges.