Heteronormativity ahoy

[nmg]

Scene: I was taking the garklet for a haircut, and we happened to pass a church that was ringing for matins. He asked why the bell was ringing, and misheard 'matins' as the name of one of his friends who moved to Cambridge last year (who I shall refer to as M). The important thing to note is that M is the child of a lesbian couple.
garklet:Where M? nmg:M's in

Comments

[valkyriekaren]

I think once you've been called pooey it's wisest to concede that you've lost the argument.

[oreouk]

I'd probably have gone on to a discussion about the difference between a Mummy or a Daddy and the fact that it took a seed from a man and a seed from a woman to make M but that giving his Mummies the seed didn't make that man a Daddy as such, and so on and so on, but then I'm known for giving my children more complicated answers than they are necessarily ready for!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, if he's got it into his head that children are made by a mummy and a daddy then he won't believe you if you say otherwise. You'd have to differentiate between physical parents and social parents, and that's going to be an interesting conversation the first time you have it :->

[steer]

I guess convincingly establishing the existence of lesbians using videos from the internet would be the wrong approach to take.

[nmg]

Quite possibly.

[moral_vacuum]

But if it were, you'd be the man to source them.

[andrewducker]

I've just remembered a similar tale from my past.

My father's a doctor, and I apparently had a stand-up argument, aged 4-ish with him and a female doctor, in the hospital, about whether it was possible for a woman to be a doctor. They were maintaining that women could be doctors, I was convinced that a female doctor was a _nurse_.

Needless to say it took a while for my Dad to live that one down :->

[nmg]

Oddly enough, that was to be the subject of my next post. I had quite a long conversation with him (in which he got really quite upset) in which he was maintaining that women couldn't be doctors, fire fighters, bus drivers, lorry drivers, soldiers (etc, etc - and despite evidence to the contrary), and that men couldn't be nursery workers (the sole male nursery worker at his place left last year), nurses, teachers (!) and so on.

[andrewducker]

I'm fascinated to know more.

I'm not sure precisely when I got over it, but clearly I did at some point. I wish I knew more.

[bohemiancoast]

For both of these, you see, we had almost none of this with either of ours. And I think that's probably because living in the wild heart of East London, life is so obviously and spectacularly diverse in so many ways that we're more often likely to have the conversation in reverse

[pinguthegreek]

You know, that is absolutely fascinating. I can't imagine that he lives in an environment where he picks up the message that there are male and female jobs. So, I just wonder where he gets that idea from.

[nmg]

Well, quite.

Two days later, he was in nursery with a bunch of his male friends who were pretending to be nurses, complete with caps.

Hmmm. On the other hand, it could be that they were pretending to be female nurses (because all nurses are female, obv).

*Developmental psychology hat on*

[sushidog]

I think he's at that age where they're figuring out sex and gender and gender roles and so on. A lot of children at around that age, for example, are not entirely clear on the idea of gender as being (usually) fixed; so boys will talk about when they grow up to be mummies, or children will ask daddy if he was a little girl or a little boy once. While they're figuring it out, they can often have very fixed (and often erroneous) ideas about it all; they'll decide that wearing a dress or a skirt makes you female while wearing trousers makes you male (even though they know mummy often wears trousers), or, as with garklet, they'll decide that some jobs are absolutely gendered. What they sometimes believe but don't know how to express is that if a man works as a nurse, that means he's female, and if a woman wors as a doctor, that makes her male; or that if two people have a child, one has to be the mummy and one has to be the daddy, regardless of gender

Re: *Developmental psychology hat on*

[nmg]

Thanks! That's pretty much what we've been trying to do so far, but our efforts get hampered a bit because he gets very upset and frustrated when we (gently) contradict him. On the other hand, when he's calmed down and thought about it, he usually comes around.

In the past, we've had similar conversations about whether all four-legged furry animals are cats (age: 2ish) and whether all cars with high visibility stripes are police cars (and not, say, paramedics - age: 2.5ish). With my artificial intelligence scientist hat on, I'd say that he was overfitting, except that most machine learning algorithms don't throw tantrums when you provide counterexamples.