Self-confessed radical feminist gave her baby son a neutral name ‘Sasha’ and now she regularly dresses Sasha, 5, in girls’ clothes.

Slycek · 2012-01-21T05:09:08+00:00

I can kinda see what she's trying to say, but she actively disregards it when she dresses him herself. If anything, she should just lay out an assortment of clothes and let him pick them.

The_Opposite_View · 2012-01-21T10:08:32+00:00

Brad Laxton gave his baby girl a neutral name and for months refused to tell anyone if she was a boy or a girl. Now he regularly dresses Sasha, 5, in boys’ clothes. He tells The_Opposite_View why.

SITTING in a circle at a father and baby group, the new dads excitedly introduced themselves and their infants, each adorably clad in a pink or blue. Except one.

“I was the last person to introduce myself, and I said: ‘I’m Brad, and this is Sasha’. And of course somebody said straight away: ‘So is it a boy or a girl?’ and I said: ‘I’m not going to tell you,’” grins Brad Laxton.

“I discovered later that I’d been described as ‘that loony man who doesn’t know whether his baby is a boy or a girl’. And I could never persuade anyone in the group to come round for coffee. They just thought I was mental . . .”

A self-confessed ‘mens rights activist’, Brad never intended to have children, until a romance with a mother-of-three changed his mind. The relationship didn’t last, but the biological pull did and, aged 39, he began to explore surrogacy. Then he met Kelly: “I don’t believe in love at first sight, but it pretty much was. Ka-pow! She moved in less than three months later.”

Kelly already had two young children, and was happy to have another. A year later, Kelly became pregnant, but finding out the sex at the ultrasound scan was a definite no-no.

An idea began to form in Brads head. What if no-one knew the sex of his baby, even when it was born? The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea, and duly drew up a list of gender-neutral names.

They broke the news to family and close friends by email, simply stating they’d had a baby called Sasha, “and there were a couple of people who assumed it was a girl, because that’s the default: something’s female unless you say it isn’t,” says Brad.

At their (television-free) home, Sasha, now 5, is encouraged to play with gender-neutral toys, as well as plenty of trucks and dinosaurs (“but not guns; they're banned because they're horrible”), and Brad won’t dress her in overtly feminine clothes: no fairies, ponies or sparkles.

Conversely he’s happy to put Sasha in blue, partly for money-saving reasons: hand-me-downs from Kellys sons now fit her, and Brad is a self-confessed jumble sale rummager: “and if you buy second hand, you have to take what there is.”

But he also admits to an ulterior motive: to make dads who choose overtly ‘boyish’ garb for their sons think about what they’re doing.

“These men dress them up like action heroes, but they’re not dressed like that, so why are they doing it to their children?

Two Christmases ago, Brad sent an email card to friends and family featuring a picture of Sasha dressed as a wrestler. Her all-in-one red outfit – complete with snarling wrestler mask – is undeniably an eyebrow-raiser too: “But children like shiny things,” insists Brad. “And if someone thought Sasha was a boy because she was wearing that outfit, then what effect would that have?”

TL;DR - Put your thang down, flip it and reverse it (to get a better understanding of issues like these)

EDIT: TL;DR

bikemaul · 2012-01-21T05:30:00+00:00

Rad-fem: “She can’t climb a tree because she’s wearing a skirt, so then she can’t climb very well. But you did that, because you shaped her environment. You shaped what she could do!”

Then she proceeds to put her child into a fairy tutu. Hmmm.

DeepFriedChildren · 2012-01-21T07:16:09+00:00

Poor kid, they wouldn't allow him too dress like a male even if he wanted to. This whole thing appears to be a direct result of the child being a male, since they apparently had no issue with their daughter dressing in overtly female clothing.

These people make me sick, parents aren't something you should have to recover from.

TracyMorganFreeman · 2012-01-21T08:29:07+00:00

Those clothes don't look gender neutral...

Roddy0608 · 2012-01-21T10:37:41+00:00

I think she has a point but is going too far. The child has to be free to choose for him or herself.

Edit: When I was a child, I used to be envious of girls because they had long hair but my hair was kept relatively short. Even the teachers at school would try to enforce this by telling boys to keep their hair short. When I was about 15 years old, I just started growing my hair and stopped caring about what people thought about it. It feels good to go my own way.

pizzaman42 · 2012-01-21T07:11:18+00:00

The gender blank slate theory was debunked a long time ago. This women is nuts and will harm her child.

cynwrig · 2012-01-21T04:52:04+00:00

Don't you hate it when parents use children to make a political statement.

iambrandon · 2012-01-21T06:59:23+00:00

I have a feeling all this will do is make the kid against this sort of radical stuff when he's older. Not to mention the abuse he'll get at school from his peers which could cause other issues.

CharlieTango · 2012-01-21T05:25:48+00:00

Their is a family in canada who is raising a gender neutral child. The parents are the only ones that know what sex the child is, and they are letting...it decide what gender ...it wants to live as.

Sort of an interesting experiment, but i have a feeling the parents are going to pressure him or her to chose the opposite sex so that media will cover it.

doublicon · 2012-01-21T08:38:44+00:00

I see where she is coming from, but if she wants men to accept female specific clothing then it would be better if she convinced adult men to champion skirts rather then have children take the hit.

Whisper · 2012-01-21T05:23:27+00:00

Yeah, he's not gonna have aaaannnyyyy issues when he grows up.

sbrbrad · 2012-01-21T14:41:07+00:00

"I want my child to be gender neutral so he can't dress in overtly masculine things! But tutus and dresses and tights and etc etc are perfect!"

2012-01-21T14:38:59+00:00

This also made me think of Angelina Jolie's daughter. She passes as a little boy, but they claim to let her choose her own style. I don't see how it will harm her in the end.

iaH6eeBu · 2012-01-21T15:24:39+00:00

While I think gender roles have to become more relaxed, I don't think trying to do that with your child is the right thing. Just think about all the harassment the child may have to face.

Also I think this looks a bit like the woman wanted a girl and now has a boy.

AllDueRespect · 2012-01-21T09:06:18+00:00

The bigger question is who stuck their dick in crazy?

bikemaul · 2012-01-21T05:24:29+00:00

[permanently deleted]

adios27 · 2012-01-21T04:45:47+00:00

Let's call child services..

2012-01-21T08:57:58+00:00

I sure hope I have a kid one day I can perform loosely defined social experiments upon. If I have a second one, I can even make them the control child.

drinkthebleach · 2012-01-21T06:29:06+00:00

I feel bad for this poor kid. Child services should act on this case.

2012-01-21T10:33:03+00:00

But for Beck, slotting a child into a ‘male’ or ‘female’ box isn’t just idiotic, it’s potentially damaging. “It affects what they wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that they become.”

And instead she chose to slot him into the "unsure" box, which is a hell of a lot more restrictive. I'm pretty sure most bullying is against outliers and kids that don't fit in. Good luck, champ.

ajleece · 2012-01-22T01:44:33+00:00

The amount of hypocricy (spelling.. ) by that women is outstanding.

zoobiezoob · 2012-01-21T15:19:01+00:00

In america people can raise and fuck up their kids any way they please. that includes raising them to be wimps, jocks, republicans, bed-wetting liberals, pop music fans or christians. Just the price of freedom.

EndlessEvent · 2012-01-21T12:35:05+00:00

No 'overtly masculine clothes', but she gives him fairy costumes and pink clothing? Only 'sex-neutral toys', but she gives him plenty of dolls too?

It's hogwash she doesn't want him to identify with a gender. She simply doesn't want him to be a boy, it seems.

I hope that when puberty starts, the boy will fight for his right to express his true gender identity. Always happens to boys raised under these horrific circumstances. You can't suppress gender, because it is not a patriarchal lie or something. Gender identity has been proven by social science over and over again, and political correctness, brainwashing boys to be girls and wishful thinking will never change that.

chavelah · 2012-01-21T13:00:05+00:00

I actually think this kid might be OK - especially compared to the kid in Canada whose gender actually IS a secret. If he was running around naked in the garden at a year old, and is being sent to a school that has a gendered dress code, then everybody he interacts with on a daily basis knows he's male and he's being socially conditioned as a male no matter what his parents think.

In a couple of years, he's going to start self-imposing limits on the bling and the flowery tops unless he is in the privacy of his home - and while that may be socially appropriate, it's also a little sad. There is no particular reason that a 7 y.o. needs to have a strong inhibition against cross-dressing. It serves no genuine purpose other than to comply with an archaic social rule.

I don't usually nod my head in agreement a lot as I am reading articles by/about radical feminists, but I thought her perspective on the way we gender-segregate babies and toddlers with their clothing was spot-on. It's overt and ridiculous. Fucking hair clips, I fucking hate them. And while very young children can be genuinely interested in sports, my son wasn't and why the fuck were all the T-shirts emblazoned with sports shit? And skulls and other violent imagery are inappropriate for young children of either gender!

dollyknot · 2012-01-21T09:50:48+00:00

Evolution to me seems to be the way life works, two sexes are everywhere in the birds the bees, the fish and the trees.

So why have two sexes?

I think the key is in sexual dimorphism or the difference between the sexes.

Take our clade, the 'great apes' (defined by our lack of tails), so we have gibbons, gorillas, bonobos, chimpanzees, orangutans and us.

Take the size difference with the gorillas it is big, the male is much bigger than the female this suggests to me that sexual selection is more active, so over time the entire species of gorillas will get bigger. Compare that to gibbons it is hard to tell them apart in terms of sexual identity, this suggests to me that as a species they are optimized and don't need to change in terms of the environment they have evolved for, the killer fact being they are monogamous.

Only 3% of mammals are monogamous.

Gorillas have a strict harem and woe betide any other male that goes near one of the silver back's females.

Chimpanzees have a loose harem there is trouble, if the females stray, but not so much as with the gorillas.

Interestingly with the bonobos anything goes and they have sex like we shake hands the only relationship that has not been observed to happen is between mother and son, the only kind of competition that has been observed is sperm competition, which is why bonobos have enormous testicles but are smaller than chimpanzees.

So where does human sexuality fit into this context, well for a start males tend to be bigger than females, so where does this fit with, this women trying to emasculate her son.

In a sense women are more conservative in a non political sense than men, this makes sense in terms of species survival.

Imagine a ship with a hundred people and it shipwrecks, there are 99 females and one fertile male, if the island was left alone for a few hundred years then visited, the chances are you would find a viable population were the numbers reversed, ie one fertile female and 99 males it would not last very long. In terms of species survival females are more valuable than males.

It is very hard to generalize in these matters because there are always exceptions, but I think there are inherent truths in these affairs.

The Chinese have the very interesting concept of yin and yang which are in a sense a kind of universal sexuality. Looking around the planet one can see this in different cultures. Like Germany is stated as the fatherland and in England it is stated as the motherland. This also resonates with the idea of left wing and right wing politically.

The female brain is less laterally specialized than the male brain, this has been observed in the speed of stroke recovery, women have a thicker corpus callosum than men.

The moot point being, the speed of evolution being controlled by the amount of sexual dimorphism, degendered cultures evolve slower than gendered cultures, if change is needed, the swingometer goes more yang, this women is trying to slow down the change in human culture.

RareApparel · 2012-01-21T07:30:15+00:00

shit like this really grinds my gears. it's clumping equal treatment of human beings regardless of gender in with treating gender function the same. such bullshit. guess what feminists? men are created differently than women. HOLY SHIT DOES THAT BLOW YOUR MIND OR WHAT? i bet when i said "differently" your mind replaced it with "better". well heres the thing that we all know, men do certain things way better (by friggin design) than women, and you women do things 1000000x better than men. deal with it.

/rant

ConfirmedCynic · 2012-01-21T16:53:17+00:00

Not a fit parent, in my opinion.

SlimThugga · 2012-01-21T16:58:23+00:00

Fuck, lady, just admit you wanted a girl and give your baby up for adoption already instead of taking it out like that, jeez.

sjmoore · 2012-01-21T11:19:49+00:00

I seem to be the only one who agrees with her. I thought MRAs were against gender roles too, and supported LGBT

Grapeban · 2012-01-21T15:40:05+00:00

Hmm, I don't like that she seems to making some kind of moral/political statement by doing this to her kid, but I still don't oppose it.

What she is doing is not assuming that her child is cis-gendered, or is happy confoming to what is expected of his gender. I see no problem with doing that.

Basically, she's doing the right thing, not for the best reasons.

2012-01-21T14:37:21+00:00

I don't see the problem. What harm does it do? If the kid grows up straight, he grows up straight. If he grows up gay, he grows up gay. It's whats in his head and not what's on his body that's going to determine it.

And if he looks back in shame because of the things he wore, well he can join the club. I have school photos where I was dressed in embarrassing things. My hair was a mess, I had a lopsided smile and accessories falling off of me.

If he's a smart and a confident child, he won't be destroyed by the idea that his hand me down clothes weren't up to par. I think he will be able to laugh it off and go on with his life as a normal person.

2012-01-21T11:19:45+00:00

Welp, that's going to lead to some dead people in the middle east in 15 years.

Damonisaprick · 2012-01-21T08:49:15+00:00

That kid is going to grow to be a faggot.

2012-01-22T02:47:38+00:00

Gender roles. MRAs only like them when they are convenient and try to claim women and feminists do this.

Wow.

Title	Self-confessed radical feminist gave her baby son a neutral name ‘Sasha’ and now she regularly dresses Sasha, 5, in girls’ clothes.
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	85
Comments	147
Date	January 21, 2012 4:35 AM UTC (14 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/opumy/selfconfessed_radical_feminist_gave_her_baby_son/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/self-confessed-radical-feminist-gave-her-baby-son.1028947 https://theredarchive.com/post/1028947

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