It's an X

I am sitting here in the Red Cup having breakfast, and overheard some folks in the next room discussing whether the baby someone is having is going to be a boy or a girl. Actually, these days they can test for such things, and they knew it was going to be a girl.

The folks in the next room were discussing how raising a girl is different than raising a boy. Certainly they are right, certainly it is a very different thing to have a boy child than it is to have a girl child. We are allegedly living in a post-feminist era when the sexes are equal, but still the most important thing anyone wants to know about a baby is, "Is it a boy or a girl?"

But I am an old-school radical lesbian feminist, and I can remember when we were going to change all that. So I did a little bit of web searching to try to find a story I remember reading in Ms. magazine when I was a teenager back in the seventies, a story about a family determined to raise their child so that its gender truly didn't matter.

The story is called "X: A Fabulous Child's Story." The author is Lois Gold, and you can read the whole thing at The Gender Centre. Please do.

Yours for a world in which we don't just bend gender, but smash it into little bits.