Gender Neutral Kindergarten in Sweden

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by ScandalAndy

This is not my most thought out response, so apologies if it's a bit convoluted, but I'm not saying that the problem is gender, i'm saying the problem is the arbitrary definitions assigned therein and the injustice that results.

Also, i'm seeing a lot of binary terminology here, and that really gets my goat. Again with the division into A or B, opposites, whatever. It's not true in nature or life in general so I dislike that it's being touted in a thread where my entire point is that it's ludicrous to think we can divide things into neat little oppositional categories and find a way for everyone to explore these categories without bias or judgment.

For the sake of brevity, I'm using binaries because--quite honestly--I don't want to type out every *possible* combination of gender expressions that human beings might be capable of. That strikes me as convoluted. So let's start here, what would a less arbitrary definition be?

Humans categorize. To use language is to categorize. The moment I call something a bird, I am tacitly making the statement that the animal I'm speaking of is not a mammal. When I speak about a land-mammal, I am tacitly making the statement that I'm not talking about water-fowl or water-dwelling mammals. I can't talk about water-dwelling mammals without making two distinctions, mammals and everything that isn't a mammal and water-dwelling and everything that is not water-dwelling.

Again, my concern is that the new normative will be "thou shalt not have a defined gender expression". Therefore, it will be fine as long as one is not identified with 'he' or 'she' in any kind of consistent fashion. What does it look like when we no longer have these arbitrary categories? What does our language sound like? How do we keep 'gender-neutral' (whatever that might mean) from being the new normative position?

Cheers
Aj