Comment by jcbrand | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcbrand | Hacker News Reader

I would be in favour of a gender neutral pronoun, but some of the things mentioned in the article just seem off to me.

> One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys "gender-coded" them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys.

"gender-coded"? Is it because the boys said that only men/boys can drive/play with cars?

If the adults allowed girls equal access to play with the cars, they could, either explicitly or via the fact of girls playing with the cars, negate that notion.

> Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely "stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.

I wonder how these micro-managed and sheltered children will fare when they one day have to travel to or live in a different society where there is chauvinism, bullying, elbowing for hierarchy etc.

If the adults allowed girls equal access to play with the cars, they could, either explicitly or via the fact of girls playing with the cars, negate that notion.

My mother in law tells the story that when her kids were small she was determined to raise them free of sexist gender norms. One of the things she did was get some dolls for her son and, for a few hours a day, she would hide his cars to make sure the dolls got equal time. This lasted until one day she looked into a room where he was playing with the doll by running it along the floor yelling "vroom vroom!" She brought out the cars and that was the end of that.

Being norwegian I can tell you the scandinavian model tends to encourage a certain special ignorance of the human condition. You come out with a naive utopian view of the world and how it should behave, then have to have reality hammered into you by the real world.

I think it's just a different kind of ignorance and it always reminds me of the saying "the road to hell is paved with good intentions"

The last paragraph really bothered me, but I'm not entirely sure why; it felt authoritarian, thought police etc.

That aside, the idea of a gender neutral pronoun sounds good to me. I'd also like a specifically plural "you", for example when you're talking to a representative of a company and want to refer to the company rather than the representative.

> live in a different society where there is chauvinism, bullying, elbowing for hierarchy

Oh there's plenty of that in the Nordic Countries too. After all, we're not a different species over here.

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