ideologies of gender

Ideologies of gender and capitol impact all systems in life.  There is no way of getting around it.  Advertisements tell us what to buy and what our lives and relationships should be like.  These ideologies of gender often seem to be quite damaging to women.  However, I think that the absolute destruction of gender categories may be harmful.  In Canada, there is a family that is raising a “genderless baby.”  The parents are refusing to tell anyone the gender of the baby when asked.  The parents want their baby, Storm, to make choices for his or herself about who he/she wants to be.  They don’t want their child to have to be unnecessarily influenced by outside pressures to be something he or she does not want to be.  They home school their two older sons, Jazz, and Kio.  They children are allowed to decide for themselves what they want to learn, how they want to dress, style their hair, and many other choices that are usually determined by the parents of young children.  The boys wear anything from pants to tutus and often wear their long hair in braids.  However, Jazz is already faces some difficulties at just 5 years old.  He hears little girls at the park saying they don’t want to play with the “boy-girl” and he is saddened and offended when people think he is a girl.  So maybe gender categories and ideologies are useful to a certain extent, but they need to be transformed.  At the current moment, they are limiting, and often damaging.  If ideologies of gender were changed by advertising, starting in the family at a young age, then perhaps some progress would be made.  

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1389593/Kathy-Witterick-David-Stocker-raising-genderless-baby.html