I'm not sure how I feel about Australia Day. I love our country, I think we are tremendously lucky to live in the freedom and prosperity that most of us enjoy, but when you get right down to it we ARE celebrating a day when Europeans came and started the deliberate and systematic destruction of an indigenous culture. I don't know what the answer is, but I do think it needs to be acknowledged. So I told Abby a little bit about how we remember this stuff on Australia Day, and Abby looked at me and said, "I don't remember". Well, no. She didn't want to talk about that anymore (and fair enough to) so we started talking about the great animals Australia has. We were talking about Kangaroos (of course) and Abby asked, "Mummy, have you ever seen a dead kangaroo on the road?". Right. So we talked a bit about what a dead kangaroo on the road looked like (flat) and missy asks if it was a baby kangaroo or a grown up one. When assured it was a grown up one she told me very solemnly that if kangaroos don't want to get run over they need to look both ways and hold hands, so kangaroos should never try and cross the road by themselves. So I have this lovely image of two kangaroos holding paws as they carefully peer onto the road. I can't wait for her to tell me about zebra crossings!
We went to the Jordan's for lunch today, which was nice. They really do have a great house for entertaining, and two (mostly) lovely girls. They also had some friends from their old church. This includes another little prep girl so Abby had a lovely time playing...stuff. However, I'm afraid I wasn't the best guest!
At one point Mrs Friend (yes, definitely Mrs not Ms) was asking Faye what she knew about what she called 'gender confusion disorder'. Apparently she had a friend with twins she hadn't seen for 6 or so years. When she saw them as infants there was a boy and a girl, and now at six years there were two girls! She was appalled that the parents were trying to get the child's gender changed on the birth certificate, and added that they were seeing a psychiatrist and everything! By this point I was getting a little... heated? and said that although I was no professional this was a topic I had read quite a bit about and that I was uncomfortable calling it a disorder because that implied that it was wrong and should be treated, whereas I believed it was just something that happened sometimes for whatever reason and we should just accept people as whatever gender they identified with.
Whoops.
But wait, it gets better! Apparently, there is talk that this disorder... sorry, issue (cue pointed look at me) was 'caused' by PND in mothers, that when they didn't bond properly their children got 'confused' or something. Well, of course I couldn't let that go, so I pointed out that I was suffering from post natal depression and had experienced trouble bonding with William but that I wasn't terribly worried about his gender identification!
So Mrs Friend decided that it would be fun to talk about the child who has been brought up gender neutral. Now that I was talking I figured I may as well continue -- I said that although I may not entirely agree with the method I completely understood what they were doing. "What, experimenting?" huffs Mrs Friend. No, I said, trying to allow their child to grow up without being influenced by what society thinks they should be rather than what they are. Well, this was never going to end well so I asked Stephanie to show me her room. Did you know that there is no sexism in Australia today? No, me neither.
Do you think I'll be invited back?
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