🐱 the birth of the gender-neutral ‘theyby’

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/26/steven-pooles-word-of-the-week


Babies are so passe, even royal ones. The hip new thing to have is a “theyby”, according to a trend spotted by New York magazine that sees parents bringing up their offspring in a gender-neutral fashion.

There was of course nothing gender-specific about the “ba-“ part of “baby”, which is already a diminutive form of the original English word “babe”. The Oxford English Dictionary says that its origin is probably onomatopoeic – two syllables of “ba”, which is a typical “early infantile vocalisation”. So while a baby can call itself a baba, even if by accident, it will take much longer to pronounce itself a “theyby”.

So “theyby” here points to the desired attitude of others, rather than removing any bias from the traditional description of the object in question.
It is often unimportant whether such bias really existed anyway: replacing “mankind” with “humankind” hurts no one.)

Meanwhile, the possibilities for today’s theybies seem endless. If they need looking after they can go to theycare. In time they will even eat gender-neutral smoked-pork slices (theycon) on a Saturday morning while reading a language column in a theyper.

 

[Bassomatic]

I really hate child abuse, that's all I'll say here.

 

[ObeseScreamingBlackMan]

This is going to result in a whole generation hating their parents. The amount of millenial parents being put into homes by their kids and ignored for the rest of their and, miserable lives is going to be astronomically high. Reality doesn't give a fuck about fake shit like intersectionality. We're going to see a rebellion unheard of. These kids are going to RIP apart their parents progressive ideals because of mistreatment like this.

I kind of hope that Gen Z is the second coming of the Yuppie generation of the 1980s. And that they regard SJW millennials and Gen X with the same snarling disdain the yuppies had for the various counter-culture groups of the 60s and 70s.

 

[TowinKarz]

Its been pointed out before, but I'd just like to remind everyone, the same people who spent the last 25 years telling us you can't change it if you're born homosexual, you can't help what turns you on, and gay isn't a choice, are now trying to tell everyone that your chromosomes are a social construct, your genitals mean nothing and your sex and gender are TOTALLY A CHOICE!!!!

 

[Dysnomia]

The opposite, in fact, when rebelling against your parents will mean calling yourself by your biological gender and using non-made up pronouns, being 100% heterosexual and proud of it, and wanting to make something of yourself other than being a victim.

Oh I can't wait!

And really, "theyby"? Baby is a gender neutral word. It's like they are insinuating that it's got to be "male default" and therefore must be changed to be inclusive to all theybykind.

Raising a kid gender neutral is going to cause all kinds of messed up problems. Have fun when your kid has a serious identity crisis and can't figure out their sexuality because mom and dad want xir to be neutral but xey feel so biologically gendered. Now they will disappoint their parents if they come out as biologically male or female.

Can't wait for this whole SJW generation to just be old people no one listens to. The new "I walked 40 miles uphill to school barefoot in the snow" will be "I was misgendered at Starbucks and left a nasty tweet on their official Twitter. All my followers liked my tweet."

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

These parents are setting their kids up for failure lmao. Theybies will be the new social outcasts.

Theybies will probably be leading the alt-right revival of the 2030s as thousands of the now-teenaged theybies discover a fantastic way to rebel against their parents. One of these former theybies will probably become the next Hitler.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

These people missed a golden opportunity to call it a "Maybe."

 

[Billy_Sama]

I am still waiting for the spartan neutral term to come about, "it"

 

[Douglas Reynholm]

These people missed a golden opportunity to call it a "Maybe."

May as well skip the bull and just call it a "gaybe". Hard to imagine anyone using the nonsensical term would even allow their little one to grow up to be 'cis-hetero scum'.

 

[CWCissey]

The salt from their elders will be the stuff of legends.

Damn these kids! All they do is work for their money and have healthy relationships!

 

[Coccxys]

Why does "raising your kids gender neutral" usually mean forcing your kid to dress like and play with toys that are considered to be for the other sex? So many of these gender neutral parents end up dressing they son in a pink dress and giving him dolls to play with, that ain't gender neutral, that's raising a serial killer.

 

[Ineedahero]

Found this.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=id=mOqWK7qlg18;t=50

Tucker Carlson sounds a lot like Asterios Kokkinos when he does his mock theyby parent voice.

 

[Ebonic Tutor]

Why does "raising your kids gender neutral" usually mean forcing your kid to dress like and play with toys that are considered to be for the other sex? So many of these gender neutral parents end up dressing they son in a pink dress and giving him dolls to play with, that ain't gender neutral, that's raising a serial killer.

My guess is they kind of have something akin to what happens in China going on. Just that they want girls and not evil white males.

 

[Mrs Paul]

Its been pointed out before, but I'd just like to remind everyone, the same people who spent the last 25 years telling us you can't change it if you're born homosexual, you can't help what turns you on, and gay isn't a choice, are now trying to tell everyone that your chromosomes are a social construct, your genitals mean nothing and your sex and gender are TOTALLY A CHOICE!!!!

Yeah, doesn't this also negate the whole being trans is not a choice? Being trans is actually pretty rare, so if you're that enlightened, just wait and see what happens, don't go out of your way to make EVERYTHING thing neutral. Jesus. The kid will probably end up rebelling by being uber-girly/boyish.



Something kinda like that happened with my cousin's oldest. Her mother didn't like pink, so she painted the nursery purple. Guess what their daughter's favorite color ended up being? (Of course, they both just laugh about it, rather than freak out, because they're not fucking insane.)

 

[uncleShitHeel]

This generation that millennials are raising is going to be the most fragile and mentally ill set of people we've ever seen, isn't it?

Yes. Most of the millenals and their offspring need a bullet.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

My guess is they kind of have something akin to what happens in China going on. Just that they want girls and not evil white males.

Those two groups could marry each other to make millions of copies of Brianna and Frank Wu.

 

[Diana Moon Glampers]

I think this phenomenon of parents seeming to over-offer kids cross-gender toys makes a lot of sense in light of changing demographics.

In the United States in the 1970s, the most common number of children for a family to have was four. Four kids, we don't even think of that as the norm, today that's a pretty big family unless you live in Utah, but there were more four-children households than three-children households, and more five children households than two-children households.

If you're a kid growing up in the suburbs in the 1970s, your block filled with residents similar to your family's age and socioeconomic status, even if you play only with your next door neighbors' kids and the kids across the street and your siblings, that's 15 other kids on average to play with.

This means it's relatively unlikely that even a single household has all boys or all girls, but pretty much vanishingly unlikely that all the neighbor kids in your direct line of sight as a kid are all boys or all girls.

There didn't need to be a real fascination with opposite-sex toys in these households, because more toys were unisex, and the ones that weren't were lying around somewhere you could see them and pick them up and play with them if you wanted. Maybe someone would give you shit for trying on a girl dress-up costume or whatever, but there was no great mystery about them, and a lot of the "Free to Be You and Me" generation was cool with kids playing with whatever they found, no matter if Johnny had a doll and Marcia wanted a short haircut and to play softball.

Today, the most common number of children for an American household is 2. And among affluent white people, 1 is far, far more common than 3, and in many cities more common than 2. So you get parents raising only children in an environment where maybe they're arranging "play dates" for their kids, but often they only have little girls come and play with little girls, and little boys with little boys, from a very early age, and there's tons of families where there's either only boys or only girls.

So a natural curiosity phase about opposite-sex stereotyped objects that a lot of kids go through (and that a lot of them, from a vantage point as adults where they're comfortable in their sex and sexuality, remember with fonndness as childish experimentation they're glad they got to engage in) can't evolve in the absence of opposite-sex peers to interact with.

Parents realize their kid is missing out on something they'd have gotten, some expanded horizons they'd have had if the boys had been able to play with their sister's dolls and the girls had been able to catch a ball with their brothers. So they try to make it so the kid gets access to those things, and they want their kid (as likely as not their sole genetic contribution to the world) to be extra special and beyond categories, because they're not going to have enough kids to see a lot of the categories their kids could have been.

 

[José Mourinho]

This seems like one of those “wxmyn” exaggerated ones except it’s for real.

 

[Wallace]

Why does "raising your kids gender neutral" usually mean forcing your kid to dress like and play with toys that are considered to be for the other sex? So many of these gender neutral parents end up dressing they son in a pink dress and giving him dolls to play with, that ain't gender neutral, that's raising a serial killer.

It comes from parents seeing their kids as accessories to get more Facebook likes. The more eyes you can draw, the more you can convince yourself that you're popular and trendy.

People give Boomers shit for being self-centered, but Millennials are far, far worse.

 

[vhstape]

The parents are also called jokes now

 

[Sinner's Sandwich]

FUCKING DISGUSTING. This will traumatize the children for life. NO one can chose their sex.