In a kindergarten in Stockholm, the parents were encouraged by the preschool teachers - apparently ideological pioneers - to equip their sons with dresses and female first names. There are now weeks in some places when boys HAVE TO wear a dress.
Why give a boy a girl's name and put him in a dress? The general answer is straightforward. According to liberal autonomy theory our status as humans requires us to be self-defining. Therefore, it will be thought progressive in a liberal society to break down traditional gender identities. This might involve encouraging girls to act in masculine ways or, as in the case above, expecting boys to become more feminine.
In Sweden, though, there's more to it than this. The Swedes have adopted patriarchy theory (a more detailed working out of these ideas) as a state policy.
Patriarchy theory begins with the common liberal assumption that our humanity is contingent: that we are only fully human when we are autonomous (i.e. when we are self-determining).
The next step is the observation that women appear to be less autonomous than men. Women traditionally had a life path which was based on a biological destiny (motherhood) rather than a uniquely chosen career; they were financially dependent on their husbands; and they did not have as much formal political power as men to shape social outcomes.
Logically, if women were less autonomous this meant (according to the theory) that they weren't being considered as fully and equally human.
How might this "inequality" be explained? Understandably, there was a reluctance to accept that traditional gender roles were natural, as this implied that women were naturally unequal.
So instead the idea was put forward that existing gender differences were socially constructed by a dominant class in order to exploit an oppressed class. Society itself was organised to invisibly reinforce this patriarchal oppression.
Therefore, you can see what those pioneers in the Swedish kindergartens might be up to. For them, the distinction between boy and girl isn't real - it's an oppressive fiction. Their aim would be to overturn the distinction and destroy the categories of male and female, so that there is only one equal human category.
In patriarchy theory the category of female is the subordinate one. Men represent the autonomous human class and women the inferior "sexed" class. It's logical, then, that liberals should first attempt to de-sex girls and "raise" them toward the masculine ("human") standard.
So in Sweden (as elsewhere) it was girls who were first put in boys' clothing rather than vice versa. One of the girls affected by this was Cordelia of the Viking Princess site, who has complained of her Swedish childhood that:
When going abroad to Southern Europe, I noticed that little girls there usually wore skirts and frequently even pretty dresses. I and my friends very rarely did. In fact I very rarely wore traditionally girly clothes at all. My parents told me that the Southern Europeans wore such clothes because they were old-fashioned, religious and couldn’t afford much clothes anyway. They made all these things sound very bad, which I as a child of course latched on to.
I also dreamed of wearing pink, or perhaps yellow clothes. But looking at photos, it would appear I was mainly in brown corduroy or navy cotton! ... I remember fantasizing about being asked to be a bridesmaid so I could wear a frilly dress and carry a bouquet of pretty cut flowers!
I was aware though that I was not supposed to want such things.
There's no reason to think, though, that a breaking down of traditional gender patterns mightn't also involve feminising boys. This is especially true, when (as seems to be the case in the Swedish kindergartens) there is the added influence of gay activists, with their belief that there is no binary sex distinction between male and female, but that people are spread out on a continuum in their gender and sexual identities.
Which brings me to I blame the patriarchy. This is a popular radical feminist site, authored by an American lesbian feminist. In a recent post, readers were asked to try and define what a woman is.
Here are some typical answers:
Drakyn: Woman=anyone who defines themselves as such.
Shabnam: people whom the patriarchy would like to put in the sex class
Elizabeth: I think a woman is a human being who declares herself to be a woman.
Heather: Woman is a social construction, a myth.
Margarita: I suppose traditionally a woman is defined biologically ... But i also think that if you define yourself as a woman, you are one. All you have to do is think it.
Kristina: In a perfect world, there would be no definition of woman. There would be no definition of man. There would just be human or person.
Curiousgyrl: woman=not man, man=person, woman=that which is not a person.
Jodie: There are no women. There are no men. There are only humans.
Opoponax: Woman: a fictional character.
Kairos Rae: A woman ... is whatever she says she is. There are no women. There are no men. There are only humans ...We are all people, and gender is a social disease... a cultural construction ...
PDXstudent: I wonder if because “woman” is constructed in patriarchy it makes sense to say that woman does not exist at all.
Edith: “man” and “woman” are only categories that exist because of the patriarchal need for them ... after the revolution, men and women won’t exist ...
Tina: How come we have to differentiate between one and the other?
The author of the site replied to these observations in a separate post:
Yesterday I asked yew-all what the word ‘woman’ means ...
Several of you clever young onions hit upon what I consider to be the point of the exercise, which is that ‘woman’ is a load of crap; defining it is impossible except in terms of patriarchy, which means that sex is virtually indistinguishable from gender, socially, philosophically, and scientifically ...
Sex, though advertised as ‘fact’, cannot in fact be fact, since it cannot be defined or quantified or observed. Since it is not a fact, it must be a fiction. Therefore, ‘woman’ is nothing but a narrative intended to sell the idea that male abuse of the sex class is congruent with essential biological truths.
Get the idea? First, there's the emphasis on self-definition, so that we can simply define ourselves to be either male or female and that a woman is whatever she defines herself to be (which makes being female pointless).
Then there's the additional thought that gender is a social construct, and that those categorised as women are non-persons.
Finally, there's the desire to entirely abolish the sex distinction in favour of one equal human category. For the more radical women this means denying not just gender difference but even the validity of categorising people as male and female based on physical characteristics.
It's all a long way from home. Such ideas might appeal to butch lesbians who don't easily fit into a mainstream femininity. They shouldn't, though, seem reasonable to ministers of state.
The Swedish state finds itself in strange company, pursuing a false theory to ever more unrealistic conclusions.