As I celebrate Father’s Day with my dad, barely a month after I celebrated Mother’s Day with my mom, it occurred to me just how backward – and, yes, sexist – these two holidays are. Worse, how much they reinforce the gender binary.
If you only have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, your parents have to pick between being a “mother” or a “father”. Children of a non-binary parent will regress to referring to that person by their biological sex. The children of homosexual couples might have to celebrate both of their parents on the same day, and no one on the other. Or, possibly worse, they or their parents will make an (often sexist) decision on who’s the “man of the house” and who’s the “mother”. (It’s sexist because it assigns things like being the breadwinner to the “father” role, and things like being more sensitive to the “mother”. Obviously, there are countless hard-working women and no shortage of sensitive guys!)
Thoughts like these make it somewhat hard to celebrate Father’s Day with a clean conscience. I can’t help feeling – even though my parents ARE binary and took on the roles of “mother” and “father” – that merely having these moments reinforces incorrect, exclusive, and dangerous notions of what the “proper family” looks like.
However, what’s the alternative? Unfortunately, I don’t know. I’ve got a few ideas, though 🙂
Like this: screw “Father’s” and “Mother’s” and make one holiday – “Parents’ Day”. You get rid of a lot of the assumptions that are harming our society. Assumptions like: 1) You need to have two parents. 2) Your parents are a woman and a man. However, there are plenty of downsides as well, for the families where the current setup has been fine. By collapsing the holidays, you eliminate a special say for each individual parent. It also would ignore the fact that – in most cases – parents ARE women and men, and these two genders tend to have different things they enjoy. In my family, my dad uses Father’s Day to drag my mother to something he likes (such as hiking) that she never would have picked. Same for Mother’s Day. Eliminating these would take that away from gender-binary people.
In short, it’s not the best solution. But doing something – I feel – is better than just letting tradition stand and doing nothing at all. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are two very problematic aspects of our culture, and – in a state (California) where you can no longer have a single-stall public restroom without making it gender-neutral – I’m amazed that we still have these holdovers from a less enlightened age.
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