Child abuse in Stockholm

From The Onion comes - wait, it's not from TO? It's from the AP? C'mon, look at the school's name for crying out loud... Well, it's beyond parody all the same:

At the "Egalia" preschool, staff avoid using words like "him" or "her" and address the 33 kids as "friends" rather than girls and boys.

From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don't fall into gender stereotypes.

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Breaking down gender roles is a core mission in the national curriculum for preschools, underpinned by the theory that even in highly egalitarian-minded Sweden, society gives boys an unfair edge.

To even things out, many preschools have hired "gender pedagogues" to help staff identify language and behavior that risk reinforcing stereotypes.

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Lego bricks and other building blocks are intentionally placed next to the kitchen, to make sure the children draw no mental barriers between cooking and construction.

Director Lotta Rajalin notes that Egalia places a special emphasis on fostering an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. From a bookcase she pulls out a story about two male giraffes who are sad to be childless — until they come across an abandoned crocodile egg [ROFLMFAO!].

Nearly all the children's books deal with homosexual couples, single parents or adopted children. There are no "Snow White," ''Cinderella" or other classic fairy tales seen as cementing stereotypes.

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Gender studies permeate academic life in Sweden. Bergkvist noted on her blog that the state-funded Swedish Science Council had granted $80,000 for a postdoctoral fellowship aimed at analyzing "the trumpet as a symbol of gender."

You know it's bad when a professor out of UC Davis has to defend the realities of human biodiversity:

Jay Belsky, a child psychologist at the University of California, Davis, said he's not aware of any other school like Egalia, and he questioned whether it was the right way to go.

"The kind of things that boys like to do — run around and turn sticks into swords — will soon be disapproved of," he said. "So gender neutrality at its worst is emasculating maleness."

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"We use the word 'Hen' for example when a doctor, police [sic--why not "policeperson"?!], electrician or plumber or such is coming to the kindergarten," Rajalin says. "We don't know if it's a he or a she so we just say 'Hen is coming around 2 p.m.' Then the children can imagine both a man or a woman. This widens their view."

Sweden celebrates itself for being among the world's leading nations in the 'global initiative' to end child abuse, most notably by being the first country to outlaw corporal punishment of children by their parents. This is a form of child abuse that is an order of magnitude harsher than spanking ever could be on all the little Swedish hens who happen to have a Y chromosome.

When, despite Egalia's best efforts at mind-bending soft authoritarianism, the young boys do better in math and worse in grammar than the girls do, and want to play football at recess while the girls do hopscotch, will school officials resign themselves to the fact that sexual differences are more than just anatomically deep? Doubtful. I'd bet on a subsequent doubling down, although I don't know how it can get much more absurd than this.