"Before our daughter left for Camp Gesher, a Habonim Dror camp in Ontario, we received a parent handbook that included a new section on the camp’s gender-inclusion policies. My brother had shared it with me because he was active on the board and felt proud of the work they had done to educate staff and parents and put these policies on paper. When I looked at the handbook, I saw that the language was similar to other gender-inclusion policies in the Reform camp movement, articulating the values of inclusivity and LGBTQ-positivity that the staff had already demonstrated. We knew that Gesher’s progressive, socialist values would make it a good fit for her. We weren’t disappointed. When we dropped her off at camp earlier this summer, she was given a name tag and asked to choose her pronouns from a sheet full of labels with different options. I was not surprised when she picked “she/her” without any hesitation, as her own identity as a girl has never been ambiguous.
Still, I was personally touched by this small effort to help LGBTQ+ children and staff feel like they belong at camp. After all, I identify as queer myself, and I wasn’t always comfortable being out in Jewish contexts as a teenager. These issues are important to our daughter, too: She has two moms, and when she first started elementary school, she was the only one in her class with same-sex parents. She has had to explain more than once that she doesn’t have a dad—not because he died, but because we used a donor. So this has been an important issue for our whole family, long before it was time for camp.
When we introduced ourselves as her two moms to the first counselor we met at Gesher, she told us she was queer, too. This also made me happy, because I knew her counselors would be accepting of her family structure and I could see the glow on our daughter’s face as well."
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Lady - you are totally messing up your daughter. What she needs is a father and a normal two parent home. Research - and intuition - show that fathers are very important. Not a crazy camp that asks little kids to decide what gender they are.
Poor her.
