By David Futrelle
Let’s take another trip to the Am I the Asshole subreddit, where a young father has come forward with a simple question: “[Am I The Asshole] for wanting another child?”
You’ll be shocked and stunned to learn that the question isn’t quite so simple after all. Admitting that his particular quandary might prove “controversial,” the Reddit daddy, calling himself iwntanthrkid, explains his situation:
When my wife and I got married we agreed that we would have 2 kids unless both were girls, then we’d have a 3rd to try for a boy.
Already I don’t like this guy.
I’m a guy’s guy and I grew up with only brothers so I feel strongly that I want a son to bond with. That’s not to say that I don’t love my daughter equally. I just want to raise someone to follow in my footsteps with sports and girls and stuff.
Uh, the first illusion, or at least one of the first illusions, you should give up when you have kids is the idea that you can and/or should raise them to “follow in your footsteps.” They’re not little clones of you. Let them make their own paths in life.
After some convincing, my wife agreed to this but said that if the 3rd kid was a girl, we’d stop trying.
“After some convincing.”
Anyway, we ended up having one boy (8 years old) and one girl (5 years old). This background is important because you need to know that having a 3rd kid was something that was on the table.
Oh crap, now it’s going to get really bad, isn’t it.
Last month, our son told us that he likes boys. This is totally fine,
Yeah, then why are you writing to Reddit about it?
I’m not a homophobe, but I’m starting to feel like I want to have a 3rd kid so we can try to have a straight boy.
I love my son more than anything and I wouldn’t love a straight kid more than him, but at the end of the day I wanted to be able to bond with one of my kids over traditional masculine stuff, which includes women.
What the fuck, dude. First of all, obviously you ARE a homophobe. And second, what the fuck do you mean by “bonding” with a son over women? Are you going to go to Hooters together and ogle the waitresses’ boobs? Are you going to tell him in graphic detail about all the hot babes you’ve banged? Are you going to say creepy things about the girlfriends he brings home?
Trust me, no boy gay or straight wants to hear his dad’s horny opinions about women.
My wife doesn’t think that this is a good reason to have a 3rd kid.
Well, your wife is right, and you’re damn lucky she even puts up with your sad ass.
She said that she would be open to having a 3rd kid but that she finds my reasoning disgusting and she doesn’t think she can go through with it knowing the reason for me wanting one.
Good. I’m surprised she even wants to stay married to you.
I don’t think she understands how special it is for a father to have a son who can follow in his footsteps.
Fuck you.
Am I the asshole or is she overreacting?
The AITA subreddit collectively came down on the “asshole” side of this question, and several of the commenters suggested that his wife should probably divorce him, pronto. I can’t say I disagree with them. He’s going to be a terrible father to his gay son. And, I imagine, to his daughter as well.
LGBTQ kids, like all kids, deserve to be raised by parents who not only love them but also don’t secretly resent them for not being little clones of them.
HAPPY PRIDE MONTH! Here’s some brain bleach.
Ok, that last one isn’t specifically a Pride Month gif, but come on, it’s a dog driving a mower!
We Hunted the Mammoth is independent and ad-free, and relies entirely on readers like you for its survival. If you appreciate our work, please send a few bucks our way! Thanks!
@Fenton said:
The father reported that his son told him and his wife that he (the son) likes boys. Presumably, those are the son’s own words.
The son has spoken and says he likes boys. Trying to pass this off as “the father’s interpretation” is complete and utter bullshit. Trying to second-guess what the son meant or how he really feels is bullshit.
Stop engaging in bullshit.
Maybe it’s because I was a late bloomer, but the idea of thinking of an eight-year-old as straight or gay is incomprehensible to me.
You know, I don’t recall ever having a “girls are icky” phase personally, though I did get to a point of being self-conscious about liking “girly” things. I just remember feeling like the “girls are icky” attitudes depicted in shows were rather exaggerated in my personal experience. I did later on go through the motions of internet boards and their performative hatred of female-coded things like boy bands and fanfiction, but somehow it never really got ingrained in me the same way it seems to have been ingrained in others (though I’ll admit that it was to some extent). I discovered YouTube atheism in 2013 and had to be explicitly lied to about feminism before I even started contemplating explicitly anti-feminist views — and by late 2014 I had become all too aware of how blatant the lies were. This may be sounding like some kind of humblebrag, but I really just did not understand why anyone made such a big deal about gender, especially as my own family became more explicit about their beliefs in gender complementarianism. It sometimes makes me think my parents used to be way more progressive before finding the church we settled in.
Also, since this entry is about a dad being an idiot because his son told him he’s gay, I thought maybe I’d speak on a lighter note. I went to Toronto’s Pride Parade for the first time. I didn’t do anything remarkable, just stood/sat in the shade wherever I could find it near Church and Bloor where it started. But one thing I noticed putting myself out there for several public events now is that I’m not really that terrible in large crowds necessarily. I have problems — like a strong urge to get out — mainly when I’m lost or I don’t know what to do or say. And it’s unlikely that I’ll ever be the life of the party. But if I’m just asked to watch, then I’m good. Kind of weird for Google to show up, though.
@Leum: It’s possible for someone to be aware of their orientation and/or gender identity as early as age four, but that’s either pretty rare, or being able to effectively express it that young is pretty rare. 8 seems about normal for early awareness. At that age, they might occasionally get it wrong, but seriously, it’s extremely rude and potentially erasing to be dismissive of it because they’re children or because they might have made a mistake. Children are still people.
Some people are aware before puberty, or occasionally even well before, some after, some not until about college age, or occasionally not until even later. It’s not a race. You’ll get it when you get it, and there’s nothing wrong with being “early” or “late”.
@Kupo,
Straight is the most common and most likely sexual orientation. My brother went through a period around the ages of 11 to 13 where he thought he was gay but he turned out straight.
So it IS too early to assume that this boys sexuality is completely determined when he hasn’t even hit puberty FFS!
This father is a sad sack of shit. I wish this man was just trolling. I don’t even want to think what he’s going to be subjected to or what the fate of this family will be. I just hope the wife can knock some decency into him and learn to accept his son the way he is.
@ Pyxxxie
Your brother is, of course, representative of all boys. His experience is not only completely generalizable, but also in fact overrides anyone else’s lived experience!
There is no way, in the face of this evidence, that we could do anything but agree with you completely. Thank you, O Enlightened One, for correcting the error of our ways and bestowing this wisdom on us. /s
Why are you so SO bothered some anonymous kid on the internet said he was gay and some of us believed him? What’s it to you? Are you the asshole?
@Big Titty Demon:
I think this depends on how much one trusts the father’s characterization of his eight year old son’s statement. In other words, it wasn’t an anonymous eight year old kid who said he was gay: it was an anonymous homophobe who said his eight year old kid was gay.
What he directly said about his son was that he said he “likes boys”, without much context for that statement in the post or comments. He indirectly characterizes his son’s statement as sexual in nature, by asserting that it means his son is gay.
For my part, my initial reaction was not to trust that characterization. This was partly because, at eight, I could not have expressed sexual or romantic preferences. If I had been asked a question like “Do you like girls?”, I probably would have responded with “No, I like boys.” because my close friends were all boys. If someone took that answer as being sexual or romantic, I don’t think I could have corrected them because I didn’t have enough understanding of the concept.
The other part is probably that I’m a straight-ish male, and have never had to deal with hate or discrimination over my sexuality. I think I probably focused too much on what I perceived as him sexualizing his son, and not enough on the homophobia. I can definitely see why other people’s perceptions and focus would be different, especially after finishing writing this comment.
Big Titty Demon,
It really doesn’t bother me at all. But it should be taken with a grain of salt and not assumed to be absolute until he hits puberty.
I find it telling that the father assumes his sons sexuality is already set in stone due to his homophobic panic.
No reason he can’t be both. And signs point to yes on both of them.
Like most parents, I realised very very quickly that my kids were individuals with their own individual opinions, and if they didn’t share the same interests as me, that’s just tough.
In particular, I have very few shared interests with my now teenage daughter besides a weakness for appalling dross with words like “sharknado” in the title, but she’s terrific company (in particular, she’s one of the laugh-out-loud funniest people I know besides her mother – and both know exactly how funny they are) and I have every confidence that she’ll make a decent fist of whatever she attempts – which I imagine will be utterly outside my own experience.
Most likely deliberately – after all, this is a girl who, when offered the opportunity to drop one of the languages she was learning at school, chose to stick with Spanish for the simple reason that, unlike French, I didn’t speak it, and therefore I “couldn’t interfere”. And I know exactly where she’s coming from, because I ended up working in a field completely different from that of any of the ones in which my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles had excelled, and this was wholly deliberate from the off.
My own parents, greatly to their credit, never tried to push me or my siblings in any particular direction (the most we’d get is a gentle steer, usually in the form of advice that I now recognise was pretty sensible), because their overwhelming priority for their kids was that they’d forge their own path and be happy doing what they wanted to do.
So, asshole wants a mini me?
No kid ever is.
There’s this woman I know. Her oldest son is my age, her second son is about 9 years younger than me, and the daughter is about 12 years younger than me.
She always went on about how horrible and difficult parenting boys is. Usually in hearing range of her sons.
I used to volunteer at a child care organization while I was still at school. Both younger kids went there.
The way she treated her younger son was infuriating, especially if you were able to contrast it with the way she was fawning over the girl.
I have no idea how any one of them turned out, but I really hope that the girl had the most epic case of teenage rebellion, ever.
I can’t stand parents who define themselves via their children.
@Knitting Cat Lady:
My mom used to complain about how horrible it is to raise a kid with disabilities. She would get really worked up about it, forget that I was in the same room with her, and then just go off about how awful it is and why did she get stuck with such a sucky kid. I thought I must’ve ruined my parents lives when I was born, that I really was a bad kid.
I HATE WHEN PARENTS DO THIS!!!!!!! Especially online, where the kid (and everyone else!) can see it for all time.
Also, on the kids orientation… all the stuff about ‘he can’t know he’s gay at 8!’ This is only my experience, of course, but I knew I was attracted to both boys AND girls when I was 8.
Some people have the privilege of not having to think about this stuff as kids, but not all of us do.
I am just guessing, but if this a***hole father doesn’t get to “bond” with a son by teaching his son about how to conduct relationships with women, this sounds to me like a lucky escape both for the son and for any women who would have been unfortunate enough to subsequently encounter the son should he have been misguided enough to have paid any attention to what his father had to say.
@Yutolia: I’m autistic, diagnosed as an adult. It runs in the family. The way I see some parents talk on the internet about autistic kids is revolting. And all the ‘treatments’ they torture their kids with in order to cure them are horrifying.
It took me ages to figure out my sexuality. I was in my late 20ies when I learned about the a-spec. And finally I knew that there was nothing wrong’ with me. I just was assembled without the whole sexuality, romanticism, and gender module!
Even if I accept this premise, what is the point of bringing such a thing up on this thread?
Is the father any less of an asshole for wanting a replacement son it turns out that his first son actually ends up being straight?
Also, I would expect that with all the heteronormative bullshit that we get spoon fed since birth, I’d expect there to be far more kids that erroneously assume that they are straight than visa versa. I was one of those kids.
The kid says he likes boys. You ACCEPT that. You don’t question that. You don’t second-guess it. You ACCEPT it. IF sometime the road, he says that no, he likes girls instead (or hey, maybe he decides he likes BOTH), you then accept that, too.
But again, this whole “that may not be what he meant” or “he might change his mind” bullshit is exactly that. And it’s just another way to invalidate the kid’s current feelings and self-understanding because you think you know better.
@JarredH:
This. So this.
And if we decide there’s a minimum age of trustworthiness on one’s declared orientation, what is that age? Because a lot of teenagers are dismissed as confused when they come out when they know definitively what their orientation is. Plus, such a dismissal makes it seem bad or silly to be confused, and being confused about your orientation is okay too.
There’s no harm that can be done by taking someone at their word about either orientation or gender identity. But there is harm to be done by not taking someone at their word. So, best to err on the side of the former.
so quick poll of the commenters
I am a nonbinary trans femme.
my husband is a binary trans man
we have 2 kids together, aged 8 & 4, and are pretty sure they’re both cis.
AITA if I demand my spouse quit the hormones and get pregnant again so we can have us a LGBTQ+ kid?
(this is so much snark, please don’t take it seriously I already have a trans lesbian stepdaughter so it wouldn’t even make sense as a serious question it’s just me making fun of douchebag McGee in the OP)
I don’t think anyone is doubting the kid, so much as we are doubting the word of the father who is all set to toss his son in the metaphorical garbage and start over based on his interpretation of what his son said. The son may like boys or not. It won’t matter because his father will now treat him as less because in the father’s mind he is less. I feel bad for the kid regardless of what he chooses in life because his father’s love is so stilted and conditional.
My brother is a recovering homophobe. When his first son was young my brother was in a huge tizzy that he was going to grow up gay because the kid liked to draw and slept with a teddy. (The range of acceptable interests for a homophobe is so small I wonder they don’t all die of boredom.). He’s doing better now, thank gawd, bigotry can be unlearned as well as learned.
Yeah, but like you said, it doesn’t matter if the father is right or not, so why should we be debating whether or not an 8-year-old can accurately gauge his own tastes?
Is it somehow worse for a father to treat his straight son badly because the father thinks the son is gay, than it would be for a father to treat his gay (or bi or pan) son badly because he thinks his son is gay? Does the hypothetical straight son “deserve” the poor treatment any less than the hypothetical gay son?
DEAR ANY YOUNG LURKERS/COMMENTERS ON WE HUNTED THE MAMMOTH:
If you are young, and think you are Not Straight, that is okay. No one knows you better than you.
If you are young, thought you were Not Straight, and then think no, maybe you are straight, that is fine. No one knows you better than you.
If you hear stories about how this one kid totally thought they were gay and then realised that no, they were straight – that doesn’t mean that you will feel that way, as you age.
If you hear stories about how no one knows themselves at that young an age, and you think to yourself “but I do!” – I believe you.
Now that that is out of the way…
DEAR OLDER LURKERS/COMMENTERS ON WE HUNTED THE MAMMOTH:
If you know someone who thought they were Not Straight, and then decided later that they were straight – Their experience is not universal. Don’t try to make it like that, you are invalidating the feelings/experiences of vulnerable kids.
If you, personally did not know who you were attracted to at 8 – don’t try to make that a universal experience. No truscum* here!!!! Everyone experiences this at a different pace. Some know incredibly early, some figure it out in their old age. It’s all cool!
—
Now, you might want to argue that we can’t trust what the dad says, because he’s a raging homophobe. (He 100% is a homophobe!)
My answer to that: Nah. I’ll trust what he says on this, because it’s too dangerous not to. I don’t see what the problem is, with this idea?
* I know that ‘truscum’ is specific to trans people, and policing how being trans manifests. I don’t know a similar term for policing sexuality, so hopefully it makes sense still.
Seconding @wwth when she said:
This is why the Joe Rogans of the world are so infuriating because they take an idea as simple and frankly innocent as a child exploring their own identity and graft a whole bunch of bad faith concern-trolling on top of it to hide their own base disgust (and it is disgust) for gay and trans people. I watched the YouTuber Vaush break down Joe Rogan interviewing, ugh, Steven Crowder about some of Crowder’s stupid pranks related to kids exploring their gender identity, and as he noted, Crowder actually came off less transphobic than Rogan did (they’re still both transphobic shits, but Crowder had the sense to steer clear of the vehemently hateful stuff).
If you can stomach it, the video’s worth watching if only to examine how it is transphobes frame the issue. The ages of the hypothetical children get younger each time and they hyperfocus on drugs and surgeries when that’s not what people are recommending for grade schoolers who haven’t reached puberty.
@Alexis Filth
Clearly your man owes you a do-over. It’s only fair. ?
@wwth, rhuu, et. al.
Thank you. I got too frustrated to continue the discussion.
@grown-ass adults second guessing a child’s orientation
This isn’t about taking the father’s word. You accepted the following without question:
* he’s married
* he and his wife had an agreement about having 2 kids, but would try for a third if both were girls
* he has two kids, a boy and a girl, who are 8 and 5 respectively
* his wife doesn’t want to try for another child because she thinks the reason is disgusting
You take all those statements at face value even though you supposedly think this man is completely untrustworthy. The only thing you didn’t take at face value? The son’s statement that he likes boys.
@Rhuu
Well said!
As my kids’ friends have grown up, names have changed, genders have changed, preferences have changed, pronouns have changed. I have known many of these kids since they were toddlers. It has always been my responsibility to keep up with who the kids themselves say they are. It is not easy, and much of my programming has had to be yanked out repeatedly, as some of it is tenacious af, and I am an older parent with older programming. The reward is seeing the kid’s face light up when I use the correct name, the correct pronoun for them and comment positively on something they’ve done in school/life. So many adults in their lives won’t bother, “You’ll always be … to me.” And the kid accepts that many won’t change. But when I can acknowlege that change, see who they are, and do it smoothly? That’s a beautiful light up face in a teen- and totally worth it. (Looking at you Sayre- whom I’ve adored since you dressed as Link for Halloween and needed math help in 2nd grade. )