Good people doing their best

This article is about raising "gender neutral" or, more likely “gender open,” “gender affirming,” or “gender creative" children. Theybies.

I came across the article from someone who thinks that this is a Bad Thing. I'm not so sure and I want to explain why.


In the article, we meet a couple who "told hospital staff, “‘At minimum, do not describe the anatomy, or what you think the anatomy means, when this baby’s born.’ We definitely wanted to prevent them being gendered in any intense moment"" and who obtained a birth certificate "with four little stars where the gender designation would normally be" for their child. We meet someone who kept their child's sex a secret from the child's grandparents "until they got comfortable with the pronouns". (The "they" in that quotation refers, I think, to the grandparents rather than the child.) And so on. Read it - it's a good read.

There are a number of obvious points to make about this, along the lines of pointing out that this is not how people have done it for recorded human history, I was raised with a gender and it didn't do me any harm and so on. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Instead, I want to point out that there's a lot of good in this, and even if you don't feel entirely happy about it, you should see the upsides.

For one thing, these are well-intentioned people going out on a limb to do their best for their children. Virtue-signalling, blah blah blah, you might say. I disagree. They can signal virtue by hanging up a rainbow flag and saying that they are open to their child choosing a different gender. They are doing more than that. These are people who have gone to some trouble - that birth certificate, family hostility, awkward conversations with daycare providers (all in the article) - to do what they think is morally right. Sure, the zeitgeist is on their side and lots of people will pat them on the back. I'm not saying they are the bravest people in the world. But they have gone further than they needed to in the cause of helping their child and changing society. Let's have some respect for that.

And I think we can go further. Gender in childhood has become a big deal. Completely small-c conservative families can happily chat about how horrible so much stuff aimed at girls is: all the princesses and pink and so on. And then that is accompanied (balanced out?, exacerbated?, I don't know) by well-meaning attempts to portray positive role-models for women, e.g. in books about Great Women of History or super-heroines (if I'm allowed to use that word) who are very good at kicking ass and/or men. Then there are things like Lego Friends, where you don't know whether to be pleased that girls are being encouraged to play with Lego or disheartened that they have to do it by being given figurines with beautiful hair and pooch parlors. And then there are boys. What do we do with them? I read something recently about a woman raising her son to be respectful of women, reading him all these books about Great Women of History and so on, and then becoming aware that she wasn't quite sure how to raise him to be a good man other than in his respectful relations with women.

It can be a minefield, and there is something to be said for opting out of that palaver altogether. Why worry about your boy playing with guns, when instead you can enjoy your child playing with whatever toys they have chosen? Or you can read them stories about Marie Curie and Nelson Mandela - and they can seek to emulate them, if that's where their talents lie - without any second-guessing and nervousness about whether you are raising a strong woman or a respectful man - because you have put it out of your head whether you are raising a man or a woman at all.

It's pretty drastic, I grant you. Most people manage to work their way past these difficulties without resorting to strange pronouns and sex-secrecy, but it's one possible solution to the problem and I'm not going to rule it out.

How about this: "The point was not to have a genderless child but one who comes to an understanding of their gender — whatever it might be — in an environment where colors and objects and activities are not slotted into the arbitrary and binary categories of “girl” and “boy,” and the concepts of “girl” and “boy” are not set up in opposition to each other. “We were just like, ‘Let’s make it look like a rainbow exploded in this house,’” Myers explains of wanting to provide Zoomer with all available options, rather than limiting options to those deemed to be gender neutral."

That sounds quite fun, doesn't it? We Anglophones used to laugh at languages that decided that tables and chairs were masculine or feminine - let's laugh at rules about trains and dollies too! And let's have rainbows explode in our houses! Apart from the name "Zoomer" (but Americans always have funny ideas about names) and some odd pronouns, who can object to all that?

My point here is this. If you remember your own childhood, you might not recall that colours and objects and activities were slotted into the binary categories of “girl” and “boy,” and that the concepts of “girl” and “boy” were set up in opposition to each other. There were differences, of course, but exclusive categories and opposition? I hope not. And I hope that's not true of many families today.

But if that is how you see the world, or perceive that the world presents itself to your child, then why not fight back in a radical way? These parents obviously do feel a heavy weight of problematic gender-conditioning besieging their households, and I can admire their determination to defend their children from it.

And there's even more to think about. These parents are clearly worried, or at least concerned, about gender. It's a big deal with them. It's going to be a big deal in their household and a big deal for their children. I wouldn't start from there, you might say, but they are going to have to. I think this is probably a better way for them to go from there than alternative ways that might present themselves to parents with these worries and concerns.

So, for example, here's a story with a happy ending: "Around 3, our kid was just like, ‘I’m a girl,’” says one gender-open parent from the Pacific Northwest (who asked to remain anonymous). “And we said, ‘Oh, yay, we’ve always wanted a girl. You’re amazing. Welcome.’” Yet they were surprised that, even growing up in a household of expansive gender expression, their daughter’s concept of “girl-ness” included many social cues from the outside world. “When this child said ‘girl,’ let me tell you, that meant all these things that were pink and glittery and made of tulle,” the parent explains. “But she’s taught me that feminine is feminist, and she can do things that other people might say are ‘boyish,’ but she redefines them as ‘girlish.’”

It's a slightly confused story, but I take from it that this gender-open parent has come to accept something that it appears they previously resisted, namely that it's ok for a girl to like pink, glittery things. And that is ok. It's not for every girl and it shouldn't be forced on them, but there is nothing worrying about girls being really, really girlish. By starting from a gender-open child-rearing position, this parent has become accepting of traditional gender expressions in a way they might not have done otherwise. Let's give the parent some credit here for personal growth and acceptance of difference.

There's an even more striking story involving Andrea, a woman who decided that she wanted to have a child a few years ago when she was half of a lesbian couple. The story continues: "But as her partner, Kat — who goes by they/them pronouns — contemplated what sort of parent they wanted to be, they realized that “Mom” didn’t seem like a good fit, that, actually, they felt more like a trans man. “They were undergoing their transition while we were trying to get pregnant through sperm donation,” Andrea explains. “They had top surgery while I was pregnant. It was a lot of change.” // That led to innumerable conversations about gender constructs and, ultimately, the decision to raise their child as a theyby. Which puts Andrea in the interesting position of believing that her child’s anatomy didn’t matter in terms of gender assignment, though her partner’s did."

That is interesting, isn't it? Try simultaneously holding those two beliefs yourself. Not easy.

Here's more about Andrea's child: "in terms of the activities they like, my child is what people would consider boy, boy, boy, boy, boy, and so I sometimes worry that, like, my mom is looking at that and thinking, Well, why won’t they just accept that that child wants to be a boy? And I guess my answer to that is that those behaviors don’t have to be associated with boys.”

You see? What Andrea is saying about her child, which is perhaps something quite different from what Kat thought about themself, is that a certain set of behaviours does not have to correspond to a certain anatomy. Which is surely a great starting point for the child being happy with the body that they were born with and will develop over time.

Let me be blunt. If you don't like the idea of irreversible medical or surgical intervention on children for gender-related reasons (or other reasons - did you know that the last Sistine castrato died in 1922?) then you should welcome all this. Assume that the girlish girl is biologically female and that the boyish boy is biologically male - after all, that's the way to bet, as Damon Runyan might put it. All is well, you may feel. Now assume that's wrong. Then you can be happy that these children are being brought up by people who do not believe that their anatomy and behaviour are linked - so they are not people who will be inclined to favour altering anatomy to bring it into line with the behaviour. They are planning to let girlish boys and boyish girls grow up and develop in their own way, without preconceptions about what their bodies should look like.

In short, these are good people trying to do what is right. Maybe this is not the very best way ever devised to raise a child (maybe, I say), but didn't Larkin have a point about child-rearing in general? If you're conservative about this sort of thing, you shouldn't let the best be the enemy of the good. And if you're liberal, well, why not let the rainbows explode in your house too!