Is "Gender-Free" Child-rearing a Form of Child Abuse?

Hanna’s post about the Swedish couple who are attempting to raise their child “gender-free” (not telling anyone its birth sex or permitting the genitals to be seen by anyone but a select few intimates) has had me thinking all day about the chicken-and-egg problem of gender identification. Do I think the category of gender is more constructed than the dominant culture gives it credit for? Definitely. Does the parenting of this couple horrify me? Completely.

Hanna, your analogy (to a “militant feminist friend” who tried unsuccessfully to make her daughter play with trucks) doesn’t quite hold up; in terms of the violence visited on the kid’s sense of self, the Swedish family’s choice to conceal the fact of gender altogether seems infinitely worse. Being told by your parents that you should (or shouldn’t) conform to this or that gender stereotype is bad enough, but imagine being told, “The entire category of gender, which from empirical observation you can see is hugely significant in all areas of human life, doesn’t apply to you alone, because we say so.” I’m picturing my own 3-year-old, who asks complex and essentially unanswerable questions about gender on a daily basis (Why can mamas have babies and papas can’t? Why don’t men wear dresses?), having to keep her own sex a secret. (That would gall her, as she’s very proud to be a girl and would hate to miss a chance to brag about it.) Obviously, you don’t have to dress your kid in tutus or football jerseys (or whatever the Swedish equivalent is), but to truly obfuscate all evidence of gender, and keep your child from giving away the game, would require some fancy footwork.

I’m stymied by the very grammar of this undertaking. Assuming Swedish has gendered personal pronouns (confirmation, Swedish speakers?), this kid’s parents must have to engineer all kinds of weird locutions: “Pop chooses Pop’s clothes Popself.” But if I ridicule Pop’s parents (and worry about both Pop and his/her brother/sister on the way), it’s not in a dismissive, vive la différence kind of way. I respect the instinct to radically reinvent the role of gender in childrearing; I think every mother I know seeks, in some measure, to free her child from the constraint of gender expectations. But this couple’s literal and dogmatic interpretation of that instinct strikes me as borderline child abuse.

Photograph of a French child reading a gender-neutral book produced by a Swedish publishing house by STR/AFP/Getty Images.

Comments

Corporeal punishment, genital

By: pinky12 | Thu, 12/10/2009 - 01:01

Corporeal punishment, genital mutilation, religious indoctrination, and discouraging homosexuality and sexuality in general is the different forms of child abuse.

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Nature and Nurture

By: eli.vandenberg | Thu, 07/09/2009 - 15:52

People seem to be getting very hung up on the nature vs. nurture debate that's been raging for years. As a trans person I have a very definite and final answer to the question "Is gender biological or socially determined?" The answer is most decidedly yes.

More interesting and relevant, I think, is not what this will ultimately do to Pop's gender once it is reveled but what it means for the idea of a genderless society. This is a point of contention within the transexual and transgendered community. Some want to transition and assimilate into their chosen gender and some want to get rid of gender altogether. Either way, living genderless in a gendered society brings up obvious real-life issues: using the bathroom, medical care and all those little things that are so much bigger than trucks vs. dolls. These are all the things that non-trans people don't have to think about but become huge when you're transitioning.

Although I think the Utopian ideal of a genderless society is perhaps interesting, I don't think it sounds like a society I'd like to live in. I like gender, I just don't like the amount of meaning we attach to it. What if gender carried no more meaning than color. What if I wore masculinity today in the same way I wore the color green. Gender is a wonderful, amazing, colorful world and worth exploring and exploding--much too interesting to get rid of altogether.

One day perhaps we'll be able to let children choose their gender. We'll be able to raise boys, girls and everyone else the exact same way. I applaud Pop's parents and think perhaps their experiment will push us in the right direction. Will Pop experience some awkward situations? Of course. We all do as children. I only hope that if Pop decides that Pop is a totally gender conforming girl or boy that Pop's parents will be OK. Sometimes parents get to struggle and push boundaries and sometimes parents have to settle for the fact that their children are decidedly and painfully normal and love them in spite of it.

pronouns

By: simskola | Wed, 07/08/2009 - 16:21

I am a Swede.

Swedish has gender-specific pronouns. All nouns belong to one of four gender classes - male, female and two different neuter grammatical genders. Nouns describing living beings a specific sex have a matching grammatical gender. Also, nouns describing many inanimate objects that do not have any obvious gender link have a non-neuter grammatical gender, such as sol (sun) and måne (moon).

For collective nouns, the same 4-geder pattern holds. However, the word for humanity has a female grammatical gender. Our version of Uncle Sam (Moder Svea) is female. English-language feminists would like it over here.

I looked up an article about the child in a major swedish paper which is generally considered to be of high quality. "Pop" is not the real name of the child, nor is it a Swedish name at all. The article states that the child has one of the common two sexes, but that parents have chosen to not reveal which one until the child demands so. A select few apart from the parents know the right sex. They have a wide selection of gaments in the closet, and hairdos are also changed. The parents describe themselves as feminists. They state that they both had figured out the idea of not revealing the gender of the child before they met each other, so the decision was easy.

@ Pamela Goldsteen

By: auros | Wed, 07/01/2009 - 23:40

Any claim that the differences you cite in your blog post are due to genetics is dubious, at best.

When anyone bothers to actually engage in some scientific study, what they generally find is that the claimed differences (e.g. "girls talk more") are just not true. See Amanda Schaffer's excellent series on the science of sex difference. (One of my degrees is in cognitive science. I've read some papers on neurological difference -- or, more accurately, the lack thereof -- across the sexes.)

And more to the point, even if you DID find a difference, how would you KNOW if it was genetic? How many kids do you know who were raised free of influences that would tend to inculcate performance of expected gender roles? No matter how well-meaning a parent is, it's very likely that they will pass on such expectations, and even if they don't, relatives, peers, and random people at the grocery store will say and do things towards a kid that are determined by their expectations about the gender associated with the perceived sex. (This is why people get so upset when somebody mis-identifies the sex of their kid. ZOMG, somebody might encourage my little boy to behave like a girl! Or vice versa.)

Such stereotyping is pernicious. They result in poor communication between people who believe themselves more different than they actually are. They drive talented people away from "wrong-gendered" fields that they might excel at, and serve as justifications for institutional discrimination. (Famously, when top orchestras switched to blind auditions -- having a screen between judges and applicants -- the acceptance rates for women went from miniscule, to parity with men, immediately.)

I'm all for identifying REAL differences that depend on genetics, so we can better understand ourselves, get more personalized medical care, and so on. But "MY kids acted like stereotypical boys/girls! so gender difference must be real!" is unserious, in such a discussion. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".

Both I and my fiancee are poor fits for our respective gender stereotypes. (I did martial arts, but I also did ballet, love to cook, am the neat/clean/organized member of our duo, and am generally more emotionally sensitive than she is; she likes to play with cars and build stuff so much that she got a Master's in Mechanical Engineering.) So I take this issue kind of personally. I keep waiting for people who claim "but there's a difference!" to actually offer DATA to back their claims.

Pop, the Swedish child

By: Pamela Goldsteen | Wed, 07/01/2009 - 17:59

I can unequivocally answer yes, this is a form of child abuse. Parents start off with the best of intentions regarding raising their children free of preconceived gender stereotypes. But once you observe your children, you can not deny that there are real, biological differences between the sexes, and this is not a bad thing. Gender equality, not gender neutrality, should be the goal.

For more, see: http://njhausfrau.blogspot.com/2009/07/oh-please.html

@ Elphaba

By: auros | Tue, 06/30/2009 - 17:26

No, the parents have not "decided for Pop that s/he has no gender," they have simply declined to tell others what Pop's sex is, so that well-meaning friends and family will be unable to behave towards Pop in a manner dictated by their expectations about what s/he ought to enjoy, think about, etc.

Arkhamescapee has it exactly right.

Gender and Sex

By: arkhamescapee | Tue, 06/30/2009 - 14:13

There's a difference between the terms gender and sex. Sex is what's between your legs, gender refers to the social constructs of male and female roles and expectations. When your daughter asks "why can girls make babies and boys can't?" that's a question about sex and reproduction and science. The Swedish couple is trying to free their child from the expectation that their child will play with trucks or dolls and letting their child play with whatever the hell they want -- and attempting to eliminate other people's biases and assumptions affect their child.

@Elphaba and ameliapeabody

By: gloamling | Tue, 06/30/2009 - 11:51

Thanks for pointing me back to the original news article. Obviously, I didn't read that one closely enough. I'm not sure Ms. Rosin's piece is quite clear on Pop's genital status, but I see that the original news story does seem to indicate that s/he has identifiably sexed genitals.

swedish is not gender nuetral

By: byclark | Tue, 06/30/2009 - 11:33

Dana,
You wanted to know if Swedish has gender identifying pronouns... They do. They use he and she just like English. Plus many nouns are also gender identified.

@gloaming

By: Elphaba | Tue, 06/30/2009 - 11:28

While I agree with your concerns, I beleive you've missed one of the main points of these articles: Pop's parents aren't waiting until Pop is old enough to decide on Pop's own gender. They've already decided for Pop that Pops gender will be "none".

If they were waiting and letting the child self-identify when they felt ready, that would be one thing - but the child still has no choice in the matter and that's the bigger issue.