Swedes Raise a Gender-Free Child

Parents of children born with an ambiguous gender often beg doctors to let them choose one gender or another. Now, in Sweden, a couple has decided to raise their now 2-year-old with no gender. Of course, the kid has one, but they won’t tell anyone what it is. They dress the kid in any old colors. When they change the diaper, they hide its parts. The kid’s name is Pop. “We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother told a Swedish newspaper. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

I had a militant feminist mother friend like this once. She only let her daughter play with cars and trucks, and then one day came in the room to see her daughter swaddling Baby Tonka in a blanket and feeding her a bottle through the chassis. Experiment over. What the Swedish couple is doing is of course absurd on many levels. To raise a child gender-free requires a kind of vigilance that can only lead to obsession with gender. If they keep it up, in a few years they will have to redirect Pop’s every natural instinct, and then what to do about the hair?

What’s interesting to me is how gender neutrality has now become an ideal. Trying to raise a girl with boy interests has the benefit, at least, of building empathy for the other sex. But the idea of no gender at all is radical and dispiriting.

Photo by Getty Images.

Tags: gender identy, sweden

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Hanna Rosin Double X co- editor, reporter, prefer my friends live.

Comments

Adding anecdotal evidence

By: fructose | Wed, 08/12/2009 - 08:07

Adding anecdotal evidence about a friend's daughter's choice to play with dolls amounts to nothing. Anecdotal evidence is not indicative of larger trends. It offers no insight as to whether the preference for dolls was inherent, and could not do so, since there is no pre-social state. Babies are socialized in regards to gender the moment they're home from the hospital. Does this mean gender is a social construct? Not necessarily. It's most likely both nature and nurture. The more we break down stereotypes, the better off we'll be as a society.

gender stamps

By: essedora | Wed, 07/01/2009 - 20:34

This article is very poorly written. Children can NOT be "born with an ambiguous gender". Its impossible because *gender* is a societal construct and newborns haven't been socialized yet! Perhaps the author means "ambiguous" sexual parts. If this is so, this child, like many children, has been born with sexual parts that dont clearly indicate if the child is male or female. Parents with children born like this "beg" to let doctors pick the gender of the baby. So they say... "well we wanted a girl, so lets raise this baby as a girl", but that doesnt always work. Sometimes by the time the child has reached an age of sexual awareness the child understands his or her self as the opposite of what their parents chose for them. Assuming this child has been born transgendered in some way, raising the child "genderless" as best as they can, is a good idea. The child can choose for itself.

“It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.” Especially if that child ends up "stamped" by his/her parents with the wrong color!

Gender is socially determined

By: shelerin | Wed, 07/01/2009 - 19:25

When I was 4 or 5 and my little brother was a toddler, we'd play with my Barbies together and he loved it! Like any child, he was attracted to these colorful objects. The fact that my brother was playing with girls' dolls worried my father greatly; he came home one day with G.I. Joes in hand and handed them to my brother. The gender rift continued to widen between us as my brother was given plastic swords and Nerf guns to play with. He even got taken to hockey games while I stayed home and played with my American Girl dolls. The toys, TV shows, clothes, and books children are encouraged to enjoy contribute to the gender roles that keep women AND men "in their place." Men fix the cars, women fix the dinner...The roles that women and men are expected to fulfill come from somewhere...yes, times are changing, but change would spread more rapidly if we started at home. So instead of handing your boy a truck and your little girl a doll OR vice versa, how about some gender-neutral alternatives that will enable boys and girls to play together? Any suggestions, creative types?

You seem to be reading a lot more into this

By: cityrat | Wed, 07/01/2009 - 16:09

First of all, where are you getting this from: "When they change the diaper, they hide its parts."?

From what I gathered from this article, the parents are precisely NOT trying to force their child into any ideology. The following quotes support this:
"I believe that the self-confidence and personality that Pop has shaped will remain for a lifetime," said Pop's mother.

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

I think it sure as hell *is* cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on its forehead, especially since the "pink" stamp very often translates into subtle (or not so subtle) suppression of the self-confidence and personality that the kid's parents mention above. Sounds pretty good to me. Again, they're not talking about forcing their child into any gender (as was puzzlingly alluded to in your blog post regarding girls with militant feminist moms being forbidden to play with dolls, etc?). Also puzzling that children of ambiguous gender were mentioned in the original piece, (perhaps to make a not particularly provocative story longer)as the child in the story has no "unusual" gender attributes.

I don't see what the problem is, unless we decide to create one. I agree with Jenny Holzer on this one.

The child...

By: Mark | Wed, 07/01/2009 - 09:39

...benefits from this how?

Most children at such a young age are pretty "gender free" unless parents are shoving trucks, dolls, or certain colors down their throats. I think the child would be just as happy, if not happier, if the parents acknowledged that the child had a sex, but allowed the child to wear clothing and pursue amusements commonly reserved for boys or girls.

He or she will certainly know their gender as soon as public interaction becomes normalized through the school system or simply public interaction. Not allowing the child to have any interactive experience of society treating them as a boy or a girl will probably be a traumatic shock to the child, eventually...

Re: WSLers' comment...

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

Why is it anyone's business what gender the kid is? They should interact with it as a human being first. Maybe it likes being smiled at, or bounced on a knee. How is gender relevant to any interaction a friend or relative might have with it?

Backfire

By: Shelley | Tue, 06/30/2009 - 15:25

I am trying to think of the best way to "verbalize" my thinking on this one. The best I can come up with right now is "curse" words.

What happens when you tell a small child a certain word is naughty? They just want to say it! Take the word "sucks." While to an adult, the word can go either way, but as a child, they learn to say the phrase "this sucks" and continuously do so because many parents will say "oh no, don't say "sucks" thats not a good word." Children rebel. Whether its body decoration to the dismay of a more conservative mother, or simply repeating words they know they shouldn't. The best way to avoid having your child speak a word you'd prefer stay buried would be to give the word NO importance.

How does this relate to the gender issue? Well, if these swedish parents wanted their children to escape the social norms placed on gender roles, the best way for them to do that would be to "downplay" gender roles. Make gender something that isn't important. Instead they are doing the exact opposite. They are placing a great deal of importance on gender, even if that is the opposite of their intentions, because they are hiding it. They are making it that "naughty word."

There are a few potential outcomes to this an dunfortunately I don't see many good ones.

What i see as the most likely outcome is the children will be embarrassed about their gender and any instinctual roles. if you are taught your whole life to hide your gender, i can see that causing a great deal of confusion for a small child. Its almost like sheltering your child from sex and a child growing up being uncomfortablea nd unable to express themselves in any sexual way, whether it be act or merely speaking about it.

Or they'll go the opposite and just want to dive into the predetermined roles head first.

Some of y'all are missing the point.

By: WSLers | Tue, 06/30/2009 - 12:22

It's not that the parents aren't taking pictures of the kid naked and not showing said pictures to friends, it's that the parents are refusing to tell ANYONE, be they friends, relatives or strangers what the sex of the baby is.

That's VERY, VERY weird and if I were one of their friends I'd be extremely annoyed very quickly and probably stop being their friend. It's as if the parents think that people will like/care about/love the kid more if it's a girl rather then a boy or vice-versa.

Really dumb, and extremely annoying.

Hanna, do you read Slate?

By: auros | Mon, 06/29/2009 - 19:08

Amanda Schaffer wrote a great series unpacking how much of "inherent" gender difference turns out to be murkier than the essentialists believe.

As another commenter observed, forcing boys' toys on a girl is not being gender-neutral.

And more importantly, regarding the girl's desire to play with dolls -- can you confidently assert that her desire to play with dolls was inherent? Was this girl raised in isolation from other children? From relatives who disagreed with the parents attitudes? I doubt it.

do most parents exhibit their children's sexual organs?

By: PGofHSM | Mon, 06/29/2009 - 16:23

I'm puzzled by the idea that there's something bizarre about the Swedish parents' not showing their child's genitalia in public. I'd thought we'd all be just as happy if our parents hadn't taken those embarrassing pictures of us as toddlers naked in the tub. It also avoids those hyper-sensitive concerns from the Wal-Mart photo development department that there's some kind of pedophiliac perversion going on.