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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.
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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.
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Reading Hanna's and Dana's posts about a Swedish couple's attempts to raise a gender-free child, I’m struck by how pointless it is for parents to try to program their children.
Of course, I think it's awesome and essential that parents make a conscious effort to raise open-minded kids (by discussing the sort of issues that Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson addressed in their piece about childrens' responses to Obama becoming president, for example), but there are some things you just can't control—like how other people respond to your child.
I'm sure my parents were less than thrilled that strangers referred to me as "him" from the time I was about 3. Some things seem funny now, but probably weren't at the time, like my grandma being asked "Don’t you think he's old enough to use the gents' toilets now?" (I must've been about 5 at the time) or, when I was home from college, my mom being asked if her grandson was visiting (double burn!). It really didn't make a bit of difference how I wore my hair or how I dressed, it's some kind of weird vibe thing.
A few years ago, I met someone who had had the same experience since she was a little girl (I’ve been a friend of her parents for years but didn't meet her until she was 12 or so). It was shocking to see her get the double takes and mangled pronouns I'd gotten. When she was 10, she wrote a fantastic essay for off our backs, in which she said:
I start to make a new friend before they know that I'm a girl, and when I tell them—I have to tell them sooner or later—sometimes they don't want to be my friend because I'm different from some girls. I have to tell them because I don't want my friends going around thinking I'm a boy when I'm actually not. Sometimes I've decided not to tell them and see what happens and it all turns into a fiasco. Not always, but because they've known me for several weeks and I haven't bothered to correct them. And they feel kind of uneasy about that when they find out. I think it's because most people see boys with short hair, pants, and shirts, and see girls as long hair, dresses, skirts.
You might want to ponder that, parents of Pop.
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Lauren, I’m glad you posted about Clay Shirky’s “A Rant about Women”—his blog post asking whether women may not be narcissistically self-aggrandizing enough to get ahead. In a sense, I’m one of the women Shirky talks about. I find it hard to boast in print; when I read his rant, I’d just written a personal statement designed to persuade a committee to give me an honor I want. When I showed a draft to a friend (and DoubleX contributor), her response was, “You’re not being self-promoting enough. You’re being a woman about this. Stop doing that.”
But I think Shirky misses something important when he assumes that finding it hard to promote oneself on the page translates to being averse to risk-taking in the workplace, or calling out “Me!” Me!” in the classroom. It may not. My theory is this: Women falter when they’re called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they’re called on to enact them. Think of it this way: Writing a self-evaluation is a narrow form of highly self-conscious self-presentation; risk-taking and raising one’s hand are a form of engagement that is more self-forgetful, integrated into the rhythms of work and study. Many women I know (and many men) find the first hard but not the second.
Finally, as you rightly point out, Shirky doesn’t spend much time on the studies that show people are often put off when women self-promote. The problem isn’t simply (or even mostly) that women don’t raise their hands and say, “Me! Me!” It’s that when they do, they’re often met with a turned back or an eyebrow raised in subtle annoyance. Consider this comment from a reader of Shirky’s post (I thought it was a joke, but it seems not to be): “Dunno, the women I’ve worked with in the past that try to be all masculine and cocky, etc. are usually a total pain in the ass. It’s like they overcompensate and get it all wrong. I’m a dude BTW.”
This damned-if-you-do-self-promote, damned-if-you-don’t is one of those predicaments that can make you despair. I draw the line at taking Shirky's advice that women emulate narcissistic assholes. A wholesale embrace of a world in which women get ahead by behaving more ego-centrically would, after all, just be another version of listening to male authority instead of claiming it for oneself.
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Lauren, I’m glad you posted about Clay Shirky’s “A Rant about Women”—his blog post asking whether women may not be narcissistically self-aggrandizing enough to get ahead. In a sense, I’m one of the women Shirky talks about. I find it hard to boast in print; when I read his rant, I’d just written a personal statement designed to persuade a committee to give me an honor I want. When I showed a draft to a friend (and DoubleX contributor), her response was, “You’re not being self-promoting enough. You’re being a woman about this. Stop doing that.”
But I think Shirky misses something important when he assumes that finding it hard to promote oneself on the page translates to being averse to risk-taking in the workplace, or calling out “Me!” Me!” in the classroom. It may not. My theory is this: Women falter when they’re called on to be highly self-conscious about their talents. Not when they’re called on to enact them. Think of it this way: Writing a self-evaluation is a narrow form of highly self-conscious self-presentation; risk-taking and raising one’s hand are a form of engagement that is more self-forgetful, integrated into the rhythms of work and study. Many women I know (and many men) find the first hard but not the second.
Finally, as you rightly point out, Shirky doesn’t spend much time on the studies that show people are often put off when women self-promote. The problem isn’t simply (or even mostly) that women don’t raise their hands and say, “Me! Me!” It’s that when they do, they’re often met with a turned back or an eyebrow raised in subtle annoyance. Consider this comment from a reader of Shirky’s post (I thought it was a joke, but it seems not to be): “Dunno, the women I’ve worked with in the past that try to be all masculine and cocky, etc. are usually a total pain in the ass. It’s like they overcompensate and get it all wrong. I’m a dude BTW.”
This damned-if-you-do-self-promote, damned-if-you-don’t is one of those predicaments that can make you despair. I draw the line at taking Shirky's advice that women emulate narcissistic assholes. A wholesale embrace of a world in which women get ahead by behaving more ego-centrically would, after all, just be another version of listening to male authority instead of claiming it for oneself.
