Free to Be, Gender-Free

This short video about a baby named Grey, whose parents are raising them in as completely gender-neutral, got me thinking about that idea in child-rearing and earlier examples I know of.

Personally, I am all for it, though I didn't practice it myself in raising Daughter Number Three-Point-One. We were very gender-neutral in DN3.1's upbringing compared to much of what this culture dictates, but we labeled her a girl starting at birth, based on her anatomy.

In watching the video about Grey, I wondered what had happened to another fairly recently born child I had read about, a Canadian baby named Storm. A quick search turned up this 2016 follow-up story from when Storm was 6 years old. (Storm is probably about 10 now.) At the time of the article, Storm's dad, David Stocker, was quoted as saying, "Storm has picked a pronoun, her gender identity is she. Assigned at birth, still nobody knows." Go dad!

That 2016 Huffington Post article contains links to earlier articles, some of which are probably the ones I read back in 2011, about how upset people would become at the idea of Storm's parents not revealing the baby's gender. I remember that they were more likely to assail Storm's mother with their complaints than her father. Interesting, that.

I knew a couple back in the early 1990s while at the University of Minnesota who had a child they were raising in a gender-free way as well. I didn't know them well, though I recall that one of them was an anthropology student and concerned with how gender roles are inculcated. When talking to their child, they referred to other children as "kids," rather than boys or girls. I don't remember if they used singular they or something else as a pronoun for the child. I think the child was at least 3 by the time DN3.1 was born, so that child would be an adult of about 30 now. 

I wonder who and where they are, and what they think of all this?

As Crispin Long, a trans person who wrote an article for the New Yorker to go with the video about baby Grey, put it:

If my parents had made every effort to free me from the strictures of the gender binary, I might have rebelled against their liberal piety or appreciated their efforts — or maybe both.

But Long also acknowledges that

An early, fragile sense of self can be damaged as a child quietly endures — or faces the repercussions of defying — choices that feel amiss.

There almost has to be a way for a gender researcher somewhere in the U.S. to find a number of adults who were raised this way, because I'm sure they exist, and come up with at least a small-scale analysis of its effect. Effect in some sense of that word; it would have to be exploratory. (Maybe it has already been done! I suppose I should try to look that up.)

My hypothesis would be that our society, so steeped in toxic masculinity, would be better off if children spent their first few years being treated without gender. It would certainly be a tremendous change and a grand experiment, but we're so far down a destructive path that it seems worth the risk, if there were a will to take it on at any significant scale.