The genderless baby

[Nas!]

Tempest. Teapot. Etc.

I am very close with a family where the children were raised like this. All of them are adults now, and none of them have any hang-ups about gender or sexuality (theirs or anyone else's). They are all very sensitive to the kind of stereotyping that exists around this issue, and are tolerant of people who are different. They are fine, open-minded human beings, all of them. None of them are hippies.

As others have speculated here, the public world quickly 'took care' of their non-traditional clothing choices once they started going to school. The boys stopped wearing dresses, for instance. The girl kept kind of a 'tomboy' style for a while, then developed a more traditionally feminine style as she got older (she grew up mystified by people's seeming obsession with her looks and suspicious of this sort of flattery). Their parents made no attempt to resist this socialization, but instead let the kids know that whatever they chose to do was okay with them.

This is my only experience with the results of this way of raising children, but I find the assertion that there is anything abusive about this very difficult to understand.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Heck, I'd wear a Kilt to court if I could get away with it. Very hot here in the summertime. A nice kilt made of cotton fabric would be wonderful on a hot humid day.

[Nas!]

Would you be thrown out of court if you did, Ser Scot?

[Aemon Stark]

I read this story when it appeared in the Star earlier in the week. I can't say I think the parents' social experimentation is worthy of any kind of praise or scorn. Attempts in the recent past to "correct" or alter the gender identification (i.e. through surgery, dress) of children have typically not been successful; gender is no more a choice than sexual orientation, and I don't think anything the parents do will ultimately matter much - though concerns about future social ostracism are entirely valid.

Either way, my eyebrows were raised more on reading about "water births" and some of the parents' other hippie-dippy beliefs than the main point of the story.

And because it's appropriate, I present some 70s music.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

ns,

It depends on the Judge but it wouldn't shock me. Hence, I've never tried it.

[Mina Martell]

I am really baffled by some of the posts in this thread. Maybe I'm just a closet hippie because I think the only way the parents are abusing their children is with those godawful names.

In a nutshell, I agree with this:

I think the idea of this, or the rather the intention, is quite excellent, quite enlightened. Then initially reading the responses here about the practical implications made me think that even though it was a good idea it might be inadequetly implemented in this case. However, I think many of the posts here have misunderstood what the article appears to say. Specifically, it doesn't say that the parents don't intend to tell the child what sex it is when it is old enough to understand, merely that, so far, they don't wan't such a non-matter to influence the way friends and family view and treat the kid. Unless I'm missing something where they adress this, I would think it only natural to assume that the parents intend to inform the child about sex, gender, societal norms, and the reasons for their decision when its old enough (and distinctly illogical to assume otherwise). If that's the case, then I think this is great.

as well as this:

Storm will be aware of his/her gender fairly quickly. Babies explore the second their diaper comes off. just like they do every other part of themselves. So really all the parents are saying. Is they don't trust the people close to them not to pigeon hole Storm.

it would be almost impossible for storm not to self identify with the same gender of their immediate family.

I'd be too conservative to do something like this with my own kid, but I don't see a problem with the idea. The point isn't to deny the child hir (I'll use gender-neutral pronouns for convenience in this post, even though it feels a bit ridiculous) true identity; it's to prevent other people from treating hir differently because of their preconceptions of how boys and girls should act.

It's another story if the parents never tell the child hir own sex, or if it lasts after s/he goes to school. But for the first few years of hir life, who cares? Arguing that you should encourage your child to do whatever s/he wants in spite of hir gender is fine and dandy in theory, but that doesn't prevent other people from stereotyping hir. Multiple studies show how we react differently to children depending on whether they're identified as male or female.

What's brilliant is that the parents are forcing their well-intentioned friends and family to come to terms with their own subconscious biases. Never mind what toys or clothes or to buy. Imagine you're supervising your...um, niecephew (:P), and s/he falls and scrapes hir knee. S/he starts bawling. Do you rush to comfort the child, or tell hir to be a man and stop crying?

The kid is the same person, boy or girl. Keeping the gender ambiguous just ensures s/he's not saddled with the baggage associated with "boy" or "girl" in people's minds. And this is a good thing, because whether or not gender differences have a biological component, if you don't think stereotypes have ANY negative effect on the child's development, you're full of it.

I don't want to touch an innate gender differences debate with a ten-foot pole now, but I have no clue why the proponents of evolutionary psychology are those most outraged by this. If the baby is going to develop the correct gender by hirself because that's what nature intended, what's the issue with not advertising to the world what that gender is? Surely it will become obvious to the child's extended family the moment s/he starts holding tea parties for the toy truck Grandpa bought as a birthday present. :rolleyes:

I feel like most of the arguments in this thread are just rationalizing the subconscious feeling that this is WEIRD, because we're just so used to assigning anything human a gender. (There's a reason we only use "it" for inanimate objects.) And all this talk about how it's so crucial to be socialized in your gender must be really alienating to intersex and transgendered people.

[smegma]

I had Tonka trucks and baby carriages and dolls and a hockey stick and a plastic baseball set all by the age of five. Kids play with what's provided to them/in the immediate area until they latch onto something they really like. That's why kids will play with pots and pans as much as anything else = noise good! If no one ever provides a boy with a truck or a girl with a doll, what will they play with then?

It would have been in my mind more logical for the parents to say 'Look, our baby is X but if you're going to purchase something for him/her, we'd like you to consider both a 'girl' and a 'boy' toy or outfit etc.

smegma, I think that's part of their bigger point. Their kid has long hair in braids. That's all it is. Is it really feminine? Sure, it's how girls often wear their hair, but shouldn't something like hairstyle be gender neutral? And yes, when he's ten and in braids and skirts he's going to get the crap beat out of him, which gets me back to the wrong-headedness of the parents experiment.

It's all great in theory and very very harmful in practice.

Oh, I know boys can play with dolls and girls can play with trucks - I was definitely just as enamored with my hot wheels that I inherited from my brother as I was with my Barbies. I guess I should have qualified it as tendencies, rather than hard and fast rules.

I don't think these parents are ruining their child's life - not even their son, who after repeated glances, still looks like a girl to me. I think it'd be great if he wasn't made fun of when he got older. Just saying that the chances are high that he is. Maybe it does some damage, maybe it doesn't.

I also don't think this "experiment" is all that valuable, because as others have mentioned, it brings the kid's sex to the forefront of the discussion. Now the kid's sex is all people will think about when they see the child. I don't think it's necessarily detrimental at this stage either, just kinda silly.

[Happy Ent]

I don't want to touch an innate gender differences debate with a ten-foot pole now, but I have no clue why the proponents of evolutionary psychology are those most outraged by this. If the baby is going to develop the correct gender by hirself because that's what nature intended, what's the issue with not advertising to the world what that gender is? Surely it will become obvious to the child's extended family the moment s/he starts holding tea parties for the toy truck Grandpa bought as a birthday present. :rolleyes:

I think this is a valid question, and it serves to highlight a moral misunderstanding of the motivations of evolutionary psychologists.

Nature is not Good. Just because “nature intends” something, we ought not follow it. As I said in my opening post, the parents seem (unwittingly) to try to implement genetic determinism: let hard-coded predispositions and nothing else shape this child. As if societal programming were in any way more vile than DNA programming.

Evolutionary psychologists are typically not guilty of the naturalistic fallacy. (“It’s Good because Nature made it so.”) Conversely, those who reject evolutionary psychology are typically guilty of what we could call the anti-naturalistic fallacy (“It’s Bad because Man made it so.”). I believe both these fallacies are psychologically religious and born out of a Christian culture of shame. (“It’s Good/Bad because God/Man made it so.”)

Another misunderstanding inherent in your questions is a belief in the nature–nurture dichotomy. Instead, one can usefully view Society as part of Nature. Nature is not only genotype.

[Minaku]

Either way, my eyebrows were raised more on reading about "water births" and some of the parents' other hippie-dippy beliefs than the main point of the story.

And because it's appropriate, I present some 70s music.

Dude, Aemon, don't knock it 'til you try it (har har, but you never can). Water helps relax the body and ease the contractions. Some women swear by water birth.

On the other hand, a PA neighbor of mine told me about the couple whose birth she attended once. The man climbed into the birth pool with the woman clad only in a Speedo, and proceeded to give everyone a hard time, shouting "I can feel the let-down!"

[Volsungr]

The kid is the same person, boy or girl. Keeping the gender ambiguous just ensures s/he's not saddled with the baggage associated with "boy" or "girl" in people's minds. And this is a good thing, because whether or not gender differences have a biological component, if you don't think stereotypes have ANY negative effect on the child's development, you're full of it.

I don't want to touch an innate gender differences debate with a ten-foot pole now, but I have no clue why the proponents of evolutionary psychology are those most outraged by this. If the baby is going to develop the correct gender by hirself because that's what nature intended, what's the issue with not advertising to the world what that gender is? Surely it will become obvious to the child's extended family the moment s/he starts holding tea parties for the toy truck Grandpa bought as a birthday present. :rolleyes:

I don't see many people in this thread who are arguing from a grounding in evolutionary psych in that group I do not see a strong reaction against this. The only reaction that really makes sense with grounding in those priors is bemusement. Behavioral genetics indicates that the influence of shared environment(Parenting mostly) explains 0 to 10 percent of variance in most personality metrics. The childs future gender identity/conformity is simply unlikely to be strongly effected by this.

I do think Happy Ent brings up a good point though, assuming the influence of shared environment on gender is greater then 0 would using this influence to push development in a non-normative way be a positive thing. Your post contains an assumption "stereotypes negatively affect children" that seems almost universal here. The idea seems to be in so far as culture has shaped gendering in our society this has had a negative effect. I think this assumption is not established or warranted for instance the progression of the womens movement in the USA has paralleled a decrease in female happiness in our society, of course correlation is not causation but I do not see strong evidence in the other direction that looser gender norms result in increased aggregate happiness. If culture does gender stereotype us what is the evidence this is a bad thing?

[Starkess]

Well lets start with the "fucking hippies" bit and continue from there.

Jazz and Storm, huh...

They are fuckin pet names, not something you give to a bloody kid.

Yeah and I will bet Storm is a girl.

If it was another boy they wouldn't be bothering with this idiotic hippy crap.

Hey, there is nothing wrong with the name Storm. It is the name of my grandaddy, daddy, brother, and nephew... :fencing:

[S John]

Would you be thrown out of court if you did, Ser Scot?

If he came into my courtroom in a kilt without a bona fide Scottish accent I'd definitely throw him the fuck out.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Minaku,

Dude, Aemon, don't knock it 'til you try it (har har, but you never can). Water helps relax the body and ease the contractions. Some women swear by water birth.

On the other hand, a PA neighbor of mine told me about the couple whose birth she attended once. The man climbed into the birth pool with the woman clad only in a Speedo, and proceeded to give everyone a hard time, shouting "I can feel the let-down!"

Preach it. :)

Aemon,

Both my kids were born at home without difficulties or complications.

S John,

Bah, around here I doubt the judges would know the difference between a real scottish accent and a fake one a la James Doohan.

[Arataniello]

Scot: funnily enough I happen to have gotten into a habit of often calling kids "it". In this case, perhaps not so appropriate :P what is the proper english word for the genderless him/her?

Well you could always use ke, which Mary Gentle uses in her book "Golden Witchbreed" for the offspring of the inhabitants of Orthe. There, the children are sexless until puberty.

Possessive kir.

[Prue]

Pff. In German, a child is always 'it' (das Kind). So I have no problem referring to children as 'it' in other languages either ;)

Btw, a girl (das Mädchen) is an 'it' in German, too, as it's a diminuative (-chen).

[Ser Aardvark]

I saw this on GMA the other day and said, "Why is this on my TV?" and switched the channel. Now I ask, "Why is this on my board?"

[The Iceman of the North]

Well that answer completly makes me change my mind... :rolleyes:

Sorry, I intended to make a much longer post, but hit reply too early, and was then distracted...

What I meant to say was that based on the research that have been done, nature does trump nurture. Gender does seem to be ingrained in humans, most with a gender matching their sexual organs. Changing the sex of an infant (which sometimes happens when the sex is not apparent) don't tend to influence what gender the child will feel like when they grow older.

As for this case in particular, I don't have a problem with the parents not making an issue of the baby's gender, but sooner or later the kid will reveal it's gender. Unless they are actively going to repress the gender, I don't see much of an issue.

[S John]

I saw this on GMA the other day and said, "Why is this on my TV?" and switched the channel. Now I ask, "Why is this on my board?"

I had heard about it a couple days ago as well, so I didn't read the article in the OP. The original articles I read were basically just AP-type blurbs, nothing really in depth. So I decided to go back and read the specific article (and to see the picture of Jazz for myself) that kair-bear linked in the OP. The results were some new-to-me quotes from the parents and.. they're definitely losing me:

Out with the kids all day, Witterick doesnt have the time or the will to hide in a closet every time she changes Storms diaper. If (people) want to peek, thats their journey, she says.

Oh my fucking God.

Thats thier journey? Ugh. That sucks so bad I'm almost in physical pain from it. These people are like a South Park parody of themselves.

Everyone keeps asking us, When will this end? says Witterick. And we always turn the question back. Yeah, when will this end? When will we live in a world where people can make choices to be whoever they are?

Yep, almost threw up. I have a feeling that these people would be downright intolerable to hang out with. I'm trying here guys. I really am. But these people are too ridiculous to take seriously. Maybe next time.

[Thelonious]

I'm all for breaking down gender values, but these parents sound like insufferable dolts. Presumably they only have three kids because their homemade organic vegan condoms keep splitting.

[ZombieWife]

I guess I'm pretty indifferent about this. I do wonder if the parents are enforcing their "agenda" at the expense of their children. But, in the end, if the kids are happy, then who am I to complain?