Sententiola

Hi everyone.  Remember this post in which I wondered how one could raise children without gendering them?  It has had various responses in various forms.  I’m going to collect them here rather than reblogging the reblogs, answering the asks, and so on.

Which means that, firstly, those who participated in the conversation but don’t follow me won’t necessarily see this.  To remedy that, I’ll send an ask to everyone who’s taken part so far to let them know about this post.  And it means secondly that this post is going to incredibly long.  So I’m going to divide it into sub-headings and put a ‘read more’ cut below this little ‘table of contents’.

1. Pop and thoughts about data
2. David Reimer and worries about choices
3. Pronouns in particular
4. ‘Gender-neutral parenting’
5. Choice by the child
6. Gendering outside home
7. The future
8. Thanks

1  ·  Pop and thoughts about data

Satah, Maggie, Flory, Suddenlytentacles, and Mikroblogolas mentioned a child who is (or was in the summer of 2009) being raised by Swedish parents in something resembling a gender-neutral way.

The story seems to originate in the Svenska Dagbladet.  I can’t read Swedish, so I have no idea what you’ll encounter if you read the article — you have been warned! — but this appears to be it.  There’s an English-language article from the Swedish press here.  It contains fail (‘Aside from a select few – those who have changed the child’s diaper – nobody knows Pop’s gender’: hahaha, no).  It’s been reported by various other sources but they all seem to derive from those articles.

On the issue of pronouns, it appears that the parents don’t use them at all but just refer to the child by name (which is, according to sources other than the article in the Local, not actually Pop — Pop is just a pseudonym created by the parents for the purposes of the press).  So that’s an option.

I note that it seems (though without being able to read the parents’ own words in the interview it’s hard to be certain) that Pop’s upbringing is still going to be binary.  Also, and again this seems to be coming from the parents themselves although it’s hard to be sure, the parents are said to be keeping Pop’s gender and / or sex (depending on which publication one reads) ‘secret’.  I don’t understand what that means.  Does it mean they aren’t telling anyone what Pop’s genitals are like, or what Pop’s combination of X and Y chromosomes is, or what?  If it’s something like that, it’s rather baffling to talk about keeping it secret.  A secret, in general usage, isn’t just something that’s unknown, it’s something that would normally be known and is only kept from being known by means of deliberate concealment.  The colour of my pancreas isn’t ‘secret’, it just happens that nobody knows it because my pancreas is not visible.  How many two-year-olds’ genitals and / or chromosomes do you know about?

Or do they actually mean gender, as in they aren’t telling anyone how Pop is identifying or how Pop is expressing / performing gender?  If so, again that seems a bit of an odd thing to call ‘secret’.  Pop’s self-identification, assuming Pop has confided it to them but not to anyone else, could be a secret, but it would be a bit strange, if Pop has already self-identified, to try to conceal that information.  If it’s a matter of Pop’s gender-expression, well, that’s something observable that can’t meaningfully be called ‘secret’.

So the way the story’s been reported makes it rather hard to understand what the nature of the parents’ approach actually is.  But some of the practical aspects are clear: no pronouns, a wardrobe including clothes of ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ styles and from which Pop chooses what to wear.

As Suddenlytentacles says,

To be perfectly frank, I find the idea fascinating and wish researchers would organize a proper experiment already. There are oodles of interesting variable to test, such as social interaction beyond the child’s immediate family, social media exposure, the child’s personality and physiology, etc. Pop might make an interesting case study, but Pop’s still just one kid in one culture.

Even if more information about Pop emerges, it will be difficult and dangerous to draw general conclusions.  And it’s absolutely right that a responsible analysis of the effects of Pop’s unbringing will need to look at a lot of information.  To what Suddenlytentacles has mentioned, I’d add that it would be important to know what Pop has actually been told about gender.  The article in the Local says that ‘Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl’.  If that’s an accurate report of what the parents said, and an accurate translation into English, then Pop is still internalizing cissexism and gender-binarism.  Which shows that we probably need to think a bit more about what raising a child without gendering the child even means.

2  ·  David Reimer and worries about choices

Clarri reblogged to add:

Eh. For some reason I don’t think this is a good idea. I think referring to a child with gender neutral terms would do the same sort of psychological damage. I mean, what if I know I am female and I feel 100% female and fine with my body parts, but my parents insist on calling me ‘they’? It could cause so much confusion over whether you’re supposed to comply with your parents’ plans and be genderqueer, or be what you want to be. Same problem.

Gender cannot be socially conditioned. It was proven in the case of David Reimer (who was born male, but lost his penis in a botched circumcision and was sexually reassigned to female and raised female by his parents - he ended up fiercely resisting every attempt to be a girl, even from a young age, and ended up transitioning to a male later in life) that coercion doesn’t work.

I don’t think what is needed here is gender-neutral parenting. I think what is needed here is open-minded parenting! Call your child a he or a she, but always let them know that they are free to express themselves in any way they want, and if they want to change, support them.

Just my two cents.

Since we’ve been talking about a specific case — Pop — I’ll start by responding to this other specific case of David Reimer.  Whose case, I suggest, does not prove that ‘gender cannot be socially conditioned’.  A single case can never prove a categorical assertion of that kind: it can disprove it or it can be consistent with it, but it can never prove it because there is always the possibility of another case that will not be consistent with it.

David Reimer’s life was far more complex and far more difficult to draw any conclusions from than is generally conceded by people who use it to ‘prove’ things.  Judith Butler’s essay Doing justice to someone is quite good on this.  Part of the point is that John Money (who recommended and supervised Reimer’s upbringing as a girl) and Milton Diamond (who oversaw and published on Reimer’s subsequent transition to living as a man) each tried to use Reimer to prove a point and each took an approach based on strongly cissexist (and heterosexist, at least in Money’s case) assumptions.

But I won’t get too much into discussing this case now because it isn’t directly relevant.  You cite the case to demonstrate that ‘coercion doesn’t work’.  It certainly does demonstrate that you can’t make someone a woman by giving them a vagina and a course of oestrogen, lying to them about their reproductive capacity, try to stop them playing with guns and trucks, dress them in feminine clothes, and tell them how nice it will be to marry a man.  Which is what Money did.  And, you know, it’s curious, because a lot of people cite Money’s failure to convince David that he was a girl in support of the proposition that gender is biologically determined and that transgender is wrong or non-existent or abberant.  But actually it’s exactly what a lot of trans* men would say too: my parents may have given me a vagine and oestrogen and given me dolls to play with and dressed me in feminine clothes, but that didn’t stop me being a man.  So you’re right, what happened to David Reimer does show that you can’t necessarily° condition someone’s gender.

But the reason I say that isn’t relevant is that nobody is talking here about deliberately conditioning anyone’s gender.  My original post was not about how to raise a child to be genderqueer but about how to avoid raising a child to be any gender other than the one the child actually is / wants to be (including, if it’s a conceptual possibility, no gender at all).  And about whether that would ever be possible.

I agree with some of your hesitation.  I think you’re probably right that calling a child ‘they’ would tend to give the child a nudge toward one thing just as ‘he’ or ‘she’ would toward others.  In my original post I wondered whether this might be one of those situations where there is no neutral option and every choice is a choice in some particular direction.  I suspect that’s the case.  It’s the case with most things, actually, and as with most things the only reason one choice seems less like a choice than the others is that that choice is the norm.  It’s the one most people choose, and they mostly choose it without being conscious of choosing because that’s the choice to which society defaults.  But it’s still a choice, even if not a conscious one, even if it’s just an unthinking acceptance of a choice that’s been made for you.  In computing, any default option is the default option because at some point somebody designed the system to default to that option.  That doesn’t necessarily make it the best option, either in general or in any particular case.  It just makes it the easy option.  It’s still our responsibility to consider whether it’s the best option.

So there’s a tension here.  On the one hand we want to avoid coercing the child or overriding the child’s own identity or imposing a restrictive ideology on the child.  On the other hand there is simply no way to avoid adopting some kind of conceptual framework, some set of axioms about the nature of gender, that will inform how you bring up the child.  Defaulting to the social norm — calling the child ‘he’ if you see a penis and ‘she’ if you see a vagina — is not avoiding the choice, it’s making a positive decision that you are going to approach the task of child-rearing based on the assumption that genitals dictate gender.  That’s true even if you ‘let them know that they are free to express themselves in any way they want’.  You’re still pointing the child in one direction rather than another.

Similarly Joey reblogged to say:

I believe Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt are raising a FAAB child who prefers male pronouns at a very young age.

I’m pretty sure they pronouned their child as the birth sex unless directed to do otherwise by the child. I agree with this idea personally as I think you could be steering the child to be gender variant if you do not. 

I think it’s okay to pronoun a child as their birth sex but be open to any changes that might occur. 

The key point here is ‘you could be steering the child to be gender variant if you do not’.  It’s hard to get away from that.  But the other side is that you could be steering the child to be gender-conforming if you do.  What may not feel like a steer to one child may feel like a strong steer to another.  Rettirc reblogged to say:

I wish I had been raised this way. S: It’d be so nice just to be without having a gender pushed on you. I know some kids prefer it that way and stuff, but I frequently felt suffocated. If the child ends up wanting to be treated in a gendered way, then they could be.

…

So gendering a child one way or another in the hope that it will work out okay can end up with a child who feels they’re having gender ‘pushed’ on them.  It sounds like Joey’s view is that it’s better, acknowledging the difficulties, to err on that side anyway.  The point is that it’s a conscious decision to err one way or another, and whatever you do will have consequences that you can’t predict.

Because it seems to me that you have to take a view.  You have to decide what you think gender is and how it develops.  If you believe that everyone with XX chromosomes is a woman and everyone with XY chromosomes is a man then you get your child genetically tested at birth (because you can’t necessarily tell just by looking at the child’s genitals) and call the child ‘he’ or ‘she’ accordingly, but you have to bear in mind that you’re ignoring the fact that some XX people turn out to identify themselves as men and some XY people turn out to identify themselves as women, not to mention that some people are XXY or XYY or other combinations.  If you believe that the fact that people with vaginas tend statistically to identify themselves as women is enough to justify treating your vagina’d child as a girl at least until the child is old enough to be able to consciously examine whether that identification feels accurate, then you do that, but you have to accept that if your child turns out to be trans* then you’ve been misgendering him / hir / them / em for at least a few very formative years and that’s bound to have had psychological consequences.  If you believe categorically that there is no such thing as gender at all and it is not only a construct but an unnecessary and unhelpful construct then I guess you pick a gender-neutral pronoun and do your best to raise your child in a genderless way and hope you don’t turn out to be denying or suppressing something important about your child’s identity.

It’s tricky and daunting.  So I do share your hesitation, like I said.  But I don’t agree that ‘open-minded parenting’ is a complete solution.  There is going to be a time, before you have any way of knowing anything about your child’s thoughts and feelings but during which you will inevitably be beginning to shape your child’s identity, when you simply have to make some decisions based on untestable hypotheses about the nature of gender, and then apply those decisions in practice.

3  ·  Pronouns in particular

Tiara reblogged to say, among other things (that I’ll come to later):

Pronoun usage isn’t going to be enough. Malay has only one pronoun for human beings and kids raised in the Malay language still generally follow common gender conventions without a second thought.

….

… and Deadgeraniums further added:

On the subject of pronouns, ta (Mandarin) or yee (Hokkien), which are not marked for gender, might do. Unfortunately, the written form is still marked, unless one uses the Cantonese written pronoun, keoi(pronounced qu in Mandarin).

…

To start with the latter: I’m not quite sure what you mean by saying that those pronouns ‘might do’.  If this means they might be usable as gender-neutral pronouns in English, er…  Well, personally I’d hesitate to do that.  That’s partly because it would seem appropriative (for me at least, since I’m not remotely Chinese and don’t speak any Chinese languages) and partly because I just don’t really see the point of using pronouns from other languages as pronouns in English.  The fact that they’re established and well-known pronouns in another language doesn’t make them any more familiar or comprehensible to an Anglophone ear than entirely invented pronouns like ‘ze’ and ‘ey’.  But perhaps you didn’t mean this as a suggestion for raising children in English anyway: I note you changed the title of your reblog from ‘Gender for kids’ to ‘Gendered pronouns and Chinese’.

Moving on to Tiara’s point, yes, pronouns are certainly not going to do anything much on their own, but they seem to me a sort of first hurdle.  If you’re trying to raise a child without predetermining the child’s gender, calling the child ‘her’ or ‘him’ means you’re working against your own objective from the beginning.  Of course there are genderqueer people who use those pronouns, but they’re still overwhelmingly marked as feminine and masculine, and indeed female and male, respectively, so it’s quite a firm steer.

4  ·  ’Gender-neutral parenting’

Tiara goes on to link to a few articles that purport to be about ‘gender-neutral parenting’:

I have come across a number of blogs about gender-neutral parenting (a search is bringing up a lot of stuff about gender-neutral passports which is interesting, as well as response to a Swedish couple’s decision to keep the gender of their child a secret - which is mostly brain numbing). Links:

http://thefeministbreeder.com/practicing-gender-neutral-parenting/
http://www.favouritethings.com/archives/1429
http://mobile.salon.com/mwt/feature/2011/01/27/renaming_our_transgender_child_open2011/index.html

I can’t seem to find the blog I’m thinking of - does anyone else remember? The child in question had an older sister who at one point decided one of her dolls was trans like her sibling; I think the kid’s name was Ariel but I can’t seem to find the blog. Does anyone know?

I was raised relatively gender-neutral - there was no secret about me being female, and I went to an all-girls school, but it wasn’t necessarily a big deal with my family, just a happenstance. Every so often (esp after puberty) my mum would get at me about being more “feminine” but didn’t force me to play with dolls instead of trucks or wear pink (EW) or whatever. I’m still a cis woman, though mostly neutral gender-roles-wise.

Now I have to say that those first two links lead to things that I would not call ‘gender-neutral’.  They’re articles about how to avoid gender-stereotyping children.  They still appear to be firmly based in the assumption that you divide children into boys and girls and that you can tell which is which from birth, i.e. presumably by looking at their genitals.  Raising a child as a girl who feels minimal pressure to like pink and play with dolls and grow up to be a secretary is grand, but what I’m interested in is how to raise a child without prejudging whether the child is a girl in the first place.

The third link is very interesting.  The gist is that the writer, Meg Whitlock, and her husband adopted an eight-year-old child from China whom they thought was a boy but they quite soon discovered that she identified herself as a girl.  The article doesn’t say much about that discovery, but the family seems to have adjusted reasonably well (Whitlock better than her husband).  The substance of the article is how they chose a new name for her.  I confess I was rather startled by it.  The child immediately started calling herself Gabrielle.  Problem solved, surely?  But, Whitlock says, ‘I was not a fan; my husband had briefly dated a Gabrielle.  Besides, a name that was too pretty, like Tiffany, could sound like a drag queen.’  Er… right.  So what seems to have been some days, even weeks or perhaps months, were spent trying to persuade the child to go for various other names that Whitlock preferred, during which time the child was still going by a masculine name at school and was so uncomfortable with it that she changed the subject or walked away when anyone asked her her name.  I really really hesitate to pass judgment on anyone else’s parenting, but I’m quite troubled by a scenario in which you have a child who’s suffering mild trauma on a daily basis because you don’t like the name she has already spontaneously chosen for herself.  Anyway, in the end they agreed on ‘Ruthie’ so it seems to have been okay.  And all this is irrelevant to the topic at hand anyway, except that it touches on the question of involving the child in these choices.

5  ·  Choice by the child

Whether it was right or not for Whitlock to overrule Ruthie’s desire to be called Gabrielle, the unusual fact there is that by the time she met her own child that child was already eight years old and able to make it clear that she was a girl.  When most parents meet their children it will still be a year or two before the children can start to communicate their opinions on the subject.  How do you deal with that?

Several responses have looked at ways of allowing children to form their own identities.  Marisa reblogged and added:

this conversation interests me because as someone who knew (and in certain ways, expressed) their gender variance at a young age (well, 13 as young is relative) and was continually shamed and manipulated into being more ‘feminine’ instead of what I really wanted to be, i would have given anything for people just to listento me. and to let me know that whatever identity/pronoun/name i chose for myself was the right one. to let me take charge of my own gender, in all the ways that entailed, if it was shaving my head and wearing more masculine clothing, i wanted to be able to do that. if it was referring to myself as ‘he’ and ‘him’, i wanted to be able to do that. i think one of the most important things in life is to let your child know that whatever they are called, whatever they appear to be, is secondary to what they want for themselves. that what they go by today does not have to be what they go by tomorrow. that they have the right to decide for themselves what they want to be known as and identify as and that they will be loved and supported and cared for, not forced into a box they don’t fit. 
So I think that referring to future children by a gender neutral pronoun is okay. Or referring to them by another pronoun. But really listening to them, at any age, and having conversations about their identities in which they take the lead, is always best. i know everyone who commented here already knows that, but i just wanted to add my two cents. :)

… and Erik similarly added:

…

We were kind of planning on referring to the kid by a gender-neutral pronoun until they were old enough to choose? And letting them know that just because they chose one certain pronoun at age 4, doesn’t mean they can’t start using a different one later. And letting them choose how they dress, again, as soon as they’re old enough.

…

Meanwhile Erica dropped me an ask and said:

It *is* possible, though it does take a lot of effort. One thing is that you wouldn’t pick the kid’s pronouns once they were old enough to read simple words. You’d give them a list of pronouns (including he & she) and ask which ones felt right that day (& make it clear that they can change their mind at any point during the day). The same goes for asking if they feel like any certain gender that day (also emphasize that they aren’t required to do or stray from certain activities because of their gender). 

Besides, I think it’d be pretty hard to sway a kid towards GQ in this binarist society. It’d be hard enough to prevent having your anti-binary-supremacy ideas negated once they start school, much less actually forcing genderqueerness on them. I suppose it’s possible, but I don’t find it likely.

These sound to me like very good suggestions.  (And Erica, it sounds like perhaps you’re speaking from experience?  May I ask?)  The name-only thing that we encountered with Pop sounds like a good idea too because it’s less marked than any of the pronoun options (though it could result in the child developing the conversational habit of over-using names, but maybe not).  Generally it seems like giving the child options and space to explore and try things and change sound good.  I still worry about how much formative stuff goes on in the very early stages before they’re able to take any real role in choosing things like this.  On the other hand I worry that too much flexibility could make it hard to form a clear sense of identity at all.  Does that matter? Maybe I worry too much.

6  ·  Gendering outside home

Drew worries too:

The only issue I can think of with this is the fact that while the parents would clearly not use gendered language, the people around the child would. I don’t know how you would minimize that impact, especially since socialization outside the home is a very important part of a child’s development (ignoring of course the negative aspects of such interaction). How would such a child be able to interact with their peers without being gendered? I don’t know, just something to think about I guess. 

That’s an important point.  I suppose there are two ways of dealing with this, at least when it comes to the people with whom the child will be frequently and predictably interacting.  One is to tell those people that you are trying not to gender the child and ask them to try not to do it; the other is to let people interact with the child however exactly as usual but just refuse (like Pop’s parents) to answer questions about the child’s gender, or redirect those questions for the child to answer if they can.

The younger the child is, the less visible secondary sexual characteristics there will be (obviously no breasts or beards but also little differentiation of things like skull-shape) and therefore the more people’s attempts to gender the child will depend on things like clothing than the child can change from one day to another.  The child might be treated as a boy on a day when they’re wearing trousers and a girl on a day when they’re wearing a dress, and end up regarding gender as something rather more mutable and superficial than many of us do.  Or they may find that they particularly dislike the way they’re treated when they wear certain clothes and that will help them realize that they’re more comfortable identifying one way than another.  Of course the major problem that social interaction is going to introduce is that it will be overwhelmingly binary (because, y’know, society).  So it would be important to look for ways to help the child understand that there are more than two options.  On the other hand, as Erica said above, at least the binarist nature of social attitudes would much reduce the risk of pushing a child into a genderqueer identity that didn’t really fit the child.

Of course, as Heavyaura says (in an old blog-post linked from this reblog), a larger-scale goal should be for external influences (both other people’s attitudes and the media) to stop making this sort of thing harder for parents and make it easier:

…

Indeed, parents should be supported by the culture at large; media geared toward children should not work against parents in this respect. While it’s probably true that media/entertainment cannot be totally “value neutral,” these outlets should strain to avoid outright harm (which often comes in the forms of bias). As a parenting style, alternative parenting relies on community, closeness, trust, and the establishment of meaningful boundaries for children that have their basis in a rational discussion of dominant culture’s effects on children.

On a related note, Jasmin says:

Huh, I feel like I was having a similar conversation the other day. It’s also worth noting that using gender-neutral pronouns for them might be alienating them, since most other kids will use gendered pronouns.

That’s another good point, and another reason I like the idea of giving the child as much agency as possible in deciding how to do gender.  No one is going to have a better idea of where the best balance is between expressing their identity and rubbing along comfortably with their peers.

And actually I think that’s important not only in order to give the child the option of avoiding alienation but also in order to let the child be more fearless than we might expect.  My friend’s five-year-old the other day quite cheerfully told the assembled company, somewhat to his parents’ surprise, that he had three daddies and two mummies.  Some might say he’d ‘misunderstood’ what daddies and mummies are, and others (if they were, for example, Judith Butler) might say that he was reimagining kinship structures beyond the heteronormative.  We might find that if they were given the space to do so some children would be much happier to non-conforming than we think.

7  ·  The future

Brian is optimistic:

I think by the time that most of us are having children things will have changed.  Maybe not total 180, but to enough degree that using gender neutral pronouns won’t alienate any child.  I also think if you give the child the best of both worlds, showing things in the “female” perspective as well as the “male” you won’t be leading them to be genderqueer either.  I’m sure it’s all up in the air now, seeing as the concept of raising a gender neutral concept hasn’t been shown in the generation of young adults to actually talk about the experience of that kind of parenting.  I think it’s a fantastic idea though, I will definitely raise my children gender neutral.  There’s nothing wrong with playing with barbies, cooking in the kitchen, and hammering away on a project with their dad.

No matter how anyone raises their children, there shouldn’t be judging in any case.  It’s our job to support them in any way they believe their life is taking them, whether they want to be girl/boy/doctor/lobster.  It’s who they are, and we will never be able to push them one way or the other.

Now, I note that Brian is twenty; I’m twenty-nine, so that difference may explain why I’m not so optimistic.  But it’s true that we shouldn’t assume the future will be the same as the present.  The visibility, if not the acceptance or understanding, of trans* people in North America and Europe has increased dramatically in the last ten years, and it may be that in the next ten years something similar will start to happen for non-binary people.  Returning to Sweden, I heard on the radio a few months ago (and here is someone who seems to have garnered the same information from a different source) that many young Swedish people have started to use a new gender-neutral pronoun, and not just for people of unknown or non-binary gender but for people in general (in the same way that young English-speakers sometimes say ‘they’ even when referring to people whom they know to be men or women).  Perhaps by the time any of us has children it will be a little easier.  Not a lot, I suspect, but perhaps a little.

8  ·  Thanks

Just a quick final paragraph to say thanks for everyone who’s commented, everyone who’s reblogged without adding anything much but thus broadening the circle of discussion, and everyone who’s been taking an interest in any other way.

· • ·

°  I say ‘necessarily’ because it doesn’t show that you can never condition someone’s gender.  It doesn’t show this for the simple logical reason that a single case of failure to do something can’t show that the thing can never be done.  But more particularly there’s good reason to doubt that David Reimer’s life shows that.  The very nature of what he went through meant that he was constantly examining and questioning — being forced to examine and question — his own gender.  He was not only being conditioned but was aware that he was being conditioned.  It’s fairly obvious that conditioning is likely to be more effective when it’s unobtrusive and unnoticed.  Consider someone who is, for example, born with XX chromosomes and a vagina, raised as a girl from birth, always read as a girl by those around them, has a body that conforms to what the media depict as a proper body for a girl to have, and is generally never confronted with a specific reason to doubt that they’re a girl: this person is not being consciously and deliberately conditioned in laboratory conditions, as David Reimer was, but is still being conditioned by society because that’s what society does.  If that person thinks of herself as a girl and doesn’t suffer any dissonance or dysphoria as a result, then that’s grand, and nobody could reasonably suggest that maybe she isn’t ‘really’ a girl but a boy or a genderqueer person or whatever.  But we can’t say she hasn’t been socially conditioned.  We are all socially conditioned and that’s what makes it so hard to get data that tells us anything useful about what gender would be, and whether it would exist at all, if we weren’t.  Reimer’s case tells us very little about that question.