“Gender fluid upbringing”

[CatsFantastic]

So I keep seeing headlines about celebrities who had “gender fluid” upbringings.

And when you read the article it turns out that they had perfectly normal upbringings and they were encouraged to play with whatever toys they wanted and wear what they like.

How the fuck is that now being framed as “gender fluid”??? It was a normal upbringing when I was a child!

My AIBU is this - it is very damaging to force children to adhere to sex stereotypes, why can’t we just let children be children ?!

YANBU - sex stereotypes are very damaging and children should be allowed to play with whatever toys you like and wear what they like.

YABU- sex stereotypes need to be adhered to, they give children guidance on how they should behave, how they should play and what they should wear.

'Gender fluid'

What a load of utter rubbish.

@RedRumTheHorse dad has never said anything and helps him on with his princess cape when he wears that.

I'm raising my boys to be free-thinking individuals. That includes poking fun at adverts and stupid stereotypes, and not giving a toss about what the packaging of a toy says or show (apart from safety instructions), or what brainless idiots say or think.

They naturally gravitate towards playing with all the toys as a result (why not? They enjoy their freedom to the fullest).
Their play style is rather boyish (most narratives are action packed and involve epic struggles, although there can be a more caring element), but the cast of their stories is most definitely gender diverse (queens, princesses and magical-warrior-mums often save the day!)

@hibbledibble

My children have access to a variety of toys, but the girls gravitate towards typically girly toys, and vise versa for the boys. They seem to really prefer certain toys, without any encouragement, which is interesting.

Unless you've never taken them outside, watched TV, or read books with them, of course they have "encouragement" to fit into gender stereotypes. It's everywhere.

Pink and blue marketing has a lot to answer for. I'd love to see it banned.

My son had a push chair for his teddy, in the 70s. He took it out on the street, when he was about 3 or 4 (quiet cul-de-sac) I heard one of the slightly older boys say 'boys don't play with those' but he just replied that his dad pushed him in his pushchair when he was a baby. So the result was that all the little boys went home to get their sister's pushchairs, and had a happy hour racing them up and down the street.

Kids will play with whatever toys are available... young children will wear the clothes parents choose for them.

@DramaDromedary

The issue isn’t as black and white as your voting options, so I’m not voting. However, an acquaintance of mine is bringing her daughter up gender fluid, and as far as I can see it involves making her wear really ugly clothes (lots of corduroy trousers and thick-knit jumpers) and refusing to buy her the doll she desperately wants.

That clothing sounds like a 70s childhood. Except no one actually thought much about children’s clothes then. Putting your daughter in cords and a jumper was normal, clothes were much more expensive then and most of us wore hand me downs and jumpers knitted by our Grans, we were unisex by default most of the time, with a dress or two in our wardrobes for special occasions.

I've not voted because it's perfectly possible to give children a range of toys and activities without needing to be self-absorbed enough to call yourself a gender fluid parent.

There's no need for everything to be pink/blue coded, but there's no need to brand a perfectly normal parenting decision in all shades of woke language

Totally agree. My kids are getting a childhood. They can have hair however short or long they want, they can play with pink toys or blue toys, they can watch whatever TV shows they want.... they remain the sex they were born. It actually terrifies me that one of my kids will meet some woke teacher who tells them that there completely irrelevant preference make them the opposite sex.
Total madness.

Whenever I read these articles, all I can see is a subheading in my mind of "Sexist homophobic privileged parents fail at trying to be less awful"

Absolutely. You've got to have fragile or messed up ideas of gender if you think you've made a radical parenting decision in letting your child choose whatever toy they want to play with.

I know we finished on this thread a few days ago, but I found this fab article in Slate, in answer to a reader who is "raising her daughter gender-neutral". The Slate answer is incisive and brilliant, IMO.

@MyMushroomsInATimeSlip

My son who had a variety of "neutral" toys as a baby learnt how to turn any random item into a vehicle by the time he was a toddler

In a similar way, I used to look after my 3 nephews and whenever they pretended something was a gun would tell them to stop, it wasn’t nice to pretend to kill people. Found out years later that my girls would go to theirs and love playing toy guns!!! None of them have turned out to be violent gun toting killers 🤣

Great article @DramaDromedary thanks for sharing. Very well articulates that gender neutral means "boy things" and codifies "girl things" as bad to be avoided.

I’m really glad you thought so. Yes, it gets to the heart of what I feel about this gender neutral thing- that actually it’s saying that feminine is bad and impractical, and masculine is healthy and aspirational. That can’t be what we’re going for!

I always think that people who say these sorts of things have just misunderstood what happens in most other houses. This is just normal. We don't need to name everything that's just normal.

Thinking more girls drive cars so why are toy cars 'boy' toys, men do dishes, cook, iron (yes I am sure partnered people will say 'not my partner' but not all men have partners) so why is a play kitchen a 'girl' toy.

Train set - boy? girls use trains too
doll - girl? boys become fathers so a doll is a pretend baby sometimes

Boys even have long hair and also use skin care porducts

so what toys are actually BOY or GIRLS toys?

who decides?