Swedish Parents raise 2 year old with no gender identity

[AndreaisSlowlyLosingIt]

www.thelocal.se/20232/20090623/

Had a discussion with the manshape about this who seems to belive the parents are insane. I however think its quite a good idea. The child is allowed to dress itself however it feels and its wadrobe includes both boys and girls clothes.

I'd love to know what the rest of you think.

Any time you bring up a child it's an experiment, especially a first child. You've never done it before and you do what seems like a good idea to you (for any number of different reasons). Bringing a baby girl home to a bedroom painted bright pink and covered in sparkly fairies and unicorn vomit (possibly "unicorn vomit" is my favourite-ever MN phrase) is an experiment.

It strikes me as a bit of a cop out to be honest. It is far cleverer to bring up your son or daughter to know that gender does not limit a person.

My eldest is 4 and sometimes tells me things like "only ladies can be teachers" which I challenge and we talk about together. It's part of my job to bring her up equipped to live in and deal with the real world, not to pretend that the real world doesn't apply to her.

A really interesting book is Pink Brain, Blue Brain, written by a neuroscientist.

Great idea. Bet Pop is a girl.

Raising a child, especially your first child is one new experience/decision after another, but I would disagree with ProfessorLayton that it is the same sort of experiment that these parents are trying because, in the main, the decisions we take as parents are informed by the wealth of knowledge available.

There are scientific studies on the benefits of different feeding methods, studies on vaccinations, and a huge amount of other parents' experiences out there for us to draw on.

For example, when I decided to wean ds1 at 4 months old, I knew lots of other parents doing the same thing - so I could look at their experiences and learn from them. Similarly, a parent deciding whether or not to vaccinate their child has access to lots of scientific and anecdotal evidence both for and against.

But these parents are doing something very unusual and with no scientific studies to back up their experiment. They cannot know what the long term effects are going to be, and for me, this tips what they are doing out of the realms of normal childrearing experimentation and into gambling with their child's psychological and mental health.

"It's a completely child-centred, child-lead approach to gender identity. He or she can be him or herself first, and if that involves pink ponies or blue cars so be it"

you see I think that's utter bull shite - you don't need to shy away from gender identity to let them play with whatever they want.

DS2 always played (and still does quite frequently) play with "pink ponies" (well ok no pink ponies - but stereotypical "girls toys"). His favourite colour is pink, he loves high school musical and is insanely proud of his pink HSM MP3 Player........but he still knows he's a boy.

I wonder if you keep a child's gender a secret it will grow up feeling as though they should be ashamed of it?

It sounds deeply perverted to me. The most fundamental thing about me is that I am a woman; I think about it and feel it all the time. That isn't gender-conditioning from the outside - it is me from within.

Are there scientific studies to back up the positive effects of dressing girl babies in pink, or of pushing them towards stereotypically girly toys? Or of dressing boy babies in camouflage and not buying them toy buggies because it might "turn them gay"? Because those things are done every day (not by Mumsnetters, of course, as we are far too enlightened...) and while they garner a lot of "" and "Oh, FFS!" around here no one purses up their lips and says "well, there are no scientific studies to back it up".

Boys used to wear dresses and be treated the same as girls until the age of four or so, IIRC (still often wore dresses until two or three as recently as the beginning of the 20th century). There's a good wealth of anecdotal evidence there.

But that's different from keeping a child's gender a secret proflayton. Are they going to tell the child not to tell anyone if they are asked? How is that going to be? I have no issue with raising a child as gender neutral - I've tried to do it as best I can - but it's the secrecy element that I find disturbing.

I wasn't saying it was all scientifically based, ProfessorLayton - but was trying to make the point that the majority of what we do whilst raising our children isn't experimentation based on nothing but our own beliefs, but usually has some sort of basis in either science or experience.

LadyBiscuit that's a good point.

Will the parents demand a non-gender specific toilet for the child at school?

The child is two. Presumably they are starting off the earliest years as unbiased as possible to try and counteract all the crap that will come later. I very much doubt they think it will be possible and/or desirable long term for the child to remain ignorant of its bilological assignation.

Good for them.

No I disagree that we experiment on our children. We bring up our children they way other people bring them up, we have a few choices of course but by and large for a world full of 6 billion people we mainly behave in a similar way.

No one hides the gender of their child, not in a world of 6 billion people, I've never heard of it before. Of course it's an experiment, and not one that would get past any decent ethics committee. .

Why do you think it is a good idea to deny a child information about one of the most fundamental aspects of its being, HullyGully?

My bet she is a girl as well.

Pop means doll in dutch, I wonder what it means in Swedish?

They've specifically said that they're not going to tell the child not to tell anyone if asked, and the whole point seems to be that it's for the child to decide to share that information if and when the child wants to do it. The child knows what its external genitalia are like. To the extent it has innate preferences that are influenced by its biological sex it will be getting on with them. It knows, or will know very soon, that it "matches" one of its parents but not the other. It will be interested in how other children fit into this pattern. As I said in my very first post, I can't see this lasting for very much longer (perhaps another six months at most) so all we are really talking about is maintaining a gender-free public identity for the first two and a half years or so. I think that's very different from (say) having a nine-year-old with no public gender.

Take the "having a toy buggy or any other girly toy will turn my son gay" thing, SDTG -- is that based on science, or experience, or solely on own beliefs? Are these fathers really chatting down the pub to dozens of others who are confiding "Yes, we let Cedric cuddle a doll for five minutes once and that was it for him"? In that case I think there's actually a reasonable amount of scientific evidence that not letting boys indulge in nurturing-style roleplay can be harmful long-term so it's actively flying in the face of all the evidence rather than just not having any hard evidence in its favour.

That is an interesting reading of my comments, Bonsoir.

I don't look at in that way. When my dc were small, their gender was irrelevant, I dressed neither in gender specific clothes, or gave them such toys - and yes, of course they still ended up with guns and barbies, although my ds did wear a rather lovely tutu for a couple of years - I didn't stress that one was a boy and one a girl because before a certain age it really doesn't crop up. They are just small people busy growing.

The reason I think what the parents are doing is interesting is that most of what we consider gender-specific does come from outside cultural influences, hence the inevitability of barbie and guns. Not telling others the gender prevents Pop being squeezed into a cultural stereotype at a tender age. There are lots of studies to show that people treat girl and boy babies differently - when they know the sex.

I think the child is being given enormous freedom and will find out what cramped gender corner it is supposed to occupy come three or so.

That is a good point, ProfessorLayton - and one I can't think of a reply to, at the moment - so I am going to take the coward's way out, and go vacuum the house for my MIL's impending visit!

I don't think that you give a child freedom to explore by denying it information about who it is. Opportunities to do different things and acquire multiple skills, in a non gender specific context, are what matters.

Not "who" it is. "What" it is.

Who

You said yourself, Bonsoir, that your identity as a woman came entirely from within. How could anyone deny you that, if it's so innate? The child already knows that it is a person with a penis or a person without a penis, and it already has access to all its innate impulses and internal motivations. What is it that it's being denied?

There is being, and there is consciousness of being. Two different things. In a world where consciousness of gender difference is the norm, denying a child that consciousness seems to me unnecessarily cruel and abusive.