Swedish parents raise their child without a gender

[Darth Wong]

Would it be possible to raise a child with a neutral gender identity without keeping them ignorant of what the general culture's gender identity options are?

No. It's not even possible to raise kids with neutral racial identity, and race is much less intimately connected to psychology than gender is. Try to imagine raising a kid so that he doesn't know whether he's white or black, or that there's a such thing as race. The only way to do it would be to isolate him from knowledge of the existence of other races, which is not going to be helpful. We actually never talked to our kids about race when they were younger, but they quickly noticed that some people look different than others. They just called them "brown people" instead of "black people" because that's the visible colour of their skin: brown. There's no way to avoid that discussion unless they simply never see a black person.

Kids aren't stupid; they can figure out that there's a such thing as boys and girls and they can identify the ridiculously obvious correlations between gender and clothing/behaviour in their society. The only way to keep them from making these correlations is to keep the raw data away from them.

[Simon_Jester]

Very true. Kids will put two and two together on their own. To make matters worse, they're likely to get five if unattended and wind up believing all kinds of weird stuff.

I take it that because you can't raise a child ignorant of gender identity, you then conclude that it is impossible to raise a child with a neutral gender identity, because they'll inevitably pick one of the identities they notice in the world around them?

[Big Phil]

Very true. Kids will put two and two together on their own. To make matters worse, they're likely to get five if unattended and wind up believing all kinds of weird stuff.

I take it that because you can't raise a child ignorant of gender identity, you then conclude that it is impossible to raise a child with a neutral gender identity, because they'll inevitably pick one of the identities they notice in the world around them?

Do you believe that sexual preference is a selection people make when they grow up, or is it biologically driven? Why would you assume gender is a choice?