Swedish parents raise their child without a gender

[His Divine Shadow]

http://www.thelocal.se/20232/20090623/

Meet Pop, a two-and-a-half-year-old Swedish child whose parents are refusing to say whether the apple of their eye is a boy or a girl.

Pop’s parents, both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few – those who have changed the child’s diaper – nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

The child's parents said so long as they keep Pop’s gender a secret, he or she will be able to avoid preconceived notions of how people should be treated if male or female.

Pop's wardrobe includes everything from dresses to trousers and Pop's hairstyle changes on a regular basis. And Pop usually decides how Pop is going to dress on a given morning.

Although Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl, Pop's parents never use personal pronouns when referring to the child – they just say Pop.

"I believe that the self-confidence and personality that Pop has shaped will remain for a lifetime," said Pop's mother.

But while Pop’s parents say they have received supportive feedback from many of their peers, not everyone agrees that their chosen course of action will have a positive outcome.

“Ignoring children's natures simply doesn’t work,” says Susan Pinker, a psychologist and newspaper columnist from Toronto, Canada, who wrote the book The Sexual Paradox, which focuses on sex differences in the workplace.

“Child-rearing should not be about providing an opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child’s needs as an individual,” Pinker tells The Local.

“It’s unlikely that they’ll be able to keep this a secret for long. Children are curious about their own identity, and are likely to gravitate towards others of the same sex during free play time in early childhood.”

Pinker says there are many ways that males and females differ from birth; even if gender is kept ‘secret,’ prenatal hormones developed in the second trimester of pregnancy already alter the way the child behaves and feels.

She says once children can speak, males tell aggressive stories 87 per cent of the time, while females only 17 per cent. In a study, children aged two to four were given a task to work together for a reward, and boys used physical tactics 50 times more than girls, she says.

But Swedish gender equality consultant Kristina Henkel says Pop’s parents' experiment might have positive results.

“If the parents are doing this because they want to create a discussion with other adults about why gender is important, then I think they can make a point of it,” Henkel says in a telephone interview with The Local.

“You can talk about there being a non-stereotypical gender; if you are a girl you can do the same as a boy, and if you’re a boy you can do the same as a girl.”

Henkel also says a child's sex can deeply affect how they are treated growing up, and distract them from simply being a human being.

“If the child is dressed up as a girl or boy, it affects them because people see and treat them in a more gender-typical way,” Henkel explains.

“Girls are told they are cute in their dresses, and boys are told they are cool with their car toys. But if you give them no gender they will be seen more as a human or not a stereotype as a boy or girl.”

She says that without these gender stereotypes, children can build character as individuals, not hindered by preconceived notions of what they should be as males or females.

“I think that can make these kids stronger,” Henkel says.

Anna Nordenström, a paediatric endocrinologist at Karolinska Institutet, says it’s hard to know what effects the parents' decision will have on Pop.

“It will affect the child, but it’s hard to say if it will hurt the child,” says Nordenström, who studies hormonal influences on gender development.

“I don’t know what they are trying to achieve. It’s going to make the child different, make them very special.”

She says if Pop is still ‘genderless’ by the time he or she starts school, Pop will certainly receive a lot of attention from classmates.

“We don’t know exactly what determines sexual identity, but it’s not only sexual upbringing,” says Nordenström. “Gender-typical behaviour, sexual preferences and sexual identity usually go together. There are hormonal and other influences that we don’t know that will determine the gender of the child.”

Both Nordenström and Pinker refer to a controversial case from 1967 when a circumcision left one of two twin brothers without a penis. Dr. John Money, who asserted that gender was learned rather than innate, convinced the parents to raise 'David' as 'Brenda' and the child had cosmetic genitalia reconstruction surgery.

She was raised as a female, with girls’ clothes, games and codes of behaviour. The parents never told Brenda the secret until she was a teenager and rebelled against femininity. She then started receiving testosterone injections and underwent another genetic reconstruction process to become David again. David Reimer denounced the experiment as a crushing failure before committing suicide at the age of 38.

“I don’t think that trying to keep a child’s sex a secret will fool anyone, nor do I think it’s wise or ethical,” says Pinker. “As with any family secret, when we try to keep an elemental truth from children, it usually blows up in the parent’s face, via psychosomatic illness or rebellious behaviour.”

But with a second child on the way, Pop's parents have no plans to change what they see as a winning formula. As for Pop, they say they will only reveal the child's sex when Pop thinks it's time.

Footnote: Pop is not the child's real name but is the name used in Svenska Dagbladet's interview with the child's parents from March 6th.

I don't really know what to say on this. Sounds like an experiment with a kids life, it might just as well backfire completely on the parents as well as it might not. Although I am not sure what the result would be assuming it doesn't backfire, a regular guy/girl with an open mind? Who knows. I'm not sure it'll last long as the article says the kid will likely start to gravitate towards either boys or girls and go with one, likely depending on his own sex.

[Simon_Jester]

I think the parents are fools, that the experiment will almost certainly backfire, and that the poor kid is going to take the hit for it.

Small children aren't going to respect "I'm not telling whether I'm a boy or a girl." They're going to assume they know and taunt the child accordingly, or they're going to take steps to make sure that they know. Children are barbarians until they've had time to become civilized. The smartest thing the child can possibly do in interactions with other children is to tell them, even if the parents refuse. But because the parents are socializing their child to do no such thing, that's not likely to happen, resulting in ostracism galore.

Either the child refuses to play along, starting from an improbably early age, or this becomes a disaster.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I don't see how this will work better than the utterly disastrous experiments to try and take children whose genitalia are damaged or incomplete at birth, reconstruct them, and try to raise them as the sex their genitalia have been reconstructed into. Those failed miserably, this will fail miserably. Sex is an unquestionable, biological reality, for better or worse, which is caused as an identity in the mind of a person, by specific differences in their brain from the brains of those of the other sex. Hell; that's why gender identity disorder exists (and unsurprisingly feminists with views like the ones described in this article are invariably transphobic bigots, because they had their personal ideology being disproved by science and so invent horrible calumnies against transsexuals to marginalize the reality of their condition) -- because the brain and body are discongruent in individuals with it. And of course we all know that the scientific evidence for certain explicit behaviour patterns based around sex is both blatant and overwhelming.

These people are just rejects from second-wave 70's feminism determined to ruin their child's life.

[PeZook]

I don't see how this will work better than the utterly disastrous experiments to try and take children whose genitalia are damaged or incomplete at birth, reconstruct them, and try to raise them as the sex their genitalia have been reconstructed into.

Exactly what I thought ; When Pop starts interacting with other children, this will inevitably fail or backfire horribly, depending on how the parents react.

[Lord Woodlouse]

I'm presuming they're allowing "Pop" to choose by the time s/he is in a position to interact with other children.

I actually quite like the idea in theory, though it obviously fails for the reasons highlighted. It would be better for the parents to simply have an open mind to the gender choices of their child. Raising the child in a relatively gender neutral environment from birth makes some amount of sense, or at very least should be harmless, but at some point "Pop" is going to show signs of which gender s/he leans in, and the overwhelming probability is that that direction is the same gender as the sex s/he was born into.

*shrug* Anyway, I'd definitely be interested to see where this goes.

[Coyote]

This is one of those things that would be utterly fascinating to observe, from a social & psychological point of view... if it weren't for the fact that they're fucking with a child to do it.

Wouldn't it have been better to create a sexually ambiguous character in Sims Online or something, have the husband & wife trade off on it while observing the reactions if they want to play like this? Messing with their real kid to prove an ideological point is just cold.

[Tribun]

My opinion is simple:
these parents are fucking morons.

There mere idea of raising someone as an "it" is disgusting. They act as if they expect that at year X "it" then decided to push Y to activate the fitting gender role. I see two possible outcomes: either the child becomes a disturbed person or a target for the surroundings who ridicule "it" at every chance. Either way, these two are people that shouldn't be allowed breeding (sadly it's too late).

[Solauren]

Those idiots don't understand feminist philosophy.

GENDER ROLES are a construction of society, not biological sex.

These people are beyond idiots, and quite frankly commiting what I'd term a 'long-term cumulative' form of child abuse.

[Fr33ze]

Would a 2.5-year-old kid have the ability to think independently, judge reasonably and choose what's best for themselves?!

[Solauren]

Would a 2.5-year-old kid have the ability to think independently, judge reasonably and choose what's best for themselves?!

No. Not even close.

My nephew just turned three and he's no where near that level. He can make some judgements and choices based on what's he's been taught, but not by any stretch of what people would call 'independently'.

I find this is true with all but the most exceptional children in that general age group.

[Broomstick]

I think it's just ridiculous.

Raising someone without gender reference? That is so far from the human norm I just can't see that working out, if only because it renders the child a cultural stranger to every culture on earth but I suspect the harm is greater than even that.

Now, raising a child to not be fixated on gender stereotypes, THAT's not impossible. In fact, I'd say it's damn healthy to expose the boys to cooking, sewing, and changing diapers, and the girls to power tools, car repairs, and toy trucks. But you don't do it by denying the inescapable fact that humans beings have a gender. Even transsexuals have a gender - unfortunately, their brain doesn't match their bodies, with all sorts of problems resulting. Which sort of illustrates why what these parents are doing is a bad idea. I don't see where denying the existence of gender is any healthier than raising a child in the wrong gender.

The other thing that makes some people espousing the idea that gender (or gender roles) is a "social construct" is the fact given a choice most biological females are going to pick "girly" interests, and most boys are going to pick "boy" interests. Healthy humans will often have some interests that may be traditionally atypical but there really are differences between boys and girls, and men and women. Those difference are less sharp than some traditionalist would have it - after all, we're all human and we have much more in common than we do different - but they do exist.

[Dooey Jo]

Oh noes, they use the kid's name when talking about it, instead of "he" or "she"! How dare they! That's gonna be one fucked up kid that gets to play with toy tractors and dolls instead of just either one.

The interview makes it clear that they are telling the child that there are physical differences between boys and girls, and that the child itself knows what it has between its legs. They are keeping it neutral from other people so that they won't treat the child according to expectations based on gender, so the child can decide for itself what it likes to do and wear and whatever. This is clearly horrible.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Oh noes, they use the kid's name when talking about it, instead of "he" or "she"! How dare they! That's gonna be one fucked up kid that gets to play with toy tractors and dolls instead of just either one.

The interview makes it clear that they are telling the child that there are physical differences between boys and girls, and that the child itself knows what it has between its legs. They are keeping it neutral from other people so that they won't treat the child according to expectations based on gender, so the child can decide for itself what it likes to do and wear and whatever. This is clearly horrible.

Are you sure the child can possibly differentiate at this young age? Or will he be totally confused? And worse still become a target of scorn and ridicule in the eyes of his peers who know either less or are equally incapable of making sense of anything?

[tim31]

This thread hardly needs another one of these, but what the hell. Those people are fucking morons.

Why do there have to be idiots that want to challenge what they presume to be nothing more than an established mindset, rather than a cold, hard fact? Worse still, why is it that most of the time these idiots do so by stomping on their offspring's development to do so?

[Dooey Jo]

Are you sure the child can possibly differentiate at this young age? Or will he be totally confused? And worse still become a target of scorn and ridicule in the eyes of his peers who know either less or are equally incapable of making sense of anything?

Confused by what? Wearing different clothes in all sorts of colours? As far as I am aware, females can already wear pretty much anything they like without getting confused, or even ridiculed. And sure the kid may get teased by other kids, but kids tease each other about pretty much anything anyway. At least the kid can change if it's a huge problem, unlike if it had been bullied for being black or something. The parents may be morons but as far as child-rearing methods go, this seems pretty harmless. Probably more harmless than the traditional "get drunk every weekend and frighten the kids" method all other parents in this country use.

[Broomstick]

The problem is that a lot of so-called adults aren't much beyond children, and "Pop's" parents refusing to say what the kids gender is will affect how the rest of society treats him/her. Morons - of which there are all too many - will make assumptions, will assume there is something "wrong" with the child, may think it's catching, all sorts of stupid shit. Yes, yes, they do this to people of different colors and ethnicities and so forth, but why add another obstacle to a child's life, particularly an unnecessary one?

[Darmalus]

If I remember right, similar experiments were done in the 60s/70s, raising kids with equal access to male and female clothing, toys and activities. I don't remember any disastrous results beyond personal quirks which made adapting to the outside world a little rougher.

I wonder if that book is still in my closet or if it wound up in the storage unit, I'll have to check.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Confused by what? Wearing different clothes in all sorts of colours? As far as I am aware, females can already wear pretty much anything they like without getting confused, or even ridiculed. And sure the kid may get teased by other kids, but kids tease each other about pretty much anything anyway. At least the kid can change if it's a huge problem, unlike if it had been bullied for being black or something. The parents may be morons but as far as child-rearing methods go, this seems pretty harmless. Probably more harmless than the traditional "get drunk every weekend and frighten the kids" method all other parents in this country use.

The kid is only fucking 2.5 years old. They may be capable of being able to differentiate between this and that, but the subtle nature of gender? This is like asking the kid to do multiplication when he barely knows numbers.

[Fr33ze]

The interview makes it clear that they are telling the child that there are physical differences between boys and girls, and that the child itself knows what it has between its legs. They are keeping it neutral from other people so that they won't treat the child according to expectations based on gender, so the child can decide for itself what it likes to do and wear and whatever. This is clearly horrible.

If Pop is able to identify its own gender as it says, I think s/he can make a clear preference in choices of clothes, toys and such already. So it's impossible to be any "secret" to other people at all, now is it?

Besides, it doesn't have to make the child appear "neutral" to offer them the freedom choosing what they like to wear or play with. The so-called "gender mould from the outset" won't change a person's true gender anyway.

[Themightytom]

“I don’t think that trying to keep a child’s sex a secret will fool anyone, nor do I think it’s wise or ethical,” says Pinker. “As with any family secret, when we try to keep an elemental truth from children, it usually blows up in the parent’s face, via psychosomatic illness or rebellious behaviour.”

um yeah this.

Using a child as a research project is unethical, there is no informed consent.
it's ultimately stupid

Quote:
http://www.thelocal.se/20232/20090623/

Meet Pop, a two-and-a-half-year-old Swedish child whose parents are refusing to say whether the apple of their eye is a boy or a girl.

Pop’s parents, both 24, made a decision when their baby was born to keep Pop’s sex a secret. Aside from a select few – those who have changed the child’s diaper – nobody knows Pop’s gender; if anyone enquires, Pop’s parents simply say they don’t disclose this information.

In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction.

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” Pop’s mother said. “It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

The child's parents said so long as they keep Pop’s gender a secret, he or she will be able to avoid preconceived notions of how people should be treated if male or female.

Pop's wardrobe includes everything from dresses to trousers and Pop's hairstyle changes on a regular basis. And Pop usually decides how Pop is going to dress on a given morning.

Although Pop knows that there are physical differences between a boy and a girl, Pop's parents never use personal pronouns when referring to the child – they just say Pop.

"I believe that the self-confidence and personality that Pop has shaped will remain for a lifetime," said Pop's mother.

But while Pop’s parents say they have received supportive feedback from many of their peers, not everyone agrees that their chosen course of action will have a positive outcome.

“Ignoring children's natures simply doesn’t work,” says Susan Pinker, a psychologist and newspaper columnist from Toronto, Canada, who wrote the book The Sexual Paradox, which focuses on sex differences in the workplace.

“Child-rearing should not be about providing an opportunity to prove an ideological point, but about responding to each child’s needs as an individual,” Pinker tells The Local.

“It’s unlikely that they’ll be able to keep this a secret for long. Children are curious about their own identity, and are likely to gravitate towards others of the same sex during free play time in early childhood.”

Pinker says there are many ways that males and females differ from birth; even if gender is kept ‘secret,’ prenatal hormones developed in the second trimester of pregnancy already alter the way the child behaves and feels.

She says once children can speak, males tell aggressive stories 87 per cent of the time, while females only 17 per cent. In a study, children aged two to four were given a task to work together for a reward, and boys used physical tactics 50 times more than girls, she says.

But Swedish gender equality consultant Kristina Henkel says Pop’s parents' experiment might have positive results.

“If the parents are doing this because they want to create a discussion with other adults about why gender is important, then I think they can make a point of it,” Henkel says in a telephone interview with The Local.

“You can talk about there being a non-stereotypical gender; if you are a girl you can do the same as a boy, and if you’re a boy you can do the same as a girl.”

Henkel also says a child's sex can deeply affect how they are treated growing up, and distract them from simply being a human being.

“If the child is dressed up as a girl or boy, it affects them because people see and treat them in a more gender-typical way,” Henkel explains.

“Girls are told they are cute in their dresses, and boys are told they are cool with their car toys. But if you give them no gender they will be seen more as a human or not a stereotype as a boy or girl.”

She says that without these gender stereotypes, children can build character as individuals, not hindered by preconceived notions of what they should be as males or females.

Is that of any value in a society that will apply those preconceived notions anyway?

[Agent Sorchus]

Comparing the cases of genital reconstruction with obscuring gender from the kid is rather dishonest. The problem that was exposed during the cases of genital reconstruction is that the family didn't start treating the child any differently till after the surgery, which happened around the age of two. Much of the problems the gender switched kids suffered come from the first two years of being treated as one gender and then being treated as a different gender, ruined those experiments.

There have been cases like Pop's, where the family decided from birth to raise their kid without a gender or to refer to the gender as X. The difference is that the family did this from birth, not making a switch after two years. In the cases with obscured gender their has not been any signs of the sort of troubles that the gender reconstruction kids had.

This is a massive difference in methodology that eliminates any ability to use the studies of gender reconstruction as a comparison to raising the child as a gender neutral person.

The gut reaction that has been shown in this thread is exactly what the authors wanted their audience to come away with, but it is only through dishonesty that they can achieve this. I trust I have made myself clear.

um yeah this.

Using a child as a research project is unethical, there is no informed consent.
it's ultimately stupid

This is not an experiment idiot. This is how the family has decided that they wish to raise the child. Their is a difference and it is one of intent; an experiment is not for the benefit of the child, but for the benefit of society. What the parents have done is made the decision that this is what is good for the child. This makes it as ethical as any other way to raise the child, it might not be wise to deviate from the dictates of common wisdom but it is not unethical.

[Eleas]

I'm sorry, but "the kid will be perceived as weird and be shunned" is a dog-whistle for reactionary conformism, nothing more. It can and has been applied to same-sex parents, mixed-race couples, parents wanting to raise their kids as atheists, or anything else the rest of society will perceive as being somehow off. Doesn't make it a valid argument.

As for myself, having seen myself just how varied the gender divide is between cultures (hell, even in Europe), I can't question that gender is constructed. Idiots might then conclude my meaning to be that there is no difference between the male and female sex, or that you could easily raise a child to fully identify with an opposite gender; it is not. Simple fact is that we have a shitload of culture that maps onto sexual characteristics, generally making one gender a better fit for the corresponding sex. That does not mean sex is irrelevant, or that it effects extend to mere plumbing.

Meaning this experiment will probably only have modest effect, unless the parents opt to seclude the kid, and I see no indication of that in the article.

[The Yosemite Bear]

well I heard about this in my parent's utopian hippy books as a threory, but sex and sexuality is pretty hard wired into the human genome. This is not going to work out the way they think it is....

[Big Phil]

Imbeciles - one of my son's first words was "car" and from a very early age he was far more interested in cars, dirt, blocks, and other stereotypically "male" toys. He had no interest, and still has no interest, in dolls, dresses, or any girly stuff, much to my wife's disappointment. If we had been dumb enough to try and raise him in a gender neutral fashion, we would have had to take the toys he likes playing with away and force him to play with things he didn't care for.

There are definitely environmental factors that affect gender selections, but simple biology is far more influential (at least in the case of my son).

[Starglider]

I'm sorry, but "the kid will be perceived as weird and be shunned" is a dog-whistle for reactionary conformism, nothing more. It can and has been applied to same-sex parents, mixed-race couples, parents wanting to raise their kids as atheists, or anything else the rest of society will perceive as being somehow off. Doesn't make it a valid argument.

Incorrect. We are talking about other young kids here, they haven't been socially conditioned to 'impose the prevailing conformism' or some such nonsense, they simply have the standard expectations built into the human brain. Humans are instictively tribal and there is a generic bias against people who are 'different' (race, religion, hair colour, it doesn't really matter in the absence of adults encouraging certain discrimination). Gender roles go a lot deeper though; the notion of gender is built into every human language, and there is good evidence that this is part of the genetic head-start all infants get on learning language. Children instinctively expect things to be gendered, often completely inanimate things, even though they don't understand what being male or female really means. Sad to say, homosexuals and transexuals have to fight instinctive prejudices that stem from a perceived violation of these instinctive categories, and this misguided 'experiment' will run into the same issues.

As for myself, having seen myself just how varied the gender divide is between cultures (hell, even in Europe), I can't question that gender is constructed.

Human perception vastly magnifies apparent differences, between individuals and cultures. In absolute terms, all humans and by extension human cultures are actually quite similar, compared to the gulf that separates humans from any other species on earth.

Simple fact is that we have a shitload of culture that maps onto sexual characteristics

Very little culture is arbitrary, it generally exists for a reason, usually fairly practical ones (e.g. the majority of cultural variation can be traced back to ecological factors for the early inhabitants). Gender roles usually build on biological predispositions. This isn't always a good thing - it can be a very bad thing - but it does mean that fighting them is an uphill battle and it is foolish to engage in battles that are unnecessary and/or hopeless.

When we have the ability to restructure brains to be genderless, or implement a Culture-style ability to switch genders at will, then you can mess about with this stuff to your heart's content (notionally, though perhaps you'll live to see it). Right now it's stupid, pointless and (psychologically) dangerous.