GENDER FLUIDITY:
In the 21st century, gender neutrality is now a new choice for parents choosing to bring up their children as neither male or female, writes Ingrid Pyne.
raising children in the gender-neutral movement
Bugsy Ross likes his long hair. He thinks it makes him look cool. And so, when the six-year-old started kindergarten last year, his parents weren’t surprised that he didn’t want to cut it. What did surprise them was the reaction of a few older schoolmates. “You’re a girl, you’re a girl,” they taunted.
“We weren’t prepared for that at all,” Bugsy’s mum Michelle GlewRoss, wife of comedian Tim “Rosso” Ross, tells The Weekly. At pre-school, Bugsy had worn jewellery, owned a doll named Brett, taken ballet classes and had plenty of girlfriends. He had also played in a soccer team, wrestled with boys and been obsessed with Lego bricks. “That’s just always been his personality,” says Michelle. “He’s open to all sorts of things.”
Like a growing number of Australian parents, Michelle and Tim are determined not to straitjacket their children into traditional gender roles. They encourage Bugsy and his younger brother, Bobby, to play with both “boy” and “girl” toys, keep their bedroom decor neutral, and allow the boys to pick their own clothes and hairstyles. “For me it’s about laying the foundation so that they have an open mind,” explains Michelle.
Unlike more fanatical advocates of the gender-neutral movement, Michelle and Tim still call their sons “boys” and use male pronouns, but they don’t want Bugsy and Bobby’s childhoods – or lives – to be restricted by traditional concepts of gender.
“I want them to know it’s okay for girls to have short hair and boys to have long hair, for boys to wear pink and girls to wear blue,” says Michelle. Strict gender segregation in clothing, toys and activities is a relatively recent phenomenon. Growing up in the 1970s, it seemed all kids wore jeans and tees, built with blocks and played outdoors. Today’s children wear T-shirts too, but they’re likely to be embroidered with pink sparkles and “princess”, or blue and emblazoned with slogans such as “wild thing”. Dolls, manicure kits, toy sewing machines and baking sets are marketed to girls; trucks, building blocks, guns and science experiments to boys. Studies show that since the mid-1990s, toy marketing has become as gendered as it was in the 1950s, because toy makers have realised segmenting the market into narrow demographic groups means they can sell more versions of the same toy.
This would all seem like child’s play, if the way in which children play did not have real world consequences for them as adults.The Institution for Engineering and Technology, for example, warned recently that
gendered gifts may be turning young girls away from careers in technology and engineering, with boys almost three times as likely to receive science and maths toys for Christmas.
Meanwhile, in the United States a 2014 study into why modern computer science is dominated by men found the percentage of women in the field plummeted after 1984 – the year personal computers started being sold into US homes, marketed almost entirely to males. “These early PCs weren’t much more than toys – you could play Pong or simple shooting games,” the study found. “This idea computers are for boys became a narrative, the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution.”
Julie Huberman, a mother of two and co-founder of Play Unlimited, a group that campaigns against toys being labelled for boys or girls, agrees. “There’s strong messaging and stereotyping in toy marketing and that relates to some inequalities and expectations we see in adult life,” she says.
REINFORCING ROLES
Research shows children absorb this messaging. By late primary age, most already have very clear ideas about the jobs suitable for boys and girls – ideas hard to shake later on. And a groundbreaking global study late last year found children around the world have entrenched gender ideas by the time they enter adolescence, with consequences for their behaviour and expectations in adulthood.
“We found children at a very early age – from the most conservative to most liberal societies – internalise this myth that girls are vulnerable and boys are strong and independent,” says Robert Blum, director of the Global Early Adolescent Study, based at Johns Hopkins University in the
US. “This message is reinforced by siblings, classmates, teachers, parents, guardians, relatives, clergy and coaches.”
A growing number of parents, educators and governments want to redress this imbalance by making the world “gender neutral”. The idea is not to ban pink and blue, or dolls and trucks, but to make all things available to all children. More challengingly, it means constantly checking language and behaviour so we don’t continue to reinforce gender stereotypes, with potentially damaging outcomes for both boys and girls.
By telling boys to toughen up when they’re upset, are we reinforcing the message boys are tougher and girls more sensitive? What if we gave boys and girls the same level of care and attention when they’re upset? Could it help end the days of women being too demure to demand equal pay and men being too stoic to admit they’re struggling? (Men still earn more than women by an average of $26,527 per year in every industry and occupation in Australia; they also account for 75 per cent of suicides.)
What if we stopped dressing girls in pretty dresses and shoes, incessantly complimenting them on their looks? Would they stop placing excessive value on appearance? (More than 80 per cent of the Australians who suffer anorexia nervosa are female.)
As academics in Australia and abroad ponder these questions the gender-neutral movement has been gaining traction. Leading retailers Target and Big W have dispensed with gendered toy categories. The shoe giant Clarks has said its Spring/ Summer 2018 range will be entirely unisex to promote the “gender-neutral ethos” demanded by its customers. Sweden’s Toca Boca, which makes gender neutral game apps for children, now accounts for a quarter share of paid kid apps on the App Store. A collection of Victorian sports leaders recommended last year that sporting codes “employ gender-neutral language across the sporting sector”, including the rather awkward sounding “ruckperson” and “batspeople”. And celebrities have clambered on to the bandwagon, with singers Pink and Adele, movie stars Charlize Theron, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Australian plus-sized model Robin Lawley and comedian Russell Brand all determined to let their children explore both their masculine and feminine sides.
Indeed, even words like “boy” and “girl”, “he” and “she”, “her” and “his” look at risk of extinction. Two years ago, the Swedish unisex pronoun, hen, used to replace han (he) or hon (she) entered the country’s national dictionary. And across the
English-speaking world – much to the horror of grammar pedants – “they” and “their” have been adopted as the gender-neutral singular third person pronoun or possessive pronoun – as in “Harry left their hat at home, so they got a very burnt face.”
While some welcome these as progressive steps for society, others dismiss them as the politically correct claptrap of radical gender theorists. Others go further, describing the current gender-neutral trend as dangerous. John Whitehall is a Professor of Paediatrics at the University of Western Sydney, with more than 50 years experience in treating children. He says most boys naturally gravitate towards trucks and girls to dolls – not because society forces them, but out of choice.
“Of course, there are also girls who are tomboys and boys who are less involved in rough-and-tumble play, as there always has been,” Professor Whitehall tells The Weekly. “But I would just go with the child’s preferences and not fuss about it.
“I wouldn’t try to raise my child gender neutral. If a child is a boy, I’d call him a boy; if it’s a girl, call her a girl. If the child is experiencing gender confusion, punitive measures should be avoided, but kindly restrictions are in order as, for example, to where cross-sex clothing might be worn.”
UNNECESSARY STRESS
Professor Whitehall acknowledges there are different social influences brought to bear on males and females but adds: “It’s not wrong to do that, it’s just the way it is”. Rather than trying to neutralise these influences, parents should aim to guide their children to the least complicated arrangement.
“Trying to act like they don’t have a gender creates psychological stress on the child and can, in worst cases, put children on a dangerous path towards medical experimentation, where ever younger children are prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones,” he warns.
“The worst thing is to allow the child to become a poster exhibit for the school and media.”
You don’t need to search far to find these poster children. There’s Canada’s Searyl, who last year become the world’s first baby to be issued with a government heath card that didn’t identify a sex. Searyl’s parent, Kori Doty, who does not identify as male or female, uses the pronoun “they” when describing the baby: “I’m raising Searyl in such a way that until they have the sense of self and command of vocabulary to tell me who they are, I’m recognising them as a baby and trying to give them all the love and support to be the most whole person that they can be outside of the restrictions that come with the boy box and the girl box.”
Then there’s Storm, who made headlines around the world in 2011, when her Canadian parents announced they were keeping her gender a secret. (Now aged seven, Storm identifies as female.) And Sasha, whose parents were so concerned about stereotyping they kept their son’s gender under wraps for five years.
Professor Whitehall questions the motives of these parents, saying they have been recruited to the ideology of gender fluidity and are using their children as an expression of their beliefs. But not everyone takes such drastic action.
At a home in Brisbane, a 12-year-old Jedi and eight-year-old Darth Vadar spin around the living room in a whirl of light sabres, masks and robes.
The scene is typical of homes and childhoods across the country, with one exception: the youngsters are girls.
“I didn’t set out to do this consciously – in fact, I didn’t even know what gender-neutral parenting was,” the girls’ mum, Julie Huberman, tells The Weekly. “It kind of evolved when my elder daughter, Emma, developed a distaste for things that are pink and frilly. That made it stand out to me just how segregated children’s clothes and toys are into girls’ and boys’ categories – and I think that buys into the artificial limitations that society has placed around gender.”
Today, Emma buys unisex clothes and wears her hair short. When playing dress-ups, she opts to be a knight or pirate over a princess or fairy. “Emma has always referred to herself as a girl and has never said ‘I feel like I should be a boy’,” says Julie. “She’s just a girl who doesn’t like the typical colours and frills that come with most girls’ clothes.”
Bizarrely, given the strides made towards female empowerment in recent years, the contrast between Emma and her peers is starker today than it would have been 40 years ago.’
In the early eighties, at the age of seven or eight, I went through a stage of wanting to be a boy. I cut my hair boyishly short, wore masculine clothes, and rejoiced when strangers mistook me for a boy. I grew out of this phase, of course, but don’t remember it causing me even a moment of social ostracism or angst. Back then being a tomboy seemed normal and wholesome; I barely stood out from the crowd.
These days it’s more complicated. Role models for our daughters are increasingly image-obsessed, superficial and prized not for what they do, but how they look and what they wear. In an age of unprecedented marketing and branding – where everything from our girls’ pyjamas to their eggcups seem to be emblazoned with a Disney princess – it’s more of a challenge than ever to get them to realise there is more to life than constantly looking pretty and girly.
Julie is happy for Emma’s preferences to play out, but acknowledges it’s still easier for girls
“Trying to act like they don’t have a gender creates psychological stress on the child.”
to push gender boundaries than for boys. While tomboys have traditionally been prized in society – George in Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Scout Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, or Jo March in Little Women – the social costs for boys who transgress into the “pink” zone is high.
Indeed, the Global Early Adolescent Study, released last September, found it was increasingly acceptable for girls to engage in stereotypically male behaviours, like wearing trousers or playing sports. “But boys who challenge gender norms by their dress or behaviour were, by many respondents, seen as socially inferior,” the researchers found. “Both boys and girls said the consequences for boys who were perceived as adopting feminine behaviour, like painting their nails, ranged from being bullied and teased to being physically assaulted.”
In today’s world it seems incredibly regressive to tell children what they can and can’t like, wear or do, based on whether they’re boys or girls. Few mothers I know – or spoke to for this story – would stop their daughter dressing up as Spiderman or their boy from wearing a tutu to pre-school. But, equally, the vast majority of them insist their sons and daughters do naturally gravitate to different toys, colours and clothes from a very young age – without any encouragement.
NATURE OR NURTURE
Jayne Lucke, the Director of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, says it’s impossible to ascertain the influences of nature and nurture in these instances.
“If you think about what gender is and how it’s constructed, it’s a lot more subtle than whether you let your child wear pink or play with a Barbie doll,” she says. “It’s going on all around your child and you can’t step out of it by your toy choices. From the subtle feedback little girls receive compared with little boys, how people hold baby girls differently to boys, how people talk to girls differently to boys – we still don’t even understand how that plays out from day one.”
Jayne commends gender-neutral parents for striving to provide their children with a critical approach to gender norms. “But given we live in this world, I don’t think genderneutral parenting is possible,” she says. “Maybe if a child’s gender wasn’t defined or disclosed you could negate some of those influences, but then you create a whole heap of social and bureaucratic problems for that child.
“That said, I do believe this movement towards a greater understanding of gender – that it is not just two neat categories, and there’s this fuzziness, and people move between them in individual ways – that’s a positive thing.”
Fifteen years ago Dr Simon BaronCohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, published a hugely influential book. The Essential Difference argued the female brain is hardwired for empathy; the male brain for building systems. Dr Baron-Cohen’s theory is part of a body of work, from academic journals to bestsellers such as Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, that supports the conventional wisdom that men and women are simply different.
Yet just as many studies found these differences exaggerated – and where they exist, they’re learned, not innate. Cordelia Fine is a University of Melbourne professor whose book, Delusions of Gender, argues research showing women are hardwired to empathise and men to systemise is based on flawed methods and assumptions.
“Of course there will be traditionalists who think there are different roles for men and women and part of childhood is socialising children into these different roles,” she tells The Weekly. “Others will see influences expanding all children’s opportunities – such as the genderneutral movement – as a positive.”
But she says gender is one of the most prominent social categories ascribed to children. “From a young age, your child is learning what goes with being male or female – from hairstyles, to clothing, to toys, to characteristics. They see it on TV, they read it in books. They’re accumulating that knowledge in the early stage of life – and gender becomes a very important part of self concept,” she says.“It’s very hard as a parent to protect your child from gendered messaging. You can create a genderneutral environment for your child, you can be as gender neutral as you like, but unless you lock your child away from the rest of the world, your child will still get the message that boys and girls are different.”
Are boys and girls truly different? Some are. But so are boys and boys, girls and girls. Julie Huberman’s younger daughter is far less of a tomboy than Emma. And the other day, Bugsy Ross’ brother, Bobby, declared men couldn’t be nurses – much to Michelle (and Bugsy’s) surprise!