THE UPS AND DOWNS OF GENDER NEUTRAL PARENTING
‘Girl’ options vs ‘boy’ options – let’s just give children human choices. A new book plots the difficult path of raising a child without the gender stereotypes society accepts
As a toddler, Alora still answered to their birth name and was still ‘she’. (I’ve used their preferred pronouns throughout this book at their request. Their point is they have always been non-binary; it just took a while for everyone to realise.) Yet, while I didn’t try to obscure Alora’s birth-assigned sex or gender from others when they were tiny, I’d always tried to raise them as a human rather than a girl or boy or even anything in between. In particular, I eschewed stereotypical ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ clothing choices, toys, and games.
Before they began choosing their own clothes, I dressed them in bright yellows, reds, and greens, and hand-me-downs from older boy cousins. We used permanent markers to draw on their shirts and scored fluffy oddities from markets. With some help from their paternal grandmother, we even dabbled in applique.
Many disapproved. One person told me that dressing Alora in a gender-neutral fashion was a form of child abuse that would sentence my little princess to a lifetime of bullying and disadvantage. A shopkeeper became angry when I questioned her description of Alora (again, still designated as female back then) as a ‘little man’. ‘Looks like a boy,’ was her repeated, indignant insistence.
Buying Alora gender-neutral clothes and toys was difficult. In big clothing shops, the girls’ section was Tinkerbelled to la-la-land and beyond. There was pastel pink, shocking pink, or, for total tomboys, mauve. Everything had frills, sparkles, flowers, and love hearts.
In the boys’ section, clothing items were mostly blue and branded with of cars, buses, trains, and planes – males the only members of society who might ever need to commute.
On the day we went shopping for a tip-truck in a discount toy warehouse, we found a pink flotsam and Bratzsam aisle marked ‘Girls’ and a wall of everything else marked ‘Boys’. In the girl division were itsy-bitsy kitchen sets, talking vacuum cleaners, vanity mirrors with makeup and grooming apparatus, and every kind of doll, including those requiring nappy changing and potty training.
The boy zone was all about the guns, swords, and space pistols. There were cash registers stuffed with fake currency, toy computers, kites, remote-controlled gizmos, and tip-trucks. Also, all the educational items such as alphabet jigsaw puzzles and abaci – male commuters being the only members of society who might ever need to learn anything. The only thing I found more infuriating than these crass binaries was the popular view that such cynical, marketingdriven manoeuvres reflected rather than created gender differences.
When Alora started walking, they walked on their toes. Even when they wore a blue top with an appliqued green demon, everyone ooh-ed and aah-ed over their little ballerina steps, saying it was a sign they’d be a ballet dancer.
“Actually, it’s a medical condition requiring physical therapy,” I’d usually reply. And on those days I’d forgotten my palm cards or my shutthef--kuplamus was on the blink:
Me: How can you subscribe to this sort of oppressive sex and gender essentialism when girls and boys are treated so differently from birth? Do you not realise parents smile more and show more physical affection to their daughters, while adults tend to see babies as stronger and less sensitive if they think they are male? This has been observed in disguised gender experiments in which adult participants perceive and play with infants and children
It is the gendered marketing of such items … that subsequently influence their preferences as they age
The girls’ section was Tinkerbelled to la-la-land and beyond … the boys’ section (was) branded with buses, trains, and planes
differently depending on whether they are told they are girls or boys.
Other parent: Um …
Me: And another thing. Studies show that from infancy boys are given more sports equipment, toy cars, and tools, while girls are given more dolls, kitchen appliances, and pink sh-t. Infants, however, have equal and overlapping interests in toys, which suggests it is the gendered marketing of such items along with uninformed opinions like yours that subsequently influence their preferences. Other parent: All I was trying to say was … Me: Further, the ‘pink is for girls’ and ‘blue is for boys’ mindset is actually relatively recent. For centuries, all children wore white because it was easier to bleach. Pink, blue, and other pastels were adopted as colours for baby clothes from the mid-nineteenth century, although these remained a gender free-for-all until the 1940s. If you’re unconvinced, allow me to quote from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department which, in 1918 advised that: ‘The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger colour, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.’ And did I happen to mention that in the late 1800s it was customary for boys to wear dresses and long hair until the age of six or seven?
By that stage it was usually just Alora and me left on the seesaw and once again I’d have to find a way to operate it such that my weight did not leave them permanently suspended in midair. These days, they proudly wear a T-shirt reading, ‘Having a weird mum builds character’. But back then I wished they didn’t have to bear the burden of my multiple social handicaps.
After we bought the tip-truck, Alora passed many happy minutes vrooming it across the playground before yoking it around the neck of a playmate and announcing it was a dog collar.
At the playground that afternoon was another queer parent. They apologised for their daughter’s choice of hot-pink slippery-dip outfit. ‘Zoe’s favourite colour used to be purple,’ this parent said. ‘Then she started preschool and wanted pink everything because that’s what all the other girls wore. Now she says that when she grows up she wants to be a mermaid or a princess. Before that, it was spaceship driver.’
Alora was the same. After starting preschool, they spent two years refusing to wear anything that wasn’t putrid fuchsia. I did what I could to accommodate their request to wear a tutu at all times – including wedged over tracksuits.
I could hardly call myself a feminist if I only permitted them choices that mirrored my own. But I dearly wished people had exerted some control over their own shutthef--kuplamus and refrained from calling my daughter a little princess and encouraging micro-Stepfordism by presenting them with wedding dolls and cooking apparatus at Christmas.
At the time, I worried about the ramifications of socially experimenting on a generation of children via this pink-and blue-ification.
A decade later, I wonder whether this may have backfired. At Alora’s high school, they and their crew are constantly changing names, genders, and preferred pronouns. They’re as fluid as febrile quark-gluon-plasma. ■