THE BABY WITH NO GENDER

The couple who are not telling anyone the gender of their baby because they don’t want them to be subjected to ‘unconscious bias’ got people talking last week. The child’s parents Hobbit Humphrey and Jake Englandjohns, who have named the 17 month old Anoush, said: ‘We’re not trying to make them be anything. We just want them to be themselves.’

The grandmother didn’t even know the baby’s gender until she changed its nappy at 11 months old. To me, not giving a newborn child a gender is actually complicating things. I believe, with some exceptions, people are born with a male or female anatomy, but you develop your gender identity throughout your life, of which there are many different identities. If that happens to be different from the physical gender you were born with then I hope society is becoming much better at accepting that. I think parents making that choice for a child before they can even talk is going a bit far, but it is totally up to them how they parent. In my opinion, a child should decide when they’re old enough if they identify as one gender or want to be genderless.