I recently became familiar with your teaching as someone I know is currently taking your LGBTQ+ studies class. I was wondering, out of sheer curiosity, your opinion on genderless parenting, or basically raising a child with as little gender bias as possible, and letting them choose how they identify without anyone else's input. Random, but you seem like just the person to ask!
I’ll start with my personal context here, which is that I am a cisgender woman with two female-assigned kids whom we have basically gendered as girls. So I’m obviously not coming at this from a position free of bias or personal interest; I have an interest in not screwing them up but also an interest in continuing to believe that I haven’t done so.
That said, we do try to be clear about the fact that we have assigned gender and we might be wrong. As an example, after B was born, A would sometimes comment on or ask about her gender and we would say, “Well, we think B is a girl but we could be wrong. When she’s older we’ll have to ask her.” (Note: A and B are their actual initials.) We also periodically ask them about their gender (we may have overdone this; apparently A checked in with our last nanny about her gender approximately once a week, so we need to work on understanding that for most people, gender is fairly stable). More on personal practices shortly.
I think that raising a child “without anyone else’s input” is practically impossible, unfortunately. Particularly if you need childcare from other people who are in a position to change diapers, there’s only so much you can do to stop them from gendering your kid based on genitals. I think you would run into similar issues with people who see them clothed just assuming that kids are boys until “proven” otherwise, by either long hair or a giant flower on their head. That said, some people do try to do more to actively avoid gendering than we have, such as by referring to their children with singular they, giving intentionally gender-neutral names, etc.
I actually thought that the nickname we use for A was pretty gender-neutral and that B’s name was clearly feminine, and in both cases they are frequently assumed to be boys based on their names, which shows how strongly our culture defaults to masculinity! If you switched up their clothing, you might at least be able to push outsiders into inconsistently gendering them, so they might get contradictory socialization from those people–but people also get a little scary sometimes when they feel that parents/kids have failed to provide “adequate gender cues.” Being able to actively push back against gendering is definitely in part a function of having race and class privilege (from not having people label your parenting “negligent,” a serious concern for parents of color in particular, to just being able to afford a wide range of clothing choices).
When my kids were very little, I never “corrected” people who gendered them as boys because it didn’t seem like they had an opinion yet so why bother–but also many people will literally get mad at you for not putting a giant flower on their head if you tell them the kid is actually female-assigned. (I always remember when A was presumed male by some guy on an airplane at about 15 months, while wearing hot pink cableknit leggings, and then when he heard me refer to her as “she” he really did get upset with me, because apparently hot pink cableknit leggings were not a sufficient gender cue. Meanwhile, I observed online discussions in which women were AGONIZING over whether it was okay to put CAMOUFLAGE leggings on a male-assigned baby, because leggings! So femme!)
For many people, of course, it would be family who would be the biggest stumbling block here–they will probably find out about the genitals, and then in the vast majority of cases they will gender the kid. Of course, dealing with your family trying to teach your kid screwed up things is not a new problem! So there are a lot of approaches, and I don’t think it’s wrong for someone to say “we are going to correct our parents every time they use a gendered pronoun for our kid, because this is important,” in the same way that I have said “we are going to correct our parents every time they talk about weight loss in front of our kid, because this is important.”
(Note about genitals and gender assignment: I did make a point of telling friends and family who asked about fetal gender that our kids were “provisionally female,” and used that to remind them that gender assignment can be wrong and also that some people are non-binary. We also had specific language in our birth plan refusing permission for any kind of surgery on “ambiguous genitalia” in the absence of immediate threat to survival–not that intersex people don’t often have binary genders or that genitals are actually relevant to gender socialization, but as a kind of example here about where I do draw a hard line about bodily autonomy: no irreversible bodily alterations.)
The way that I kind of think about gender socialization is similar to religion. People raise kids in religions all the time, and I don’t think it’s inherently harmful. There are religious groups that are abusive and ideas and beliefs that may be framed in religious terms and are extremely harmful, but there are also religious groups that are powerful sources of community and support, and ideas and beliefs about love and autonomy that I agree with and may also be framed in religious terms. I have a hard time with the idea of presenting any one religion as the Only Way, and I see gender with my kids in similar terms: “We’re raising you as a girl but that might be wrong for you, and also there are a lot of ways to be a girl. People who say that girls are inherently a certain way, or that any particular person HAS to be a girl, are wrong. People who think that ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ are the only options are wrong, too.”
But I’m also saying this as a cisgender woman; while I know trans parents who have also provisionally assigned gender according to social convention to their kids, I’m sure there are trans people, probably especially non-binary people, who don’t feel that this is sufficient. The research I’ve seen on young trans kids and family support shows that a supportive family basically eliminates disparities in depression between trans and cis kids, but the kids in studies currently underway virtually all have binary genders (in some cases, researchers lump non-binary adolescents in with binary trans adolescents essentially based on the researchers’ assessment of the adolescents’ gender expression which is obviously TERRIBLE SCIENCE). The system that we’re raising kids in makes binary trans identities legible in a way that it doesn’t make non-binary identities visible as possible selves.
This means that models are really important. When I went back to work after B was born and we needed to find a nanny because daycare for two kids was impossibly expensive, we happened to find someone who was a really good fit for us who was also non-binary (I specified in our listing “LGBTQ+ friendly household). We had previously talked about how some people are not boys or girls (a conversation that ended with A saying to me, “So when I’m a grown-up… I can use scissors” because she could tell this was Serious Business and she wanted her concerns addressed), but definitely our previous daycare was not a lot a lot of help on this front, and A hadn’t had much personal contact with non-binary people before. She had trouble for a week or two with singular “they” for a known other (we were already trying to use it to talk about people we don’t know, rather than assuming gender, and she picked that up pretty quickly), and then she got used to it. When we had to find a replacement and she shadowed K, our old nanny, for a day, and kept using feminine pronouns for them, A apparently corrected her every time: “K is not a boy or a girl. When we talk about K, we say ‘they.’”
So kids definitely can learn this stuff, though you have to reinforce it, and you’re always pushing back against mainstream culture to some degree. We also try to actively talk a lot about why people assume gender and how they can be wrong, and how some friends were misgendered when they were born, and how body parts are not inherently gendered. We have a gender-neutral book about conception and birth (“What Makes a Baby” by Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth) which I helped Kickstart and which A really loves, and which has sparked some good conversations about body parts:
“Do I have a uterus?”“Probably. We haven’t checked. Most people who have vulvas have uteruses, but not everyone.”“Will I get boobs?”“Do you want boobs?”“Yes.”“Probably you’ll grow some. But if you didn’t, we could fix that, and if you didn’t want them, we could fix that, too.”
Basically, I try to make my choices with the idea that bodily autonomy is crucial, and having as broad an awareness as possible of what the available options ARE is critical to having real autonomy.
(I keep an eye on Kickstarter for LGBTQ+ themed picture books, especially anything that addresses trans identities beyond the binary, and when the kids get a little older Silverberg & Smyth also did a gender-neutral sex ed book that we have. I just got Call Me Tree/Llamame Arbol by Maya Christina Gonzalez, a picture book in which no genders are assigned to the characters, for my class, although a student noticed that it tends toward a fairly masculine presentation of “gender neutrality” in some ways. Again: class privilege! I can kick in for books I think will be good even though I know from experience some of them will not meet hopes and expectations, and I can buy books if I can’t get them through a local library.)
I hope this addresses your question. Feel free to ask more!