I’ve been sweatin’ the nomenclature all week!
I’m not sure how well this is going to work, if they take Pop out in public a lot. If he/her knows his/her gender, then Pop’s going to see how girls vs. boys are treated, so the influence is there, whether other people know the gender or not. They’d have to sheild the kid pretty carefully.
An interesting experiment, but I’m not sure how it could work, practically.
X2
I agree that what they are attempting is absurd. Yet, I am not so clear about the obvious and critical role of gender roles and our development. Can you give some examples?
Other than the logistics of peeing and having sex, what roles do men and women play that are obviously and critically linked to gender?
Hey, if you really believe that you can’t tell a person’s gender from their genitals or their chromosomes… why guess? 
Reminds me of when the wife and I enrolled our kids in pre-school back in the 80’s. During the orientation the headmistress made a point of telling the parents (all touchy-feely, just like us) that the school was careful to practice a gender-neutral policy, that all our little wonders would be given equal time on all projects and activities, etc., etc. …
“But,” she added with a touch of resignation, “I have to tell you that little boys and little girls JUST AREN’T THE SAME!”
Good idea, I’ll give $5 to the first person to pants the kid in the park, but no I won’t pay for your bail.
I agree. When I was a toddler, my mother was a strident feminist and refused to buy me dolls or dress me in dresses or otherwise feminize me. The result was that, when I was 2, she found me cradling a screwdriver I’d wrapped up in a blanket and named Babydoll.
I’m all in favor of a gender-free society, but it hasn’t happened yet, and I think it’s inevitable that their child will absorb some gender-based expectations from the people around them. Still, I think it’s a step in the right direction.
I asked my Pop about this, and he thought it was weird.
I think if the parents are so concerned about making a statement on the over-importance of gender, the parents should recommit themselves to living a gender-free life and leave their damn kid out of their experimentation.
While stereotypes are not necessarily helpful, I think denying one’s child a gender identity is ultimately like forcing them to wear a bag on his/her head. If a child walks around with a bag on his/her head, the question most commonly asked won’t be, “What an interesting protest; why should physical beauty or ugliness effect how our children grow up?” but “Why the fuck is that weirdo kid wearing a bag on his head, and how do I keep my child away from the parents’ bizarre, cult-like behavior?”
Mommies and Daddies?
Tsk tsk tsk! Pop is not to be referred to using gender-based pronouns.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I was trying to get at when I said that trying to enforce this will end up making the kid hyper-aware of gender issues. If the parents are always explaining the gender-neutral thing to everybody who asks “boy or girl,” the kid is going to get the very clear message that “something’s up with my gender” and people’s reaction to him or her will be cautious and uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people inadvertently avoided the family for fear of doing something “wrong.”
What will really be interesting is when the kid, if it’s a boy, starts acting like a boy, or if it’s a girl, it starts acting like a girl. This will be in direct conflict to their whacked out ideology, and they will assume some ‘gender bias’ got in…then they will somehow try to “correct” the “problem”.
Wait… girls have vulvas and boys have penises?
I never get these memos…
Of course they will slip up and refer to Baby as he or she (or the Swedish equivalents–does Swedish have masculine and feminine definite articles, btw? That alone will make Baby’s world full o’ gender)
The whole thing is silly. Just my opinion.
Awww, how cute: first time parents.
Eventually they’ll find out the hard way when their charming but naive philosophy gets trashed by biology.
This is a much more concise way of saying exactly what I was thinking.
Hormones and all the changes and differences they cause between men and women and even younger boys and girls can’t be explained away by “social constructs.”
This couple ought to read As Nature Made Him, which is a true story about a boy who suffered a terrible circumcision accident, and ended up being raised as a girl. It didn’t work, to put it mildly. Some truths you just can’t hide from.
I think you meant As Nature Made Him, no? 
I agree wholeheartedly. I was a little girl who played with more GI Joes and Legos (spatial reasoning) than Barbies. I played in the mud more than in dresses. But I still knew I was a girl, though. I acted like a little boy. I knew I was a girl, but just because I was a girl didn’t mean I had to do “girl” things.
Raising it without a gender won’t do anything more than confuse it. It’s very easy to break gender rules.
Good god. I quite honestly think that story fucked me up as a kid. Or, to be more precise, my innate personality reacted to that story in a slightly fucked up way. As a child I used to adopt whatever idea I was exposed to in an extreme way. I think lots of kids do this, but I was especially prone to black-and-white thinking and especially resistant to socialization from peers or even adults that went against whatever my thinking was. Someone at Quaker meeting read that story to me when I was very young and something in it stuck to the point that, although I don’t recall any other source of anti-genderism while I was growing up, I recall years later (meaning age 8 or 9 maybe) being horrified and incredulous when presented with the proposition that men have greater physical strength on average than women. Now, I don’t think I ever played with dolls as a kid, but I didn’t play with toy cars, either. (I preferred books.) I do remember that I especially rejected any of the games that kids play that tend to split girls and boys into separate groups, such as when girls chase boys around trying to kiss them or boys chase girls around trying to pull their hair or such - games that obviously play a role in kids’ social and psychological development. I steadfastly refused to treat girls as a kind of “other” or an object of curiosity to the point that when they became an object of rather intense curiosity, I was even less able to adapt socially than the average awkward adolescent boy. To this day, I have a lingering sense of “wrongness” about typical socially-enforced gender roles. As an adult, I think it is positive for adults to challenge and even throw off traditional gender roles where they don’t fit, but I think for a child to do so [Edited to add] based on adult influences[/ETA] causes problems with socialization. I think that this, along with other (more significant) factors such as being raised as a vegetarian and a Quaker in Arkansas and speaking with a foreign accent as a child (I was born in Scotland and was about 8 when I lost my mom’s accent) caused me not to identify with or socialize with other kids in a normal way. Of course, as I said, I don’t blame any of these things in my upbringing as much as I blame the way my upbringing happened to connect with the personality that was already hardwired into me prenatally. So there is no reason to think any other child with a similar upbringing will turn out as awkward and weird (but currently happy!) as I did!
Pretty stupid. I’m looking forward to a follow-up report of how it backfired in their faces.