re: the Myth of Gender-Neutral Parenting (letter to the editor)

In My Humble Opinion
1

The following is a letter sent to Newsday in response to their printing of op ed article “The Myth of Gender-Neutral Parenting”, available here. Newsday declined to print this letter.

Neuroscientist Debra Soh does a disservice to gender-variant people and to parents attempting gender-neutral childrearing (“The myth of gender-neutral parenting”, NEWSDAY 2/5/2017, page A 30).

Imagine, if you will, that you have a mango snowcone in one hand and a mint snowcone in the other. Hurl the mango snowcone at the nearest wall from a distance of 5 feet. You get a massive splatter of orange ice a couple feet in diameter. Now hurl the mint snowcone, aiming about 6 inches to the right of where you threw the mango cone, and now you have a second large splatter that substantially overlaps the first one but skews to the right.

THAT is what neuroscience tells us about gender: that there are differences between males and females, but that there is more variation within each population than there is on average between the two populations, and that there is a lot of overlap.

I myself am a gender-variant person, the equivalent of a spot of mango ice over in the portion of the wall primarily occupied by mint green ice-flecks. No different or unusual process caused that ice fleck to be there —ordinary geometry says that any time you have this kind of distribution pattern, with a wide spread within each group and overlaps between the two groups, you are, BY DEFINITION, going to have such points.

The purpose of gender-neutral parenting is not to impose some kind of forced androgyny on children but rather to step back from gender prescriptivism, the belief that males who are not masculine and females who are not feminine are wrong, inappropriate, and not to be approved of.

A typically masculine male child would have no more reason to feel uncomfortable in a gender-neutral environment than a feminine male child like me would. Nothing bad is going to happen to him if he isn’t getting his self-expression bolstered with constant messages saying that males are expected to be masculine, as long as he’s supported in his self-expression.

The converse is not true. The atypically gendered child has historically experienced the world as a hostile place, because we are perpetually confronted with the message that not only are the majority of the people of our biological sex configured with a different set of personality characteristics, behaviors, priorities, and nuances, but that ours is wrong and that we should not self-express but instead should try to tuck our odd corners out of sight in shame and embarrassment.

If gender-neutral parenting is a threat to a typically gendered child’s potential, the typically gendered person must be a fragile hothouse flower indeed.

———

Allan Hunter, author of THE STORY OF Q: A GENDERQUEER TALE, is a gender invert, a genderqueer activist; he presents gender theory and leads discussion groups in university women’s and gender studies courses and addresses LGBTQ groups.

———

(this is yet another echoed blog post, permission courtesy of the moderators)

2

Did we read the same article? The Newsday article and your response don’t seem to have a lot in common.

3

What do you mean “don’t seem to have a lot in common”? I just read it and I think it does the question a disservice precisely by ignoring the points made by Ahunter3.

4

The article is about gender neutral parenting as a way of instilling the best features of the opposite sex in children, and how it doesn’t work. It doesn’t mention gender variant children at all. It doesn’t mention “forced androgyny”. The response is coming from a completely different viewpoint that the author of the original article didn’t even attempt to tackle.

5

The article ignores the simple facts in AHunter3’s first two paragraphs and dismisses Gender-Neutral Parenting due to an embarrassingly biased view of innate gender differences. Gender variant children are a good example of how these biases can harm children, because it’s obvious how this is, but the points in the second paragraph show how the concern is valid for the vast majority.

6

Yip. The article claims that raising a child in a gender-neutral environment will somehow limit their potential. It uses a lot of true but irrelevant information to attempt to make that point.

The OP points out that there is no reason why a gender-typical child would have a problem in being raised in a gender-neutral environment. but that a gender-typical environment can harm the gender atypical.

Despite all the true information, the article does not actually establish its premise that there is something wrong with raising a child in a gender-neutral environment. All it does is say that studies show that much of gender is innate.

7

If by 'ignores" you mean the author didn’t write a completely different article about the possible benefits of gender neutral parenting for gender variant children then I guess we are in agreement. I’m sure Debra W. Soh, a sexual neuroscientist at York University in Toronto, could write a perfectly good piece about what you want her write about but she didn’t. She wrote a piece about how you can’t make boys into girls by giving them dolls and vise versa.

8

However, there’s nothing about “forced androgyny” or anything remotely similar to " males who are not masculine and females who are not feminine are wrong" in the article you link to. Basically, the author states “people try to give a gender-neutral education so that children will be able to find their own way, but it’s mostly pointless because gender roles are innate for a significant part”.
However, I’ve read statements by people advocating for gender-neutral parenting that indeed basically amounted to “forced androgyny” (the idea being basically that since society pressures kids into fitting in the role assigned to their physical gender, parents should exert an equivalent pressure in the other direction) with a goal that was seemingly to raise “agendered” children rather than say, ending up randomly with a boyish boy, a girlish girl, a girlish boy, a boyish girl (the idea here being that all gender differences are cultural/imposed by society and besides that, wrong and detrimental for both genders).

I’m not saying that this would be representative of the majority of such parents, but people who make the extra-effort of raising their children in an atypical way are relatively likely to be “true believers”, so they might not be that rare, either.

9

That is correct. It doesn’t. My reply does. I think you’re attempting to make a point, but I’ll be damned if I can discern what it is.

Those are indeed my words. Is it perhaps your opinion that Debra Soh thinks gender-neutral parenting is a perfectly acceptable practice and is just alerting us to the fact that gender differences have a genuine biological basis? And that she is not arguing against gender-neutral parenting?

Umm, OK.

10

Yeah, that doesn’t sound healthy either. I’ve known a handful of parents who didn’t want their female children to be girlish or didn’t want their male children to be boyish. In my own personal experience (i.e., anecdotal only, no extrapolation claims being made here), they weren’t gender-neutral parenting advocates but had something else going on. Parents of a girl who really really had their heart set on having a boy. Parents of a boy who associate boy-behavior with sinfulness and aren’t hung up on the worry that a feminine boy woud automatically be gay. Parents of a girl who consider every aspect of femininity to be an artificial patriarchal construct but think masculine behavior is normal untrammeled human behavior. Etc.

Well, I can see how someone with any such attitudes could find justification in gender-neutral parenting. But heck, people can extract justifications for many things from philosophies and belief systems that don’t really advocate those things.

11

That’s an absolutely fantastic letter.

The ‘snow cone’ explanation hits on exactly what frustrates me when people talk about differences between men and women. I say this as a cis-gendered woman, so I am aware that my frustration is a small thing compared with what many others experience.

12

Thanks, StrangeBird :slight_smile:

13

No. No one have been talking about that. She was however nearly as blatantly wrong about gender differences in what she did write.

14

Before I read any of this.

If I say I don’t agree with you, will you respect my opinion as valid? Or will will you dismiss it out of hand because it is counter to your arguments?

15

I agree it’s a good letter. I just finished reading a book regarding this topic, Delusions of Gender by Cordelia Fine. It goes into a lot of stuff about how a lot of the “scientific” research showing how men and women and different is often actually pseudoscience. It’s hard to design a good study, and even the most well-meaning scientists don’t realize how their own implicit biases affect them and affect how they set up a study and interpret it’s results. It’s easy to look back at scientists in earlier years comparing the brain sizes of men and women and think that obviously they were misinterpreting things, but there are scientists now doing things not much differently. It’s a really interesting book.
This part of the article stuck out to me:

First thing, most parents who try to raise their children in gender-neutral homes probably aren’t truly doing so. John and Jane Doe might mean well and be doing their best to not place gender expectations on little Sam and Sarah, but John and Jane were definitely not raised gender neutrally, and have implicit biases and assumptions they don’t even realize, and those will affect how they interact with and raise Sarah and Sam.

But even if John and Jane work their absolute hardest and do succeed in overcoming their own implicit biases, there is still the rest of the culture to deal with. They’re going to have a hard time balancing out what children’s books to read to them, since most children’s books have a male protagonist. You can maybe find more girl heroes on TV, but in TV shows male characters are shown to be strong, athletic, and independent, and female characters are shown to be gentle and care-giving.

Also, the kids are going to interact with other people and leave the house. Are Jane and John going to police every interacting that Sarah and Sam have with other adults, and going to intervene when relatives tell Sarah she’s so pretty and tell Sam that he’s so strong? Or going to monitor every playdate and intervene when other kids tell Sam and Sarah that girls play with dolls and boys play with trucks? Sarah and Sam are going to interact with friends, relatives, teachers, schoolmates, doctors, various strangers, and are going to see movies, shows, commercials, and all sorts of other things that will have gender stereotypes in them.

Most parents aren’t able to truly raise their kids gender neutrally, because it is truly a Herculean task. But if they think that they are doing so, then find that their kids still conform to some gender stereotypes, they think that the behavior must be innate, when it’s really not.

16

If it’s a matter of opinion, of course I won’t dismiss it out of hand. If it’s counter to factual arguments I’m making, then it is wrong, and I’m not dismissing it out of hand, I’m dismissing it because it’s wrong.

17

I like to think that I will respect your opinion and give it consideration and not just dismiss it out of hand. But admittedly I’m very partisan and engaged in these issues and I don’t always meet that standard of fairness and objectivity. How about we give it a try and if you think I’m not giving you a reasonable listen, you call me out on it? :cool:

18

So your letter makes good salient points that very few people educated in the field would disagree with (in my opinion).
But I don’t see your letter and experience as being greatly relevant to the article. The article isn’t about gender variants; it’s about raising typical children in a gender neutral environment and the value of that. Your letter was rightly rejected because it was far enough off topic to not be sufficiently important enough to publish. If the original article was focused on gender variant children then it would have been more relevant and maybe, might have been published.
By the way, there is no obligation to publish your letter. It can be perfectly fine and a good argument and relavent to the topic but not get published for a variety of reasons. Sometimes people think their letters don’t get published because it doesn’t fit the organization’s political agenda. I find that not to be true, as critical letters often make up the bulk of the respondents. More likely your letter wasn’t selected for much more boring reasons.

19

Well I’m back to be more critical of your letter. I’m not a journalist, but I’ve written several things and sometimes had a letter published. I was married to an exceptionally good journalist and editor for a significant time so I think some of that has rubbed off.

While your letter is generally not of enough relevance to be published, some specific things make ita bad choice to put in a “letter to the editor” section. It’s too long and not concise enough, and it makes assertions that no one ever claimed otherwise. Your ice cream example kills your letter. It’s too long. Just say that gender is not black and white or it’s not binary. There is zero need to make an analogy of overlapping splotches of ice cream. I’m guessing the editor said exactly what a professor wrote on a paper where I did the same thing…“What the hell is this!?”

20

first off let me say i liked your letter, a lot of information. i would like to comment, but i’m afraid i’m going to make a mess, so please bear with me.

i read the newsday article twice, and i didnt get the feeling that they were advocating against gender neutral parenting. they were pointing out the the data indicates that its not necessary. whether you choose gender specific or gender neutral parenting the child is going to “tell” you where they fit on the gender spectrum. now, i am not a psychologist, but i think the harm comes when the parent refuses to “listen” to the child.

and this is where i think newsday missed out. they should have printed you letter. as you rightly point out raising a child in a gender neutral environment isn’t going to do any harm. but, as newsday rightly points out a gender neutral home is probably not going to matter all. however, as you point out, raising them in a gender specific home does run the risk of harm to a child to who might not fit that specificity.

if your point was, if you have a choice of raising a child in an environment that potentially has no effect on them vs raising them in one that has potential risk; opt for the one with no risk, then i agree.

i’ve rewritten this response so many times, now, and i’m not sure it says exactly what i wanted to say, but its close. please forgive me if i’ve missed your point

mc