The decision by a Toronto couple to keep the gender of their new baby Storm a secret, to protect the child from the constraints of social gender norms, is honorable. Naïve, but honorable.
What's puzzling is that the couple already has two sons. This means they ought to know how hopeless it is to assume, like B.F Skinner and the behaviorists, that nurture is everything, and that controlling the environment in which a child grows up is what mostly determines gender roles in the first place.
A story: There was once a young couple, children of the 50s and 60s, committed to raising their children in gender neutral ways. While the couple didn't go as far as Kathy Witterick and David Stocker, the parents in Toronto, they believed their kids would be better off if raised free of gender stereotypes, particularly stereotypes about girls and women that they feared could limit a daughter. They both believed that children were born 'neutral,' behavioral blank slates on which, like Kathy and David, this couple was determined society would not write its limiting, constraining gender rules.
Their first child was a daughter. They named her Rachel. (No gender-neutral 'Dakota' or 'Jessie' or 'Pat.' They were serious about the gender thing, but not fanatic.) From the beginning, clothes were gender neutral; jeans and overalls and lots of stuff from Osh Kosh B'Gosh, in gender neutral colors, no frills, no skirts, no dresses (until one snuck in, a gift from Grandma when the child was nine-months-old).
Toys were gender neutral; things that would spin and make noise and engage her when she was an infant, then arts and crafts stuff and blocks and construction kits and shovels and buckets and wind-up swim toys for the tub.
The couple read their young daughter a whole range of books; Goodnight Moon and Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel and Babar and Dr. Seuss, along with Disney fairy tale classics.
They were careful about the TV shows and videos they watched, Mighty Mouse and Rocky and Bullwinkle and Tom and Jerry and Sesame Street (and yes, Disney classic fairy tales, which are certainly heavy on the princess theme). They didn't watch any regular TV, with all its inescapable gender messages, when Rachel was in the room.
But they couldn't keep Rachel in a box, of course. She had friends -- boys and girls -- and visited their homes, saw what they wore, shared their toys. And the couple both had jobs, so Rachel went to day care, a wonderful center the parents screened in advance to make sure it was also careful about avoiding gender stereotypes. And slowly, before the parents even realized it was happening, Rachel started developing... well... shall we say, tendencies.
She liked the games with dolls. (Her favorite object at home was Mommy Doll.) She loved to draw princesses and mommies and rainbows and, well, mostly princesses.
And oh did she love to play dress up. Dress up AND modeling Show, in which she would decorate herself with all sorts of things -- old slips from Mom's wardrobe or old t-shirts from Dad's -- and prance and dance around to some piece of waltz music, basking in the attention of her parents as their tears of joy flowed and the video camera blazed.
Then it happened. Her collection of dress-up clothes had grown as the parents had added loose bits of fabric from sewing projects or fabric stores, or hats and shirts and dresses and jackets from parental hand-me-downs or second-hand shops.
One day Rachel came down to breakfast dressed in several layers of everything pink and feminine she owned, including a pair of Mom's high heels. She scuffled in in those adorably too-big shoes, and put her hands on her hips, snooted her nose up in the air, and declared with the absolute certainty of a two-year-old discovering her power to control the world, "I'm NEVER going to wear anything but pink, EVER AGAIN."
The lesson was hysterical and wonderful and obvious, and Mom and Dad totally cracked up, and told Rachel that if that's how she chose to dress that was fine. And in an instant the whole pretense of thinking their daughter was a blank slate and that they could give her a gender-free upbringing was thoroughly exposed as a sweet and innocent fraud.
Their two-year-old was making quite clear that she was not gender-free. She was a girl, and lots of the limiting social behavioral patterns her parents wanted to protect her from weren't the products of external nurture after all.
They were rooted in the truth of Rachel's nature. It was like her "GIRL!" gene had finally grown frustrated and decided it was time to overtly declare that no careful control over her wardrobe, stories, TV, or anything was going to change that.
So it surprised Mom and Dad less when their son was born and, exposed to all the gender neutral books and toys and clothes and messages, Matt chose the trucks, turned sticks into guns and wanted to wrestle and play mock sword battles more than dance and color. He and Rachel did play with dolls together. They called the game 'Dismember Barbie.'
The Mom and Dad didn't stop teaching their kids that they could be anything they wanted to be, and do anything they wanted to do, and correcting them when they said girls couldn't do this or boys couldn't do that. But they let their kids be who they were, a GIRL and a BOY, and supported their interests and tastes, even if that meant Rachel wanted to take ballet classes and Matt wanted to play baseball and soccer and learn Kung Fu. The lesson the parents learned, from their kids, was that it wasn't their job as parents to protect their kids from the world, as much as to just give them open minds about it.
(By the way, my wife and I checked with Rachel to make sure our daughter was okay with recounting this wonderful tale. She says she's proud of what she taught us, but couldn't talk long. She had to go shopping. For shoes.)
Follow David Ropeik on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dropeik
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Girls aren't always encouraged to don pink. A hundred years ago reddish color was considered fitting for boys and blue fitting for girls, because red symbolizes passion and blue relates to quiet and peaceful nature. So how could "GIRL genes" do a complete turn in such a short time?
By the way, my "GIRL genes" always told me that pink is too bright and shopping for shoes isn't as fun as shopping for books.
Is spouting off on how everyone in the world should raise their own children, as well as about how most modern psychology of gender is meaningless compared to your awesome knowledge of genetics, all it takes to be a blogger on a major news outlet? I'm in the wrong line of work.
The parents of Storm have one book as their source.
This is a discussion of ideas and while I didn't think so before becoming a parent, children know and seek out identification of their own genders pretty early in life and need good role models to give them a fulsome and broad example of what that gender means socially. It need not be restrictive, but to fail to encourage a child to identify their own gender and to encourage a positive and life affirming attachment to it, is no different than deciding not to teach your child a language.
Yes, like gender, children are wired to learn a language as a means of communicating with the outside world, but if no one understands them but the parents (who presumably have learned the child's language along with them), then that child is going to be stunted and is not going to be able to function outside the home. Clearly, this is the antithesis of good parenting, which is to prepare your child for independence away from you, home and hearth.
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You can model boyhood as nurturing, loving dress up, colouring, loving pink, long hair, etc., as well as more traditional boyhood pursuits and the child will grow up identifying as a boy. As the head of gender reassignments at CAMH in Toronto was once quoted as saying, if you play around with gender in the early years, you're going to cause gender confusion and that's something the child is going to have to deal with his or her whole life. If the child isn't born into the wrong body, why create a problem? In fact, he advised parents of boys who want to wear girls' clothing to say "no", "it isn't appropriate, except for dress up time." You don't let your kid wear a Hallowe'en costume to school every day, so why let your boy wear a "girl costume", unless you want to ensure that there will be problems later on. And this is from someone who helps transition those who must, to the opposite gender.
I don't know what the answer or consequences are, but the parents ought not to delude themselves that this is going to be a neutral exercise.
Now that that's out of the way, the point of my comment was that this blogger's entire argument is that it's OBVIOUS that the love of pink, shoe shopping, and other unspecified "girly" attributes, is genetic, due to the fact that his daughter liked them. Of course, he has no qualifications in genetics or psychology, and the "nature vs nurture" debate is massive and ongoing among people who actually know what they're talking about. I don't see how quoting a controversial physician (Ken Zucker's theories are not accepted by most gender reassignment doctors) on his opinion of gender SOCIALIZATION in any way proves that the blogger has once and for all solved a giant question of human psychology through his "girl gene" theory.
I don't know anyone who looks back and says, "my parents were too loving and too supportive".
The children of Kathy Witterick and David Stocker are blessed will wonderful parents we should all be so lucky.
I don't want Canadian spelling in Huffington Post US but it should be in the Canada section. That makes it Canadian.
Furthermore I was really bothered by the implication that there are only two genders in your world. This is not only wrong but goes on to ignore the life experiences of innumberable peoples who live outside the gender binary. Those who are trans/intersexed/genderqueer who have just been told that because they aren't GIRL or BOY they don't exist. Allowing Storm to make decisions that feel right hopefully will allow them to play with gender and have fun with the roles that so many of us feel tied to.
Sometimes it is going to suck but I am fairly sure it's nothing to do with Storm being given a choice how they are going to act and has a lot more to do with the rest of us acting like jerks, treating others like crap because we think we know what is best for them.
I can't comment on the study, but it is interesting that so many girls do go right for the pink, while little 3 year old boys do not, for the most part.
This is what these parents are missing. Their job is to make their kids confident, independent people who can stand proudly and live in the world.
Your gender is not just about what's between your legs. It defines you in the same way as your face and the rest of your body do. It's part of who you are. It doesn't have to be limiting. It can be re-defined. Arguably, today, we have a much broader conception of what it is to be a girl or a boy than they did 50 years ago. But that doesn't mean that you can live without gender.
Even the people who struggle with gender need to find an identity and something to call themselves. Some people have to go through gender reassignment surgery just to do that. That doesn't make gender irrelevant. It proves that gender is very relevant. In other words, you can be a boy and like pink and like dress up. But you are still a boy. Unless, you feel in your heart that you are a girl, and that is a completely different struggle.
I hope these parents put some more thought into what they're doing before their children suffer. From the media reports, the 5 year old is already suffering for his parents' choices.
So bravo for being as thick as the rest of the media.
If no one teaches you language and keeps you away from it, you won't discover it on your own, at least not a language that anyone else understands.
Same with gender.
This kid has to live in the world. For kids who come with gender identity issues, they suffer greatly in feeling they are in the wrong body and need to become the other gender. Why experiment with depriving a child of a model for gender. You wouldn't do it for language, so why for gender?
My plan is to tell my kids that they will face a lot of adversity in their lives, and to prepare for others to try to limit them in dozens of ways, gender roles included. Then they will not be shocked when it happens...
This story, and the above blog post about it, says a lot more about our creepy, anything-different-may-be-threatening culture than it does about Storm's parenting choices.
Of course people are threatened by 'different', they've been conditioned that way for thousands of years. That's what makes this an experiment, like it or not.