Gender-Neutral Parenting

            One form of parenting I admire is letting children choose whatever they wish to be interested in.  Parents who let their children play with either dolls or Legos regardless of the child’s gender is crucial to enhancing the child’s creativity and interests.  Sasha’s parents allowed him to play with whatever he wanted to and dressed as he pleased, which, in my opinion, was a good choice. Children should be able to choose what they want to play with and what they want to wear without feeling society’s pressure.  What I do not agree with is the more extreme version of gender neutral parenting: when the parents do not tell the child that he or she is a boy or a girl. 

I think that not telling the child his/her gender may do more harm than good.  Sasha’s parents did not tell Sasha that he was born as a boy, or refer to him as “him.”  They simply referred to their child as “the infant,” which I believe to be incredibly cold.  If they wished to refer to Sasha without using gender-based pronouns, they could have selected other descriptors, such as “our child” or simply use his name.  Sasha’s parents say their gender-neutral parenting will be hard to keep up as Sasha grows older and enters school.  This article did not mention anything about the parents’ thought process for when Sasha reaches puberty, but I would be interested in reading about that.  If Sasha was not told he was biologically a boy from an early age, how will he learn to accept this fact and thoroughly understand it when he is already in school with other children?

After reading the article Sasha, I decided to read some of the comments on the article to look at other perspectives.  Apart from much negativity on the subject, one woman mentioned that the idea of “declaring” a gender should not stereotype a person.  This made me think about our discussion in the first lecture about cis-gender and trans-gender individuals.  Cis-gender individuals identify with the gender they are born with, while trans-gender individuals do not.  Gender neutral parenting essentially aims to let children choose how they wish to be portrayed without society’s input, but in Sasha and Storm’s cases, these extreme measures may just be too extreme.  Regardless of whether or not Sasha or Storm identify with their biological genders, they will both have to recognize the gender they were born with at birth simply for health reasons.  Finally, since this kind of parenting has not been studied before, we have no way of knowing the impacts on the child in the future.