In the early years of my life, I was raised in a culturally conservative family whose primary focus was on raising me religious and’ moral’. The concept of womanhood had been underdeveloped and rarely touched on as discourse around gender was rare due to its taboo nature. The basis of many of the things I was taught was traditionalism; this was confusing to me as I had always found these gender roles quite unfair and exploitative towards women.
As I went through puberty and developed, the subtle sexism I had been experiencing most of my life became more apparent and more rampant. I had developed a more womanly figure at a younger age and was also overweight. These factors opened me up to many years of bullying and commentary on my figure from family members, peers, and adults I did not know. The pressure to be thin as a woman came in contrast to the pressure to be sexual as a young girl with my body type. At such a young age, I had become convinced that due to the nature of my development, I would be permanently subjugated to sexual status.
I went through puberty at around the age of ten and began developing around nine for a frame of reference. At the time, I thought my interactions with men were regular because it was how I saw women I identified with being treated in media, though, in recent years, I have come to understand the severe nature of an eleven-year-old feeling as though older men would be attracted to her. Therefore, when discussing these experiences, I feel inclined to point out the differences in a child’s mindset when brought up without the concept of gender forming their perception of themselves.
Ridgeway and Correl (2004) outline that cultural beliefs surrounding gender and their impacts on social-relational development are the main principles that uphold the structure of gender. Social-relational situations include any situation where any person defines themself in relation to the persons they are interacting with. Gender shapes this idea in that when a person is interacting with someone else raised as a different gender, they have different life experiences that shape their thoughts and perceptions, meaning they will react to certain behaviours in overtly different ways. These social interactions become the main feature of our development which results in viewing society not as an external thing separate from yourself but as the result of every interaction that has taken place (Germov & Poole 2011).
In a family where gender is not a crucial part of emotional and mental development, children learn to curate their identities based on preferences and life experience instead of a pre-determined box forced upon them. Simone De Beauvoir spoke about how the imposed idea of gender is reflected in women. She wrote,” Man is defined as a human, and a woman is defined as a female. When a woman behaves as a human being, she is said to imitate the male’. This quote delves into the idea that a woman is subjugated to this second class status with rules forced upon them with roots in colonialism and racism. As a young girl grows up, she is socialised into the box of women. The rituals performed by women are foreign to men and human nature. In a genderless form of socialisation, women would not be forced to follow arbitrary rules to ‘determine their worth’. Small things such as body hair removal and weight watching have deep roots in British colonisation. In indigenous cultures where their behaviour does not define womanhood, body hair removal and placing value on weight are not as commonly practised.
To raise a child gender-neutral does not mean not discussing gender at all. As the children grow up and start to learn about their environments, they must learn about gender, what it means, its implications and what it might mean for them in the real world. Even when discussing gender, not forcing your child into a box is the main idea. Many parents are concerned about gender-neutral parenting as it “confuses the child” or “ignores gender altogether”. This is not the case. Even so, The 2019 Sesame Workshop “Identity Matters” report found that 57% of parents rarely or never address gender, meaning that not only gender-neutral parenting has this problem. Not only does this argument assume the child is too young to understand gender, but it also makes the case that conversations around gender are inherently sexual/inappropriate for children. In reality, the Ceder-Sinai study conducted by the journal of the American Medical Association found that trans children can experience gender dysphoria as young as four years old and that 73% of the transgender women and 78% of the transgender men first experienced gender dysphoria by age 7. Children understand gender more than many adults. It is doing your child a disservice to ignore the existence of gender in your homes.
Gender is so diverse, and considering that identities are so fluid, children should not be raised feeling as though they have a list of rules to follow based on society’s standard of personhood. Forcing children to conform leads to more confusion when questioning their identities later in life and will slow moves towards gender abolition and gender equality. Non-binary people who are not socialised into a specific gender as a child will have an easier time feeling comfortable enough to ask people to refer to them by their pronouns and not partake in gendered rituals they are not comfortable with.
Even within the bounds of gendered socialisation, young children are not always socialised as the gender they were assigned at birth. We see this often in the case of trans people or occasionally outwardly gay children. As Devon price states in an article about gendered socialisation (2018), “Socialisation involves which expectations are placed on a person, perhaps, but crucially, it also involves which expectations a person internalises and applies to themselves.” Price’s article delves into the concept of how the binary is forced into the idea of gendered socialisation and how in reality, everyone is socialised differently, which leads to everyone having a unique gender identity. The damaging ideas of gender forced onto specifically queer children reaps more harmful effects than can be measured. For example, in families where trans girls are forced to be socialised as boys, the young girl still retains a feminine perspective while being forced into a box they do not fit. This is why the concept of gender-neutral parenting aims not to ignore gender but to give an understanding of how identity should be formed within oneself aside from societal expectations.
The information in this article barely scratches the surface of the institution of gender and its impact on how children develop mentally, emotionally, and physically. The impact of gender-neutral parenting cannot be understated. Children who grow up without the weight of being forced to conform to a gender they might not align with would increase mental health, help children avoid issues regarding their gender identity later in life, and create social change amongst families who might not be accustomed to this type of parenting, repeating the cycle and ensuring their children have a healthy environment to grow up in. In a report by the National Library of Medicine, it showed that in families where queer/transgender children grow up in an accepting environment, suicide rates decrease by 40% and that “Youth with high levels of acceptance from any peer also had significantly lower odds of reporting a past-year suicide attempt.”
In summary, the benefits of gender-neutral parents strongly outweigh any complaints people have come up with in discussions about its impact on children. Children who are raised in a gender-neutral environment will grow up with more accepting parents, which will have a highly positive impact on a child’s psycho-social development. It is an essential step for parents to take when battling gender inequality to discuss gender in an open and understanding way and allow parents to take the initiative and work on their perceptions of gender in themselves. As a cisgender person, my perspective is inherently flawed as I have not experienced what it is like to be transgender and be socialised in the wrong gender. Therefore, I can only provide a limited scope of understanding, and I would implore anyone reading this to pursue further knowledge from transgender activists and academics.
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