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In Salon today I read about a pair of Swedish parents who have made the decision not to tell their two-year-old whether it is a boy or a girl. I struggled with “it” just now. I felt, in using “it” that I was denying the child “its” personhood. And yet, is personhood defined by gender? Should it be? My gut ties them together in ways that are tough to explain. “It” makes me think of a chair or a bike.
In English, the definite and indefinite articles attached to these objects are gender-neutral, but in many other languages, like French, these objects have gendered articles attached to them: “la chaise,” “le velo.” And in vernacular English, we assign genders to objects constantly. But I digress.
I had a discussion with my coworker about the propriety of depriving a child of knowledge of his or her gender. Would it necessarily damage the child to go through its first few years of life as a socially genderless human being rather than as a little boy or little girl?
What does gender inform as a child grows up? Clearly, once the child encounters other children, in school or in play, the subject is bound to come up. And mutual anatomical comparisons will resolve the issue in fairly short order. But while the child is still young enough to be protected from the knowledge of its gender by its parents, how will it be affected by lack of that knowledge? Should this knowledge play into natural development of the mind, personality, and interests? If the child is given access to a wide variety of the cultural artifacts of gender, a neutral mix of clothes, toys, books, and media, will that produce an androgynous child? One who enjoys the loud clanking sounds of toy trucks and the colorful accouterments of dolls in equal measure? Will this change the way the child understand the world?
I think of some of the essays I’ve read by Ursula LeGuin about the role of gender in storytelling. Will this sort of early upbringing change the stories that the child makes up to understand its own existence and the world in which it lives? Personhood is made up of these “stories” that one tells about oneself. The whole field of psychoanalysis is based on “telling your story” and analyzing it to better understand the self. Do we deny the child an essential element of its early story? Or do we make more stories possible? Only time will tell. I would be very interested to see a follow up on the Salon article in a year or two.
