Theybies
"Is it possible to raise your child entirely without gender from birth?"
The question is the title of an article by Alex Morris, a contributing editor for New York Magazine and Rolling Stone. It's not a question of his own posing, though; he's reporting on the fact that some parents have been contemplating that question, and how they're approaching the matter.
It's not a brand-new notion. I remember reading a reprint of Lois Gould's "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" when I was in my 20s and it was already nearly ten years old by then. Of course, that was fiction. The parents described in Morris's article aren't fictional.
In the actual world, parents who have worried about the effects of sex role socialization on their children have mostly tried to raise their children in a cheerfully agender "Free to Be You and Me" permissive world that didn't include a bunch of insistences that boys had to play with boy toys and wear boy clothes and display boy personality-characteristics while girls were pushed towards playing with girl toys and girl clothes and feminine attributes.
The parents in Morris's article decided that as long as people knew the children's sex, they would still project expectations upon them even when they were trying not to, and that many people would not see any problem with having gendered expectations or with treating kids differently based on what sex they were -
...society’s gender troubles cannot be solved by giving all children dolls and trucks to play with or dressing them all in the color beige
... and they decided to go the full Lois Gould / Baby X route and keep the sex of their children a secret. These are the so-called "theybies parents" (author Morris's term).
There is, of course, a predictable loud outcry of critical people who say this is bad, an irresponsibly destructive piece of social experimentation that not only won't work as hoped for but will do damage to the children involved. You can see some of these replies in the comments below Morris's article and you can find others if you do an internet search on "Morris" + "raise your child entirely without gender".
The critics' argument isn't a single argument, though, so much as it's a set of different arguments that all end up in the same conclusion-area. Even if we end up dismissing all of those arguments, I think it's worth looking at them in clusters (if not necessarily on a one at a time basis) and giving them separate consideration.
There are some people who are opposed to what the "theybies parents" are doing because they think it is natural and important for children to get gendered - to be treated as either boys or girls and to learn what it means to be a boy or a girl. The people making this argument are taking the diametrically opposite viewpoint from the "theybies parents". They're defending the gender binary as something critical to healthy development, and I don't see any difference between them and the people who would be horrified if their son were to wear a skirt. I'm dismissing them from further consideration.
But there are also people who are opposed to this because they visualize a few children being kept ignorant of their own biological classification, growing up in a world where other children are not having this information kept from them. In other words "we know what's best for you, your ignorance is a blessing, so we're going to keep you uninformed about gender for your own good".
I can see where that would be a matter of some concern if that was in fact what the "theybies parents" were proposing. But it doesn't seem to be:
Parents do not shy away from describing body parts, but are quick to let children know that “some people with penises aren’t boys, and some people with vaginas aren’t girls,” as one mom told me.
The parents do not appear to be trying to keep their children from being aware of their own biological equipment. It's slightly less clear whether they intend on informing their children that most people fit into one or the other of two primary biological sex categories. It would, actually, be a more accurate and more truthful explanation if they were told that some people do not, in fact, fit into either of those physical categories.
The main focus of the parents' intent appears to be running some interference with how other people will perceive and treat their children. In a social/cultural context where there are a boatload of assumptions and interpretations foisted onto people based on their biological sexual equipment, where people altercast other people into identities based on their perceived sex, then the only obvious way to avoid that unwanted foisting is to keep the biological sex unknown.
Some critics point out that the whole rejection of biological essentialism kind of revolves around it not mattering what you've got betwixt your legs. If it doesn't matter, then it need not be kept a secret. But there's a gap between what matters in and of itself and what makes a difference in a social context. Keeping the children's sex secret is sort of like affirmative action: it's a patch, a temporary fix that only makes sense in the context of something already, historically, being wrong.
Finally, though, there are people who are concerned about children being raised this way because they visualize a few children being kept ignorant and unexposed to the social fact that most people are indeed treated differently depending on their sex. This is a more complicated and nuanced area than trying to keep kids oblivious about their biological classification.
It reminds me of the question of whether minority parents should raise their kids as blissfully unaware of racism and bigotry as possible, so that they aren't tainted by it, or if they should raise their kids to be savvy of the world's racist bigoted nastiness so that they aren't caught unprepared and vulnerable when they finally have to confront it.
Would we be setting up the children for a rude awakening? Would they feel they had been lied to, in the form of lies of omission, if they were not warned that the world tends to believe in sexual differences and has different expectations and treatments of people based on whether they're male or female in body?
I totally approve of the motives of the parents. I understand what they're trying to do here. And I loved "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" and thought it was totally cute. But I notice that both the situation described in the Morris article and the situation described in the Lois Gould short story all involve babies and very young children. When I do a fast-forward in my own mind and imagine older children, I see the control of whether or not to let the surrounding world know their sex shifting from the parents to the children themselves. If they were to continue to preserve that state of affairs, doing so would depend on a lot of body coverage. I mean, you can't do this and also live in a naturist community, if you see what I mean. In fact, you'd end up needing gunnysacks and burqas. It would be difficult to keep the project from being tainted by body-shame and the notion that this physical secret was somehow sinful or socially unmentionable or taboo.
I said earlier that keeping the children's sex secret in this manner is a patch, a fix to a social problem. I think it is also fair to say that doing this is a tactic. It's not a goal in and of itself. The goal behind all this is to someday have a world in which people knowing the sex of your children (or of you, yourself for that matter) would make no difference in how folks behaved towards them, would have no influence in expectations or how your behavior gets interpreted, any of that. But as a tactic, keeping the biological sex a secret works better as a thought experiment than as an actual endeavor, in my opinion. Secrecy is seldom a liberating experience.
I am not a parent and I suppose it is easy to say "Well if I were a parent I would do such-and-such" when you don't have to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. But if I were, I would attempt to teach my children...
• That most (but not all) people fall into one of two biological sex categories, male and female;
• That people have ideas and notions about what it means to be male or female, and these ideas have been around for a long long time, and lots of people don't like those ideas;
• That some of those ideas and notions do seem to be true in general, but there are exceptions to the rule and always have been, and that there have been particularly mean and nasty attitudes about the people who are the exceptions, but it's changing, it's getting better;
• That it is brave to be and do what comes natural to you instead of letting other people's attitudes and expectations shape you from the outside;
• That the body they were born with is beautiful and good as it is, regardless of anything else, and that no one has to have a certain kind of body in order to be a certain kind of person.
--------
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The question is the title of an article by Alex Morris, a contributing editor for New York Magazine and Rolling Stone. It's not a question of his own posing, though; he's reporting on the fact that some parents have been contemplating that question, and how they're approaching the matter.
It's not a brand-new notion. I remember reading a reprint of Lois Gould's "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" when I was in my 20s and it was already nearly ten years old by then. Of course, that was fiction. The parents described in Morris's article aren't fictional.
In the actual world, parents who have worried about the effects of sex role socialization on their children have mostly tried to raise their children in a cheerfully agender "Free to Be You and Me" permissive world that didn't include a bunch of insistences that boys had to play with boy toys and wear boy clothes and display boy personality-characteristics while girls were pushed towards playing with girl toys and girl clothes and feminine attributes.
The parents in Morris's article decided that as long as people knew the children's sex, they would still project expectations upon them even when they were trying not to, and that many people would not see any problem with having gendered expectations or with treating kids differently based on what sex they were -
...society’s gender troubles cannot be solved by giving all children dolls and trucks to play with or dressing them all in the color beige
... and they decided to go the full Lois Gould / Baby X route and keep the sex of their children a secret. These are the so-called "theybies parents" (author Morris's term).
There is, of course, a predictable loud outcry of critical people who say this is bad, an irresponsibly destructive piece of social experimentation that not only won't work as hoped for but will do damage to the children involved. You can see some of these replies in the comments below Morris's article and you can find others if you do an internet search on "Morris" + "raise your child entirely without gender".
The critics' argument isn't a single argument, though, so much as it's a set of different arguments that all end up in the same conclusion-area. Even if we end up dismissing all of those arguments, I think it's worth looking at them in clusters (if not necessarily on a one at a time basis) and giving them separate consideration.
There are some people who are opposed to what the "theybies parents" are doing because they think it is natural and important for children to get gendered - to be treated as either boys or girls and to learn what it means to be a boy or a girl. The people making this argument are taking the diametrically opposite viewpoint from the "theybies parents". They're defending the gender binary as something critical to healthy development, and I don't see any difference between them and the people who would be horrified if their son were to wear a skirt. I'm dismissing them from further consideration.
But there are also people who are opposed to this because they visualize a few children being kept ignorant of their own biological classification, growing up in a world where other children are not having this information kept from them. In other words "we know what's best for you, your ignorance is a blessing, so we're going to keep you uninformed about gender for your own good".
I can see where that would be a matter of some concern if that was in fact what the "theybies parents" were proposing. But it doesn't seem to be:
Parents do not shy away from describing body parts, but are quick to let children know that “some people with penises aren’t boys, and some people with vaginas aren’t girls,” as one mom told me.
The parents do not appear to be trying to keep their children from being aware of their own biological equipment. It's slightly less clear whether they intend on informing their children that most people fit into one or the other of two primary biological sex categories. It would, actually, be a more accurate and more truthful explanation if they were told that some people do not, in fact, fit into either of those physical categories.
The main focus of the parents' intent appears to be running some interference with how other people will perceive and treat their children. In a social/cultural context where there are a boatload of assumptions and interpretations foisted onto people based on their biological sexual equipment, where people altercast other people into identities based on their perceived sex, then the only obvious way to avoid that unwanted foisting is to keep the biological sex unknown.
Some critics point out that the whole rejection of biological essentialism kind of revolves around it not mattering what you've got betwixt your legs. If it doesn't matter, then it need not be kept a secret. But there's a gap between what matters in and of itself and what makes a difference in a social context. Keeping the children's sex secret is sort of like affirmative action: it's a patch, a temporary fix that only makes sense in the context of something already, historically, being wrong.
Finally, though, there are people who are concerned about children being raised this way because they visualize a few children being kept ignorant and unexposed to the social fact that most people are indeed treated differently depending on their sex. This is a more complicated and nuanced area than trying to keep kids oblivious about their biological classification.
It reminds me of the question of whether minority parents should raise their kids as blissfully unaware of racism and bigotry as possible, so that they aren't tainted by it, or if they should raise their kids to be savvy of the world's racist bigoted nastiness so that they aren't caught unprepared and vulnerable when they finally have to confront it.
Would we be setting up the children for a rude awakening? Would they feel they had been lied to, in the form of lies of omission, if they were not warned that the world tends to believe in sexual differences and has different expectations and treatments of people based on whether they're male or female in body?
I totally approve of the motives of the parents. I understand what they're trying to do here. And I loved "X: A Fabulous Child's Story" and thought it was totally cute. But I notice that both the situation described in the Morris article and the situation described in the Lois Gould short story all involve babies and very young children. When I do a fast-forward in my own mind and imagine older children, I see the control of whether or not to let the surrounding world know their sex shifting from the parents to the children themselves. If they were to continue to preserve that state of affairs, doing so would depend on a lot of body coverage. I mean, you can't do this and also live in a naturist community, if you see what I mean. In fact, you'd end up needing gunnysacks and burqas. It would be difficult to keep the project from being tainted by body-shame and the notion that this physical secret was somehow sinful or socially unmentionable or taboo.
I said earlier that keeping the children's sex secret in this manner is a patch, a fix to a social problem. I think it is also fair to say that doing this is a tactic. It's not a goal in and of itself. The goal behind all this is to someday have a world in which people knowing the sex of your children (or of you, yourself for that matter) would make no difference in how folks behaved towards them, would have no influence in expectations or how your behavior gets interpreted, any of that. But as a tactic, keeping the biological sex a secret works better as a thought experiment than as an actual endeavor, in my opinion. Secrecy is seldom a liberating experience.
I am not a parent and I suppose it is easy to say "Well if I were a parent I would do such-and-such" when you don't have to put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. But if I were, I would attempt to teach my children...
• That most (but not all) people fall into one of two biological sex categories, male and female;
• That people have ideas and notions about what it means to be male or female, and these ideas have been around for a long long time, and lots of people don't like those ideas;
• That some of those ideas and notions do seem to be true in general, but there are exceptions to the rule and always have been, and that there have been particularly mean and nasty attitudes about the people who are the exceptions, but it's changing, it's getting better;
• That it is brave to be and do what comes natural to you instead of letting other people's attitudes and expectations shape you from the outside;
• That the body they were born with is beautiful and good as it is, regardless of anything else, and that no one has to have a certain kind of body in order to be a certain kind of person.
--------
This LiveJournal blog is echoed on DreamWidth, WordPress, and Blogger. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts