Raising a child without gender

[Pandora II]

Just thought of a different perspective on this...

There are children born where the gender is not clear and it can take time to establish whether the child is genetically male or female and how that affects their external appearance.

Perhaps this child is 'intergender'...

How would everyone feel about revealing that information publically? I think I might prefer my parents to say they weren't revealing my gender for the reasons that these parents are doing rather than say to everyone 'well we haven't quite decided what it is'.

Perhaps the responses to this and other threads on this I have read on this topic elsewhere demonstrate how truly hard it must be to grow up as a person who is not firmly one gender or the other. Society has a terrible need to pigeonhole...

 

[Cehrabehra]

Pandora is right (though I could argue that there should be no shame in being open about the questionable sexuality - maybe THAT would help society understand that gender is not so strictly cut and dry). I have long found gender mosaic a very interesting topic that the majority of people are ignorant about.

 

[AGBF]

Just thought of a different perspective on this...

There are children born where the gender is not clear and it can take time to establish whether the child is genetically male or female and how that affects their external appearance.

Perhaps this child is 'intergender'...

I think that the issue of children born with both male and female sex characteristics is irrelvant to this discussion.

The way that this couple raised its previous two children and the reasoning it gave for hiding the sex of the third child even before its birth make it clear clear there was no problem with hermaphroditism in this case.

When I was a young social worker I worked on the pediatic service at a large metropolitan hospital. I did see one baby with both male and female characteristics while I was there. The parents and doctors tried to work with the infant's more dominant set of characteristics and make the others fall in line with with them. One cannot ask an infant what s/he wants to be!!!

Deb/AGBF

 

[Pandora II]

Disagree - the two were the topic of a Radio 4 programme here in the UK this morning.

One of the things that the doctors on the programme raised was that the chances of hermaphroditism are increased in communities where inter-marriage is more common. Often in these communities sons are far more desirable than daughters and they had problems at time where the child was more female than male but the parents decided that they wanted a boy and so went with that as a gender against medical advice and then there were major issues when the child hit puberty.

May be I'm looking at the Storm situation more as a theoretical question about hiding a child's gender rather than looking at the individual family and whether they want to be in the news etc

Since pretty much everyone on this thread has come down hard on the side of revealing the gender and the possible consequences of bringing a child up genderless, I was interested in what reactions would be like to a parent who didn't reveal the child's gender because it wasn't clear and they wanted to see what the child gravitated towards naturally.

 

[Circe]

I think that the issue of children born with both male and female sex characteristics is irrelvant to this discussion.

The way that this couple raised its previous two children and the reasoning it gave for hiding the sex of the third child even before its birth make it clear clear there was no problem with hermaphroditism in this case.

When I was a young social worker I worked on the pediatic service at a large metropolitan hospital. I did see one baby with both male and female characteristics while I was there. The parents and doctors tried to work with the infant's more dominant set of characteristics and make the others fall in line with with them. One cannot ask an infant what s/he wants to be!!!

Deb/AGBF

ABGF, I don't know what the details were in the situation you mention - but I've read a fair amount about the treatment of intersex children, and the consensus today is to wait until the person the infant becomes can decide.

There are people who were born with micropenises who were raised as girls, who felt out of place their whole lives, and people born with "abnormally large" clitorises who were ... reduced ... to conform to "standard" who lost all sensation.

Parents might have to make a tough call in terms of how to raise their children in cases of true hermaphroditism (which is pretty rare), but for the most part, messing with nature is a bad idea. Just another reason why reducing the strong gender markers we tag on kids would be a good thing (though I still think the gender-free thing is going too far).

 

[Circe]

Just thought of a different perspective on this...

There are children born where the gender is not clear and it can take time to establish whether the child is genetically male or female and how that affects their external appearance.

Perhaps this child is 'intergender'...

How would everyone feel about revealing that information publically? I think I might prefer my parents to say they weren't revealing my gender for the reasons that these parents are doing rather than say to everyone 'well we haven't quite decided what it is'.

Perhaps the responses to this and other threads on this I have read on this topic elsewhere demonstrate how truly hard it must be to grow up as a person who is not firmly one gender or the other. Society has a terrible need to pigeonhole...

Hm, this is an interesting conundrum. In the past, parents have tended to "pick" the gender they felt was more pronounced, sometimes with medical intervention (which ... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah), and sometimes without (and even that can cause a lot of angst as the child matures). Personally, I think I'd share the truth with close friends and family, and stonewall strangers as much as possible until my kid was of an age when personality and preference were beginning to come through. Little 5 year old "Jordan" (or fill in the gender-neutral name of your choice here) wants to be a girl? Cool, then, that's how we'll register her in kindergarten ... and should that change at puberty when adolescence hits, well, there's a reason school transfers were invented.

I don't think there's anything that needs to be concealed about such matters as "wrong" or "icky:" I do think we live in a prurient society. So finding a balance that respects the child's agency as well as their privacy seems to be key ....