For a small but growing cohort of parents — ones who see gender as a spectrum rather than a binary — the unisex movement of the ’60s and the “gender neutral” parenting trends that have followed have come up woefully short. For them, 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; the gender binary must not simply be smudged but wholly eradicated from the moment that socialization begins, clearing the way both for their child’s future gender exploration and for wholesale cultural change.
In 2011, parents Kathy Witterick and David Stocker became the objects of international attention — and “vitriolic” criticism, as they told the Toronto Star, the paper that originally broke the story — when they became one of the first families to go public with their decision not to assign a gender to their third child, Storm. People questioned whether a child raised without gender would be able to form an identity, whether Storm would suffer permanent psychological damage, whether the parents themselves were mentally ill. A barrage of cruel letters arrived on the family’s doorstep. Cars passing them in the road would slow so that the driver could yell “Boy!” or “Girl!” out the window.
It was actually the anger that drew the attention of Kyl Myers, now the parent of a 2-year-old theyby, Zoomer. A gender-studies student at the University of Utah at the time, Myers understood gender to be not a biological imperative but rather a social construct. “I had read the stories about Storm, I had seen the comments, and I just thought, I have such a different experience with the world and a different idea about gender than these people do. Sure, there are biological differences among the sexes, I get that. But once I was exposed to it, I couldn’t unsee or unlearn that gender is a social construction.”
She couldn’t unsee, for example, that gender roles and norms vary across time and space, even from one household to the next. “I remember in one of my textbooks, it was like, ‘Imagine, if you could, a child that no one knows their gender.’ And it’s like, ‘Imagine, if you could? What are you talking about? That could happen.’ ” Should happen, Myers felt.
“I knew that I wanted to parent like this years before I ever got pregnant,” she says. “I knew I wanted to parent like this before I met the father of my child.” If no one knew her child’s sex, then no one could treat that baby like a boy or a girl, molding the child to fit into the stereotypes that Myers believed to be unfounded. The point was not to have a genderless child but one who comes to an understanding of their gender — whatever it might be — in an environment where colors and objects and activities are not slotted into the arbitrary and binary categories of “girl” and “boy,” and the concepts of “girl” and “boy” are not set up in opposition to each other. “We were just like, ‘Let’s make it look like a rainbow exploded in this house,’ ” Myers explains of wanting to provide Zoomer with all available options, rather than limiting options to those deemed to be gender neutral.
In fact, “gender neutral” is a term that tends to be rejected by people parenting this way — in lieu of “gender open,” “gender affirming,” or “gender creative” — and Kyl’s website, raisingzoomer.com, and its accompanying Instagram account have become go-to destinations for families curious about what gender-creative parenting might look like. And what it looks like is pretty appealing, with Myers’s photogenic and well-lit family doing such wholesome things as hiking and biking and cuddling under fluffy comforters in stylish, well-appointed rooms. Sometimes Zoomer is wearing pink. Sometimes they’re wearing blue. Sometimes they’re wearing their dinner.
What Instagram can’t quite show, however, is the awareness and specificity and — a favorite word among this cohort — intentionality required to remove gender bias from a child’s life. Read more via the Cut
