But parents do force a gender on the child with the whole blue/pink and dolls or toy cars thing. Allowing a child to just experience the world and where they fit in. Be that male/female/gender queer a child should be free to explore it all without being told that’s good or bad behaviour and thus enforcing one gender or the other on the child.

You can know your sex, or well, to an extent anyway, but you can’t just “see” your gender, nor can anyone else. You “know” your gender. It is unknowable by all but the one concerned.

I say “to an extent” for sex, because nothing is clear cut. I got a penis, but I resist testosterone at the genetic level. I’m obviously underdevelopped for a male, so much that I don’t look male, save for genitals. Legally I classify as male, but meh, legal classifications are obvious simplifications.

Knowing your gender takes tons of introspection, asking the right questions, mostly to yourself, and some experience. It may have taken a lot of work, but I’m glad for it. I’m better off for it than the average woman who’s never questioned her gender (not stereotypes or anything, but how she knows she is female ‘inside’, where it counts). I don’t need to rely on stereotypes, and I actively shun many of them. Not as a political action, but simply because it doesn’t suit the real me.

The changing will look weird if going girl one day, boy the next. But passing a child as the opposite sex? Extremely easy until puberty. Same voice, same height, same weight, same build. How do you think I can be seen as a cissexual girl so easily even if I never had the required equipment? I didn’t develop much. No puberty, no maleness, simple. Estrogen gave me breasts, and voila.

And I’m 24. A 8 years old at random could pull it off. Puberty is what complicates things for trans folks, not their “innate differences” biologically speaking. Only swimsuits and panties might cause issues (they’re too tight to hide anything).

“I want to specify that even if I’m doubtful this could continue until the child identifies with a gender (around 3 right?) ”

I don’t remember anything before 5, and I don’t remember figuring anything before I was 8. And then I dismissed it as fabulation. I only took it seriously at about 21-22. The only proof I have that I’ve been younger than 5, is a video of my 2nd birthday (in beta, later transferred to VHS), and pictures.

I’m pretty sure it varies from child to child, some say they can remember at 2 clearly feeling like a boy, or a girl. I don’t remember even knowing boys and girls were different then. And I figured the anatomy was different with a book, at 8.

Now, of course, the child in question might not ever feel that way at all, and certainly not while he/she’s under 3 years old.

For someone who is more concerned with gender and trnasgender issues on the whole, I do understand why you would want to raise your child in such a way, and I agree with what some other people have said about the bigger problem being how other people treat them vs. how they themselves. It is true that people will base many compliments off of gender and what we generally see as “success” from those genders in today’s society (aka pretty, big, strong, whatever).

All in all I feel as though there can be harm done by it, and I’d be interested to catch up with this couple a few years down the road to see how they felt it worked out. Like I said, it’s not something I can see myself doing but I don’t think it’s wrong or “disgusting”. What I do find wrong and disgusting is that we live in a world where someone who wants to promote gender equality in such a fashion has to go about it by hiding their baby’s gender!

“I’m also wondering if, in the case of transgendered children, NOT assigning gender at all and waiting for the child to self-identify is preferable to assuming gender but being open to the fact that one’s child may be transgendered and changing your behavior in the case that the child expresses a transgendered identity. Psychologically, what would the implications of being referred to as one gender until one self-identified as the opposite gender (and then being accepted and referred to as one’s self-identified gender) versus being referred to as non-gendered until one self-identified as a gender?”

If it’s anything like how it worked on my extended family:

After 3 years of transition, I’m still seen as male even though I look nothing like it. More than the occasional name and pronoun slip. I cut off half my extended family (father’s side) more or less over that.

They don’t see my “femaleness” on par with my “maleness”, to them I am not too far from a deceiver. Keep in mind, they’re still pretty progressive people, and none have made threats or disowned me or anything even close.

This would have confused me probably. Well it did. My parents were not too rigid about gender roles and stuff. My father wanted me to play hockey, and baseball, but he abandoned when it seemed hopeless. Keep in mind my younger brother (2 years younger), a pretty macho manly-looking guy, also stopped sports then. I didn’t see it as indicating I should be female.

In fact, it took me two decades to figure out that stereotypes didn’t matter and that the answer was deeper within than pink and blue, walking this or that way, etc.

Telling me I can be “my own kind of boy” is what I did to myself, for years. Whenever a confrontation a la sex wars came up, I used myself as an example to say “not all boys are like that” as I was so radically different in how I thought. Turns out being “my own kind of boy” doesn’t work. I’m part of the 1/3 that will always be female whatever you do, however raised etc. I just wish I’d figured that sooner.

If you want to break down narrow thinking on gender roles you teach a kid that being male, female or hermaphrodite is not a choice and people should be proud to be what they are. This is the way enlightened people teach kids about religious or ethnic differences. They don’t pretend that everyone is white and that being Hispanic, Asian or Black is just a “social construct”. You also don’t pretend that all people are straight and that homo-, bi-, and asexual preferences are “social constructs”.