There’s Nothing Neutral About Gender-Neutral Parenting

Last week the Irish politician and far left socialist, Paul Murphy, introduced his beautiful baby boy to the world. Juniper will be raised by his parents in a gender-neutral environment. Speaking to the Irish Times newspaper Mr. Murphy stated that ‘We’re not gendering it. So we’re not describing Juniper as a boy, we’re describing Juniper as a baby, but it is male’. That comment is, to quote Senator Michael McDowell, an example of ‘linguistic chaos’. Mr. Murphy recognises his son is male but won’t be describing him as a boy and in the most dehumanising of ways describes his child as ‘it’. Mr. Murphy went on to say that ‘We live in a deeply sexist and gendered society which creates certain expectations for boys and certain expectations for girls’. Mr. Murphy and his partner appear to think that sexism can be overcome by ignoring the fact that being a boy or a girl is determined by being male or female. By this logic women and girls, the world over, can now escape misogyny and sex-based violence by employing Mr. Murphy’s neat linguistic trick – I’m not a girl/woman, I’m a person, but I am female. To paraphrase Frederick Engels, someone Paul Murphy may be familiar with, changing the names of things does not change the things themselves.

New babies always make me think of my own children. A week before my son was born, I bought a pink babygrow in TK Maxx. I didn’t know I was having a boy because we were old school, analogue parents who wanted the sex of our baby to be a surprise. The babygrow was patterned with lemons and watermelons, and I fell in love with it. I scoffed at the idea that it mattered what colours a baby wore, clothes are just clothes. I regularly dressed him in the pink, fruity babygrow. I was delighted with myself, striking a blow against sexist stereotyping. He was wearing this outfit at his three-week check-up and the nurse who was due to examine him assumed he was a girl. I bored her to tears explaining that in Victorian times boys were dressed in pink because it was derived from red, the colour of masculinity and aggression and girls were dressed in blue because it was associated with the Virgin Mary. I patiently explained, as only a pedant can, that my baby’s sex was male and putting him into a pink babygrow didn’t make him a girl anymore than calling him Napoleon would have made him French. The nurse probably damaged her eyes due to excessive eye rolling.

However, in the 14 years since my son was born a peculiar thing has happened as illustrated by Paul Murphy’s comments. Sex, the word used to refer to the biological categories of male or female has been usurped by the word gender. This wouldn’t be a problem if we all agreed that gender is just another word for sex, but it isn’t the case. Gender can mean a few things. It can mean biological sex, or stereotypes, or social roles, or gender identity. It strikes me that if you are going to replace a word fundamental to the classification of humans, sex, you’d better be sure everyone agrees on the meaning of the word you’re replacing it with. If I had my son today, I could dress him in the same pink babygrow and insist he was a girl, asserting that his male sex was incorrectly ‘assigned’. Rather than challenging such preposterous assertions and recommending that anyone who makes them gets more sleep the medical establishment are being actively encouraged to facilitate these delusions.

While Mr. Murphy may wish to demonstrate his progressive credentials by calling his son ‘they’ or ‘it,’ that decision may not be without consequences for his child. We know that children thrive in environments that are stable and offer coherence. They learn to differentiate between reality and fantasy and acquire knowledge by organising what they see, what they learn, and what they understand. It is unclear what the psychological effects of raising a child in a gender-neutral way will be. It’s an experiment.

Would such an experiment even receive ethical approval if proposed by psychologists or social scientists? Why would we teach a child that a person’s sex does not operate under the same principles as time, numbers, or gravity? Why are these properties of the physical world constant and stable but sex isn’t? Children develop a firm sense of their sex in a fashion parallel to the development of these physical concepts. If they can’t rely on adults to tell the truth about something as fundamental as the nature of sex, how can they trust them to tell the truth about anything?

Referring to a child as ‘they’ or ‘it,’ telling them they are neither a boy nor a girl seems highly likely to cause a child confusion and anxiety. Home is not the only place where children are socialised. If children at creche or school describe themselves as he or she, the child referred to as ‘it’ or ‘they’ may feel like they do not fit into the world. And the confusion will extend to the peers of the ‘gender-neutral’ child who will struggle to understand a concept that requires higher level thinking. Gender-neutral parenting that rejects stereotyped clothing, toys or expected behaviours is a generous way to raise a child because it broadens their horizons. But the gender-neutral parenting that denies that sex is real, and, sometimes matters, is entirely different because it rejects much of what we know about what children need to grow up feeling secure. There is nothing kind, progressive or ethical
in that.