“Nowadays, we are assigning gender even before birth. We have become socially conditioned to participate in the gendering of children at the earliest possible moment - whenever a sonogram can identify its genitalia. Gender-reveal parties have become a trendy way to celebrate the child’s fate, steering them down a life of masculine or feminine ideals before ever meeting them.” -George Matthew Johnson
My friend Saturn became a grandmother four years ago. But she just found out that she has a granddaughter.
Oh, she’s been playing with all four of the grandchildren regularly since their births, and there has never been any question that three of them were born male and one was born female, as far as their sex at birth goes. But the parents want to respect the choice of each child of what, if any, gender they want to identify with.
When asked at age two if they were a boy or a girl, the two year old female child replied, “probably a girl”. Saturn did not ask very often. Once a year or so. The second time, at age three, the answer was also casually noncommittal.
So everyone around “them” learns to use the pronouns they/them. It is an education for all. People start to become aware of how deep seated their thinking, and concomitant projecting, of sex and gender is. Friends of the family begin to say stereotypical things to them like “oh what a pretty outfit you have on today” as soon as they figure out which set of genitals is actually in the diapers.
The box we put people into very early in life is very set and strong. Even family members often slip up, catch themselves, correct their pronouns, and notice their internal assumptions. It is a real consciousness raiser.
“Bodies are not only biological phenomena but also complex social creations onto which meanings have been variously composed and imposed according to time and space.” -Katrina Karkazis, Fixing Sex: Intersex, Medical Authority, and Lived Experience
Some extended relatives freak out. They warn that the children will grow up confused. They will not be able to “fit in”!
But soon it begins to dawn on everyone that if a child can not fit in, maybe it is because the problem is with the sexist society. So, some choose to extend their new habit of calling the children by the gender neutral pronouns to calling everyone by them. We begin to realize that to have a well adjusted child, we will have to adjust the world to fit the children, not the other way around. To force a child to adjust to a sick society is simply child abuse.
I consider all of these issues and conclude that henceforth I shall refer to all as they/them unless I have a specific contextual reason to do otherwise, much like the policy that news organizations have on not mentioning the race of a person in a news report.
Why are we so obsessed with children’s sex? Why do we need to refer to every persons’ genitals every time we speak of them? If that is such an important identifier, why don’t we also say, call them, for instance, the “short, fat, pink, brown haired, male” person? Or the “dark skinned, bald, skinny, wheelchair bound male” person? What is so important about the knowledge of, and constant reference to, just the gender?
Other languages gender everything. Studies have shown that this does in fact change the way we think about those arbitrarily gendered things. In some languages the sun or moon is male or female, and in others, it is vice versa. We say in English, the “mother” Earth. Why does the Earth have to be a mother? Is it not more like a tiny male sperm in a solar system dominated by a huge mother ovum sun?
“Let's stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.” -Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation
At the age of four, Saturn’s granddaughter finally announces she is, in fact, a girl.
Saturn is overjoyed. In the meantime, since the birth of grandchild number one, three more grandchildren have arrived, all with male physical reproductive apparatus. They are being dressed and reared with free choice as well.
But their parents are acutely aware that their own feelings about this include the knowledge of the different cultural status and prospects of boys and men. It can be postponed, but not ignored. They notice they have different impulses around the issue than they did with the female child. The cultural biases are deeply grooved, not only into the culture, but also our own unconscious feelings and attitudes.
“Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.” -Pierre Bourdieu
Yesterday, the four year old granddaughter says brightly of their sibling: “We use they/them for (her one year old male sibling). When they get old enough, they will tell us what they want to be called. They might want to be a girl, or a boy, or neither one.”
“The last dragon was apparently still too young to have made up its mind which sex it wanted to be; it didn't have any horns at all.”
― Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing with Dragons
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