gender: whoever they are

"Your kids are beautiful. Is that a boy or girl?"

I'm really aware when I'm asked this that what people are really searching for is a doorway for conversation. Children really embody joy, and I think that when a stranger is asking about my kids, they are just trying to connect with that joy. I just wish they would ask something else. "Your kids are beautiful, what are their names?" would be the perfect question to ask in my mind. It's asking something about them that is relevant, the answer to that question is a little piece of who my kids really are, Olive and Emy, AND the answer to the question boy or girl is held within their names.
So what's wrong with asking boy or girl?
It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't tell you that Olive likes to walk her bikes around, and tuck her dolls into bed. Or that she will eat any food as long as its one thing at a time, cause she gets distracted by a medley of things. She likes jumping, and pretends she is shy. She looooooooves her sister. It doesn't tell you that Emy is happy all the time until she not. That her favourite game involves sticking her tongue out into the wind, and that she loves to mimic her daddy spitting bubbles. I can't think of one relevant way that knowing Olive and Emy are girls would change a strangers interaction with them.

Olive and Emy are female. They were born with female genitalia, and for simplicities sake I do call them girls. I dont really care about what their true gender is. They can be boys if they want, or they can be girls, or they can be nothing at all. What matters to me is that they dont feel pressured to be anything at all. In my previous post about growing up feeling like I wanted to be a boy I mentioned how our gender is really irrelevant to how we act. We have preconceived notions as a society about how boys and girls will act, but in reality they just do their thing. Its our notions that begin to shape their actions as they become aware of social behaviours. I do not want that for my kids. I dont want them to hear on a daily basis that THEY ARE GIRLS, even in conversations with strangers.

There is an episode of The CBC Radios; Ideas called The Gender Trap. In the second half they have an extensive interview with the family who became newsworthy last year when they refused to disclose the gender of their third child, Storm. Their insight into allowing their kids to determine their own genders on a daily basis was so inspiring to me. The father saying that it pretty much goes like this: the kids are always playing, and that means playing a part. Sometimes the part is female, sometimes it is male, and that seems to be how they determine their gender.
That's what I want for Olive and Emy. I want them to play and discover their identities, and take the time to get to know who they want to be. In my case it took 25 years to figure out. I dont want them to be told they are girls, and then spend years trying to align socially constructed ideas about what women do with what they actually want to do. I want them to just forget the construct and do whatever the hell they want. There are other ways which I am happy to shape my children; teaching them morals, and empathy, for example. But I see no value in guiding their gender.

I already feel as though Olive is feeling out her own gender. In her first year I was more wary about dressing her explicitly feminine, but as she got older it kind of shaped itself. She likes dresses, regardless of her genitalia. She also chooses pink quite often. I can tell by the way Olive uses the terms boy and girl that she doesnt really grasp any meaning behind it. She'll say things like "I wanna sit on this chair like a boy" with no indication that she's sitting in any special way. It could just mean to her that she saw a boy sitting on the chair. The only indication she's given between gender differences is that when she wears a dress she says, every time, " Look! I am married like Amy and Tony, but not Tony". Which I think means to her that Amy is wearing a dress in her wedding photos, and Tony isn't, and now Olive is wearing a dress too.

I have no idea about Emy, because she just likes to stick things in her mouth. which is why she's just a baby.


CBC's Ideas: The Gender Trap: part 1
                    The Gender Trap: part 2  (Storm and family appear in this part)