Gender Neutrality

As you all know, or at least most of you, Peter and I have decided not to reveal the gender of our new baby until birth. Even then, the focus will not be on what gender the baby is, but rather the health and well being of the baby.

Some believe this is a silly thing to do and thinking about their reason for that is the exact reason why we're doing it. If nothing else, it starts the conversation on how we intend to raise our children.

"Gender neutrality (adjective form: gender-neutral), also known as gender-neutralism or the gender neutrality movement, describes the idea that policies, language, and other social institutions should avoid distinguishing roles according to people's sex or gender, in order to avoid discrimination arising from the impression that there are social roles for which one gender is more suited than the other." - Wikipedia

To me, this means our children can play with, dress, and act whichever way they want to without judgement from either of us as parents in regards to how they SHOULDN'T be acting because of their gender. It means we'll be dressing our baby in whatever color we have. It means we take no issue with boys playing with barbie dolls or girls playing with trucks.

I have been raising my 8 year old daughter this way and she's turning out wonderfully! She loves building with Lego and loves to cook. She loves mermaids and has started taking an interest in paper crafting. She has a ton of energy and enjoys playing outside and getting dirty as well as inside with video games. She says she wants to be a firefighter when she "grows up," yet at the same time be a mommy. For a long while her favorite color was black, now it's red (because it's my favorite color) and rainbow. When she was a baby, I dressed her in whatever I had and people often thought she was a boy, but it didn't bother me at all.

Raising a gender neutral child doesn't mean encouraging the child to be the opposite gender. It means we want to encourage the child to discover what they COULD be without restriction on what they SHOULD be.

So... to bring us back to the surface, I don't mind if, in your excitement, you decide to buy a blue/pink onesie for the baby, but please, at least, be considerate of the fact that we're trying to avoid gender targeted "stuff."