ryan's research on gender neutrality

ryan’s research on gender neutrality.

Gender neutral parenting is when a couple decide to bring their child up with no set defined gender, so neither male or female.
There are many reasons for families to decide parenting this way, the main reasons include the avoidance of gender discrimination, gender stereotyping and personality conforming.

This style of parenting is on a very slow increase in recent times and some well documented cases are gaining a small following with approval from many parents, however many sceptics about how this may affect the child themselves in later life is largely up for debate as very little research and cases have been recorded to determine the long term affects.
Unfortunately there is no data on exactly how many parents in the country or world are raising their children gender neutral.

The number 1 concern for parents raising their child's this way is their opinion on gender stereotypes, as they feel it is unfair or old fashioned to think genders have set personality or activity traits, for example boys are heavily associated with the colour blue and girls naturally being associated with pink.
The 'new generation of parents' (as some newspapers have labelled) feel their children (or any child) shouldn't be subject to set traits of how they should live their life or what they should play with etc. They feel eradicating them of any gender at all provides them with a free platform to develop a personality from absolute scratch, as a result anything supplied for the children will be viewed in their eyes without a predisposition of gender association with that particular toy or activity.

A more heavier and serious reason for this style of parenting is the issue of gender inequality. Gender inequality is different from gender stereotyping as it is a form of discrimination. Parents feel their child may not get the same opportunities or choices in stages throughout their life just because they are male or female.

One other reason for gender neutral parenting is to help their child develop better mannerism towards people when they grow up. They feel that giving their child a blank canvas to delve into stereotyped aspects such as, giving their child toys considered only for boys/girls and same with clothing and activities, that this would let them see the world through other people's lives and therefore not discriminate others or have preconceived ideas about that person's personality due to their gender.

A major example of gender neutral parenting was a child called Sasha who was born in 2007 was raised for 5 years as gender neutral.
Parents Kieran Cooper and Beck Laxton decided to raise their child as gender neutral for as long as they could, their reasons for doing so was that they felt gender stereotypes are "stupid" and that children and adults likewise shouldn't be placed into groups due to their gender.

For the first 5 years of sashas life, Mr Cooper and Miss Laxton provided their child with gender neutral toys and addressed their child as "the infant" instead of the traditional 'him/her' labelling.

Their influence for carrying out this lifestyle for their child was directly from Miss Laxtons family members, as her parents personalities seemed to differ from most others, her mother being more sporty and firm and her father being more openly emotional and 'feminine'. This made her feel stereotypes do nothing but generalise people and define their characteristics for them.

Sasha would be clothed in anything from a standard buttoned shirt and trousers to a dress and skirt, both those items of clothing considered more associated with one sex.
The same approach would be taken with daily activities as Sasha was provided with dolls and comics. All this done in the hope that their child will not be prejudice to the worlds view on genders.
This as a result alienated other parents which meant Mr Cooper and Miss Laxton were unfortunately labelled as unusual and lost them social interaction with other families, however this did not phase them as their focus was on making sure Sashas gender was not revealed.

Eventually the family had to reveal the gender of Sasha, who is biologically a male, due to the difficulty of his undesignated gender when starting primary school.

A psychologist, Dr Daragh McDermott, was asked for his opinion on how this style of parenting can affect a child's mental state when reaching adult hood but personally couldn't say how it might affect Sasha or anyone else for that matter.
Due to the lack of research and lack of gender neutral people in the world not enough is known about the affects of this particular lifestyle.