Is It A Girl Or A Boy? No, It Is A Pop — Couple Refuse To Reveal Sex of Baby

How sweet, people coo, leaning over the baby carriage. The next question is inevitable: Is it a girl or a boy?

A Swedish couple have refused to identify the sex of their baby — causing an international furor, with some accusing them of child abuse.

Pop is a healthy two and a half year old child. Since birth, Pop’s parents have refused to disclose Pop’s gender. The child is not refereed to as he or she — simply as Pop.

“We want Pop to grow up more freely and avoid being forced into a specific gender mould from the outset,” says Pop’s mother. “It’s cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead.”

Pop has all kinds of clothes in Pop’s wardrobe — from skirts and dresses to pants — and Pop decides what Pop wants to wear on a given day.

Some people have complained that raising a child this way is tantamount to child abuse, and the Guardian says: “The idea of concealing a child’s gender strikes people as cruel, dangerously experimental, unnecessarily odd, and somehow quintessentially Swedish.”

Pop will certainly have an unconventional upbringing, but I applaud Pop’s parents for trying to help their child find Pop’s likes and dislikes without being hemmed in by gender bias.

Before the 20th century, babies were not expected to be colour-coded by sex. However, somewhere along the way people decided that it was important to know whether the new little person was going to grow up to be a man or a woman.

Why? Because it would change how they reacted to the tiny bundle of joy.

“People are very disconcerted if they don’t know if a baby is a boy or a girl, and they don’t know how to interact with the baby, which is telling in itself,” said Lise Eliot, author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow into Troublesome Gaps.

She mentions one study which showed that babies dressed in blue are exposed to more aggressive behaviour, such as being thrown in the air, while babies dressed in pink are soothed by the adults they are with.

I started out writing a book about the differences between the brains of boys and girls… But the evidence just wasn’t there… I just realised that I can’t say boys and girls are fundamentally different.

By degendering their child, Pop’s parents are refusing to limit Pop’s experiences. Pop can to grow up to be the person that he or she wants to be.

If there is any child abuse here, it is teaching Pop to refer to Pop in the third person.