Ragnarok caught this in pone of his epic posts, but I think this deserves it's own derision.
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/boy-or-girl-parents-raising-theybies-let-kids-decide-n891836
TLDR: Parents don't tell anybody the gender of their children, including the chidren themsleves, i order to avoid "gender stereotypes". The "joke" is on the poor kids when they hit pre-school or kindergarten!
F*** THESE PEOPLE! They don't have a philosophy, they have a religion - one that requires human sacrifice of their own children! And they are down for it! They are f***ing proud of themselves! It's a way to virtue-signal!
These people shouldn't be allowed to breathe, leave alone drive, vote, or reproduce!
Really, it goes on and on and on. I know we're supposed to reproduce in full, but I think we really have enough here in order to despise it.
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/boy-or-girl-parents-raising-theybies-let-kids-decide-n891836
TLDR: Parents don't tell anybody the gender of their children, including the chidren themsleves, i order to avoid "gender stereotypes". The "joke" is on the poor kids when they hit pre-school or kindergarten!
F*** THESE PEOPLE! They don't have a philosophy, they have a religion - one that requires human sacrifice of their own children! And they are down for it! They are f***ing proud of themselves! It's a way to virtue-signal!
These people shouldn't be allowed to breathe, leave alone drive, vote, or reproduce!
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Three-year-old twins Zyler and Kadyn Sharpe scurried around the boys and girls clothing racks of a narrow consignment store filled with toys. Zyler, wearing rainbow leggings, scrutinized a pair of hot-pink-and-purple sneakers. Kadyn, in a T-Rex shirt, fixated on a musical cube that flashed colorful lights. At a glance, the only discernible difference between these fraternal twins is their hair — Zyler’s is brown and Kadyn’s is blond.
Is Zyler a boy or a girl? How about Kadyn? That’s a question their parents, Nate and Julia Sharpe, say only the twins can decide. The Cambridge, Mass., couple represent a small group of parents raising “theybies” — children being brought up without gender designation from birth. A Facebook community for these parents currently claims about 220 members across the U.S.
“A theyby is, I think, different things to different people,” Nate Sharpe told NBC News. “For us, it means raising our kids with gender-neutral pronouns — so, ‘they,’ ‘them,’ ‘their,’ rather than assigning ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ ‘her’ from birth based on their anatomy.”
Raising 'theybies': Letting kids choose their gender
Jul.19.201803:39
Parents in the U.S. are increasingly raising children outside traditional gender norms — allowing boys and girls to play with the same toys and wear the same clothes — though experts say this is happening mostly in progressive, well-to-do enclaves. But what makes this “gender-open” style of parenting stand out, and even controversial in some circles, is that the parents do not reveal the sex of their children to anyone. Even the children, who are aware of their own body parts and how they may differ from others, are not taught to associate those body parts with being a boy or girl. If no one knows a child’s sex, these parents theorize, the child can’t be pigeonholed into gender stereotypes.
This type of parenting received widespread attention in 2011, when a Toronto couple announced that they were raising their child, Storm, without gender designation, sparking a media frenzy. Progressive parents, who see their child’s gender as fluid rather than binary, took notice. A Brooklyn couple runs a blog featuring their 2-year-old, Zoomer, and offering advice on how to navigate the world while raising a “theyby.” Others have taken to Instagram to share photos and support.
Some developmental experts see gender-open parenting as a noble goal, but they also wonder how it will hold up once kids enter a gendered world that can be hostile to those who don’t fit clearly into categories. Gender-nonconforming children are more likely to be bullied. Last year, 10 states considered “bathroom bills” requiring people to use bathrooms aligned with the gender assigned to them at birth (none passed).
“Once your child meets the outer world, which may be day care, or preschool, or grandparents — it's pretty much impossible to maintain a gender-free state,” Lise Eliot, professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School and author of “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” said in an email. “And depending on how conventional your community is, you could be setting your child up for bullying or exclusion.”
Parents like the Sharpes understand these realities — but they’re determined to shield their children from them for as long as possible.
Deciding to raise a ‘theyby’
The Sharpes, both mechanical engineers in their early 30s, say their decision to raise their twins without designated genders evolved from a mix of research and personal experience. When Julia found out she was pregnant, she felt conflicted about learning the sex of the twins. As a female engineer in a male-dominated profession, she understood the constraints of gender expectations firsthand.
“It's taken a lot of work for me to feel confident in my designs and my suggestions, and to really stand up for myself,” she said.
At first, Nate didn’t understand why Julia wanted to wait to find out the babies’ sex. But after the couple began researching how stereotypes affect a child’s development, he changed his mind.
“We read about how from when they're 20-week fetuses, they're already starting to be gendered, and people are calling the little girls ‘princesses,’ and buying certain things for different children,” Julia said. “We wanted to prevent that, so that's how it started. And then about a couple weeks before they were born, Nate just said, ‘What if we didn't tell people ever?’”
When the Sharpes arrived at the hospital for the delivery, they asked the staff not to announce the twins’ sex. Even after the newborns were put in their arms, their anatomy remained a mystery for several hours.
“It just wasn't something that was interesting,” Julia said. “It was all about meeting the children and interacting with them, and just not something that we focused on at all.”
Now toddlers, Zyler and Kadyn aren’t focused on it either. On a recent morning, they were busy playing with large cardboard blocks. They constructed a tower, then a robot.
“Look how tall it is!” Kadyn declared.
“If you put one more block on it, it will be taller than you!” Zyler squealed. “We can get it up to the ceiling!”
Their Cambridge home is littered with toys that come from both the girls’ and the boys’ aisles — a dollhouse, a play gym, a bedroom full of stuffed animals, a basket of dolls. Their parents want to foster an environment of openness where the twins feel loved whether they grow up to identify as LGBTQ or not. That means learning to see their children simply as “kids” rather than as “boys” or “girls,” and encouraging others to do the same.
That’s not always easy, or comfortable, in a gendered world. Family, friends and day care workers struggle with they/them pronouns, and not everyone understands the Sharpes’ decision to keep the children’s sex private.
“We definitely got more pushback from co-workers, who were like: ‘Wait, you're not going to tell me what you're having? You're not going to tell me what your kids are?’” Julia said. “I’m like, ‘I’m telling you they're children.’ But they got really, really frustrated that we wouldn't tell them what their genitalia was, which is kind of a weird thing when you think about it.”
Kadyn and Zyler still have little understanding of gender, according to their parents, but have started to pick up on it. One day recently, Zyler asked Julia what “she” and “he” mean.
“Since we've tried to avoid really getting into gender until they're old enough to understand it, I answered that ‘he’ and ‘she’ are pronouns and you use them to make sentences simpler, so instead of saying someone's name over and over in the sentence, you'll say ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they’ instead,” she said, “and Zyler got distracted after that and moved on.”
Is gender hard-wired?
At birth, reproductive organs reveal a baby’s assigned sex. Gender, however, comes later, around age 4, when children begin to identify as masculine, feminine or somewhere along that spectrum, experts say.
People tend to think that this gender identity is hard-wired, because most people identify with the gender that matches their sex at birth. But large-scale research suggests gender is largely influenced by a child’s environment, said Christia Spears Brown, a developmental psychologist and author of “Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes.”
When boys and girls are born, their brains are virtually indistinguishable; while boys have slightly bigger brains on average, they also have bigger bodies. Studies suggest there are some minor observable differences in behavior early on. For instance, baby girls seem slightly better at regulating their impulses and attention than boys, according to a 2006 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Experts agree that girls tend to speak a few months earlier than boys, though it’s not understood why. “But in general,” Brown said, “the differences get larger as kids get older, which really suggests that it's society and culture that are shaping the differences that we see — not innate differences from birth.”
From the day they’re born, baby boys and girls are ushered into blue and pink worlds where they are dressed in different clothes and given different toys. As they get older, they begin to pay attention to gender-based marketing: Recent research shows that when a girl is given a toy that is pink, she is more likely to play with it, but when the same toy is blue, she’s less likely to.
Experts say the way parents interact with their children also shapes them from a young age. For example, parents are more likely to explain numbers to sons and use emotion-based words with daughters, according to The Handbook of Parenting, an authoritative collection of research on parenting. Parents also tend to encourage aggressiveness in boys and emotions in girls, the handbook says.
Is Zyler a boy or a girl? How about Kadyn? That’s a question their parents, Nate and Julia Sharpe, say only the twins can decide. The Cambridge, Mass., couple represent a small group of parents raising “theybies” — children being brought up without gender designation from birth. A Facebook community for these parents currently claims about 220 members across the U.S.
“A theyby is, I think, different things to different people,” Nate Sharpe told NBC News. “For us, it means raising our kids with gender-neutral pronouns — so, ‘they,’ ‘them,’ ‘their,’ rather than assigning ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘him,’ ‘her’ from birth based on their anatomy.”
Raising 'theybies': Letting kids choose their gender
Jul.19.201803:39
Parents in the U.S. are increasingly raising children outside traditional gender norms — allowing boys and girls to play with the same toys and wear the same clothes — though experts say this is happening mostly in progressive, well-to-do enclaves. But what makes this “gender-open” style of parenting stand out, and even controversial in some circles, is that the parents do not reveal the sex of their children to anyone. Even the children, who are aware of their own body parts and how they may differ from others, are not taught to associate those body parts with being a boy or girl. If no one knows a child’s sex, these parents theorize, the child can’t be pigeonholed into gender stereotypes.
This type of parenting received widespread attention in 2011, when a Toronto couple announced that they were raising their child, Storm, without gender designation, sparking a media frenzy. Progressive parents, who see their child’s gender as fluid rather than binary, took notice. A Brooklyn couple runs a blog featuring their 2-year-old, Zoomer, and offering advice on how to navigate the world while raising a “theyby.” Others have taken to Instagram to share photos and support.
Some developmental experts see gender-open parenting as a noble goal, but they also wonder how it will hold up once kids enter a gendered world that can be hostile to those who don’t fit clearly into categories. Gender-nonconforming children are more likely to be bullied. Last year, 10 states considered “bathroom bills” requiring people to use bathrooms aligned with the gender assigned to them at birth (none passed).
“Once your child meets the outer world, which may be day care, or preschool, or grandparents — it's pretty much impossible to maintain a gender-free state,” Lise Eliot, professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School and author of “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” said in an email. “And depending on how conventional your community is, you could be setting your child up for bullying or exclusion.”
Parents like the Sharpes understand these realities — but they’re determined to shield their children from them for as long as possible.
Deciding to raise a ‘theyby’
The Sharpes, both mechanical engineers in their early 30s, say their decision to raise their twins without designated genders evolved from a mix of research and personal experience. When Julia found out she was pregnant, she felt conflicted about learning the sex of the twins. As a female engineer in a male-dominated profession, she understood the constraints of gender expectations firsthand.
“It's taken a lot of work for me to feel confident in my designs and my suggestions, and to really stand up for myself,” she said.
At first, Nate didn’t understand why Julia wanted to wait to find out the babies’ sex. But after the couple began researching how stereotypes affect a child’s development, he changed his mind.
“We read about how from when they're 20-week fetuses, they're already starting to be gendered, and people are calling the little girls ‘princesses,’ and buying certain things for different children,” Julia said. “We wanted to prevent that, so that's how it started. And then about a couple weeks before they were born, Nate just said, ‘What if we didn't tell people ever?’”
When the Sharpes arrived at the hospital for the delivery, they asked the staff not to announce the twins’ sex. Even after the newborns were put in their arms, their anatomy remained a mystery for several hours.
“It just wasn't something that was interesting,” Julia said. “It was all about meeting the children and interacting with them, and just not something that we focused on at all.”
Now toddlers, Zyler and Kadyn aren’t focused on it either. On a recent morning, they were busy playing with large cardboard blocks. They constructed a tower, then a robot.
“Look how tall it is!” Kadyn declared.
“If you put one more block on it, it will be taller than you!” Zyler squealed. “We can get it up to the ceiling!”
Their Cambridge home is littered with toys that come from both the girls’ and the boys’ aisles — a dollhouse, a play gym, a bedroom full of stuffed animals, a basket of dolls. Their parents want to foster an environment of openness where the twins feel loved whether they grow up to identify as LGBTQ or not. That means learning to see their children simply as “kids” rather than as “boys” or “girls,” and encouraging others to do the same.
That’s not always easy, or comfortable, in a gendered world. Family, friends and day care workers struggle with they/them pronouns, and not everyone understands the Sharpes’ decision to keep the children’s sex private.
“We definitely got more pushback from co-workers, who were like: ‘Wait, you're not going to tell me what you're having? You're not going to tell me what your kids are?’” Julia said. “I’m like, ‘I’m telling you they're children.’ But they got really, really frustrated that we wouldn't tell them what their genitalia was, which is kind of a weird thing when you think about it.”
Kadyn and Zyler still have little understanding of gender, according to their parents, but have started to pick up on it. One day recently, Zyler asked Julia what “she” and “he” mean.
“Since we've tried to avoid really getting into gender until they're old enough to understand it, I answered that ‘he’ and ‘she’ are pronouns and you use them to make sentences simpler, so instead of saying someone's name over and over in the sentence, you'll say ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they’ instead,” she said, “and Zyler got distracted after that and moved on.”
Is gender hard-wired?
At birth, reproductive organs reveal a baby’s assigned sex. Gender, however, comes later, around age 4, when children begin to identify as masculine, feminine or somewhere along that spectrum, experts say.
People tend to think that this gender identity is hard-wired, because most people identify with the gender that matches their sex at birth. But large-scale research suggests gender is largely influenced by a child’s environment, said Christia Spears Brown, a developmental psychologist and author of “Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes.”
When boys and girls are born, their brains are virtually indistinguishable; while boys have slightly bigger brains on average, they also have bigger bodies. Studies suggest there are some minor observable differences in behavior early on. For instance, baby girls seem slightly better at regulating their impulses and attention than boys, according to a 2006 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Experts agree that girls tend to speak a few months earlier than boys, though it’s not understood why. “But in general,” Brown said, “the differences get larger as kids get older, which really suggests that it's society and culture that are shaping the differences that we see — not innate differences from birth.”
From the day they’re born, baby boys and girls are ushered into blue and pink worlds where they are dressed in different clothes and given different toys. As they get older, they begin to pay attention to gender-based marketing: Recent research shows that when a girl is given a toy that is pink, she is more likely to play with it, but when the same toy is blue, she’s less likely to.
Experts say the way parents interact with their children also shapes them from a young age. For example, parents are more likely to explain numbers to sons and use emotion-based words with daughters, according to The Handbook of Parenting, an authoritative collection of research on parenting. Parents also tend to encourage aggressiveness in boys and emotions in girls, the handbook says.
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