Our gender obsession is not serving us well. Are we ready for gender-creative parenting?

I spend a lot of time thinking about gender stereotypes and their implications. I want my two daughters, aged three and five, to avoid the pitfalls of modern femininity, so I dress them in shorts, talk to them about science and encourage them to play with cars and dinosaurs as well as their dolls.

But despite my best intentions, I haven’t been able to withstand the onslaught of girliness. Pink, princesses, and fairy wings are popular at my house. Our human knack for categorisation starts early; once each of my children understood that she was a girl, she quickly set about absorbing what that meant. Even at preschool age, their worlds are full of cues and signals telling them what girls do, what they like, how they behave.

There’s no denying we are living in a gender-obsessed moment. When you’re pregnant, the first thing everyone from your boss to your barista asks is “Do you know what you’re having?” Elaborate gender reveals are suddenly an everyday thing (this one involved an alligator). Toys, books, clothes, sports – the list goes on – are all gendered.

This preoccupation with gender is not serving us well. The gender pay gap in Australia equates to $26,000 a year. Women make up just 26.7% of ASX 200 board members. One in four women have experienced violence at the hands of an intimate partner.

Transgender and gender nonconforming individuals are much more likely to have poor mental health outcomes, “due to the high degree of stigma and prejudice that they experience for their gender identity”, says Dr Beatrice Alba, research fellow at the Australian Research Centre in sex, health and society at La Trobe University. One survey found that 48% of trans young people had attempted suicide and 80% reported self-harming

Enter “theybies”: children whose parents keep their babies’ sex secret and raise them in an environment free from gender bias. In the past, parents who have hidden their child’s gender have been subject to vitriolic criticism, but in an era of toxic masculinity, “misogynistic trash talk”, revenge porn and eating disorders, are we finally ready for gender-creative parenting?

Alba thinks so. While she believes there is a biological basis for some gender differences, she argues that many others arise from the inflexible gender roles that society enforces on children and adults. “If we weren’t so rigid in the way that we maintain gender norms, we would have a more gender-equal society,” she says. “This would mean that people would not be as constrained or oppressed by gender roles and expectations, and this would mean better mental health outcomes for people of all genders.”

The failings of a gender-neutral approach like mine is what gender creative parents want to overcome. I’m just tinkering around the edges; for these parents “the gender binary must not simply be smudged but wholly eradicated from the moment that socialisation begins, clearing the way both for their child’s future gender exploration and for wholesale cultural change”, writes Alex Morris in her recent New York Magazine feature about gender creative parents in the US.

To me, parents who take the gender-creative approach seem incredibly brave. I don’t know if I would have the energy to constantly explain my radical choice to the many people in my children’s lives (spelling out their double-barrelled surname is hard enough) or handle the inevitable resistance that our family would encounter along the way, but I have no doubt that the kids would take it all in their stride. Small children are delightfully free from judgment, making sense of the world as they go.

Surely the hardest part would be other people. In Australia, we are notoriously reluctant to break with tradition. Some of our ideas around gender roles remain stubbornly fixed (stay-at-home dads, for example, remain an anomaly in Australia, making up just 4% of two-parent families). “There might always be a conservative section of society that is committed to maintaining the status quo around gender roles,” acknowledges Alba. “As long as adults believe that men and women should play different roles in society and in the home, they will raise their children to do the same.”

“Let boys be boys and girls be girls” is a common refrain from commentators who want to maintain the masculine/feminine status quo, but surely gender creative parenting lets kids be kids? Not princesses, or little soldiers. Kids who express emotions: cry, rage, smile, laugh. Kids who play with balls, blocks, dolls, trucks. If we take away the lens of gender, maybe we’ll see our children, and their character and behaviour, more objectively.