Pop Goes the Gender

By Scott Williams

Although his parents might object to me calling him such, two-year-old Pop is a social experiment.

The Swedish toddler's mom and dad, eschewing social gender constraints, refuse to let anyone know whether the child is a boy or girl. They never use pronouns to refer to the toddler, and have outfitted the child with everything from dresses to pants. They also regularly change the child's hairstyle.

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

While the outcome of this informal experiment might answer some long-standing questions about how much of gender is biological and how much is conditioned by the culture, it may come at the expense of Pop. It wouldn't be the first time.

More than 40 years ago, a botched circumcision on a twin brother prompted parents to raise Bruce Reimer as "Brenda." He had reconstruction work and was encouraged to dress and act like a girl. As his brother Brian tells it, "the only difference between him and I was he had longer hair." Only when Bruce/Brenda began to rebel against femininty as a teen did his father tell him the whole story.

After bouts with anger and depression, Bruce changed his name to David and underwent surgical procedures and hormone treatments to become a man. He eventually married and was able to have a normal sex life and, despite being unable to father children of his own, did raise three children with his wife.

But by then, David's psychological trauma was exacting its toll. After a separation from his wife, a job loss, and the death of his twin brother, David committed suicide in 2004. In the years before, he had publicly spoken of his ordeal, labeling the gender identity experiment a crushing failure.

Before adolescence blew the lid off of everything, those who said it was nurture not nature that determined gender identity had pointed to the Reimer case as proof. Eventually Johns Hopkins University, which had initially encouraged the Reimers to allow Bruce to be Brenda, abandoned its gender reassignment ideals.

You would think that people would learn, but with our current cultural tendency to reject anything that limits our ability to define our own humanity, the practice continues. One of the current parenting fads is to delay puberty with hormonal treatments until a child settles what gender most closely matches his or her feelings.

The whole thing is much simpler than we make it out to be. Sexual identity, both physical and emotional, is by God's design. He created male and female to correspond to each other, both physically and emotionally. Sure, there are cultural norms that either downplay or caricature gender attributes. Some may be harmful, but others (like pink and blue) are benign and petty.

It's okay and even healthy to reject narrow, often arbitrary, gender constraints. It's foolish, on the other hand, to pretend that these differences are completely devoid of divine design. True balance comes from understanding God's original design and operating within that realm.

Nowhere does God mention pink and blue.  He does not forbid men to cry or women to do auto mechanics. He has, however, created men to be risk-takers, providers, initiators and achievers, and women to be responders, nurturers, and to experience life as a holistic blend of mind and emotion. And He has also created us as infinitely unique individuals who vary wildly within those male/female designs. Understanding God's design provides both structure and freedom.

I hope Pop's parents realize the futility of their blank slate approach to gender before the damage is done. With Pop due to become a big brothersister in the next few months, that realization can't come too soon.