I'm raising my child without gender

When Kyl Myers told people she was bringing up her baby without an assigned gender, critics accused her of child abuse. Here she writes about gender creative parenting and explains how the experience has been a gift for her

- Kyl Myers

What are you having?” I’d be standing in line at the post office or a movie theatre, and I’d realize a stranger was staring at my belly. The kind person thought they were asking me a simple question with a simple answer: Is it a boy or a girl?

If you want to get technical, my partner, Brent, and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender. The only things we really knew about our baby was that they were human, breech, and going to be named Zoomer. We weren’t going to assign a gender or disclose their reproductive anatomy to people who didn’t need to know, and we were going to use the gender-neutral personal pronouns they, them, and their.

We imagined it could be years before our child would tell us, in their own way, if they were a boy, a girl, non-binary or if another gender identity fits them best. Until then, we were committed to raising our child without the expectations or restrictions of the gender binary.

I wanted to give my child a gift. The gift of seeing people as more than just a gender. The gift of understanding gender is complex, beautiful, and self-determined. I hadn’t considered how much of a gift I’d also be giving myself.

The summer before I was pregnant, I noticed a young sprinters track meet banner on the fence of the local high school. I can’t wait till I have a little one who can run in that! I thought.