Sex/uality Artifacts

Gender Neutrality in Parenting

Posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2015 at 4:40 pm

Hey everyone! My name is Jadon Nichols and my artifact is a commercial for an Easy-Bake oven and a Barbie Power Wheels Jeep. We discussed in class a few recent cases of Gender Neutral parents, specifically the story of Storm, the child without a gender from Canada. The parents have hopes that Storm will choose his/her own gender and not be confined to the gender driven society we live in. After the birth, Storm’s parents put out this statement, “We decided not to share Storm’s sex for now — a tribute to freedom and choice in place of limitation, a standup to what the world could become in Storm’s lifetime” (Davis). To say that the family of Storm is without skeptics would be lying. Many people have claimed that the parents are doing Storm an injustice and could cause him/her a lot of distress in the future. Other went as far as saying that the family was raising a “freak” of some sort. We discussed the possible positive and negative outcomes from raising a child like this and it seems that in our day and age raising a child to be completely gender neutral would cause a lot of issues but would have it’s benefits if for instance Storm was born with one set of parts and identified as another. Ultimately, Storm is missing out on a normative experience and is being used as a social experiment. As far as gender neutrality goes in some of our own lives, many times parents will reject the thought of buying their child a toy or object that is identified with another gender. In my own experience, when I was a child I really wanted an Easy-Bake Oven, and my parents, despite being very conservative, were open to the idea. Looking to a different side, my own girlfriend was given a Barbie Power Wheels Jeep when she was a kid for one of her birthdays and rejected it because she wanted the “cooler” corvette model that was marketed for boys. Looking at all of the examples that people have of playing with different gendered toys can be a good example of how as parents we can be more supportive of what our children want and how they express themselves.