Society and Neutrality

After doing a brief search for "gender" in recent news, it appears to me that a new trend is cropping up among a few parents of a newer generation: keeping the gender of their children a secret from the rest of the world in hopes that they can have a choice on how they live their lives. Several couples all over the world have either already announced their children genderless or raised them to take their pick between the girls' and boys' sections of clothing and toy stores without judgment on the part of the parents.

As someone who tends to reject societal guidelines when it comes to acting according to my gender, I have in fact imagined that if I were ever to have my own children, I would like to decrease environmental influence so they might have a choice in the matter. After all, some people inevitably make that choice on their own when they grow up to find a dissonance between society's expectations and their personal identity. I believe that giving them the choice early on could settle a lot of eventual angst earlier on.

The question is, why are people making such a big deal out of this? How parents chooses to raise their children is really their own business, though the rest of the world likes to stick their nose in it anyway. Communities and fellow parents voice their concern for the well-being of the child and ethicality of such treatment, citing bullying from other children and uncertainties about how well-adjusted the child could possibly grow up to be as the major possible issues with such a radical way of raising a child. However, these issues are entirely based on social prejudice. If these parents believe that it is not their right to indoctrinate their children with who or what they "should" become, why do complete strangers presume themselves to have a say? This circuitous sequence of pressure is the exact reason these parents decided to raise their children the way they do.

This does raise another problem, however. If their lack of social gender gives cause for bullying and limits their social interaction as a result, is it really worth it to completely cut them off from any kind of association with social definitions of male or female? A moderate amount of gender neutrality is acceptable, and even desirable, in certain locations and situations, but what if this attempt at allowing children to truly be themselves gives them a disadvantage in social interaction and, therefore, in being a productive member of society? After all, no matter how much we try to change things up, this society is the one we must live in, and it always favors the middle ground and shuns extremes.