Essayhat are you having?” i’d
be standing in line at the post
office or a movie theater, and
I’d realize a stranger was star-
ing 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 part-
ner 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 is that
they were human, breech and going to be
named Zoomer. We weren’t going to as-
sign a gender or disclose their reproduc-
tive 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,
nonbinary or if another gender identity fit
them best. Until then, we were committed
to raising our child without the expecta-
tions or restrictions of the gender binary.
I have a gender-studies degree and a
Ph.D. in sociology. In the decade before
Zoomer was born, it was literally my job
to study and educate others about gen-
der. There was no shortage of gender-
disparity statistics, but I felt confident
that progress toward gender equity was
gaining momentum. In my Sociology of
Gender and Sexuality course, I would
lecture on discrimination against queer
people, the motherhood penalty, men’s
higher suicide rate, violence againsttransgender women of color, and the
way intersex people– those born with bi-
ological traits that aren’t typically male
or female–are stigmatized or completely
overlooked. But I also taught about the
victory of same-sex marriage equality,
more women running for office, fathers
demanding family leave, the rising visibil-
ity of trans gender actors in the media, and
the movement to end intersex surgery.
With every new semester, the number
of students asking me to call them by dif-
ferent names and use different pronouns
than they were given at birth grew. Women
confided that they were experiencing sex-
ism from their chemistry professors. Men
vented about the pressures of masculin-
ity. These 18- to 20- something-year-olds
were feeling crushed by gender stereo-
types. I could relate. I was raised as a girlW
I didn’t assigna gender to my kid.It’s up to them todecide what identityfits them best