“It” refers to people all the time: “Who is it?” “It’s me.” “It puts the lotion on its skin.” (Wait, bad example.)

Some languages have only genderless third-person pronouns and guess what–they still notice biological gender.

I wouldn’t alter my roll in society (for the better) as a person by removing or hiding my gender, and it’s not the kind of weight I would put on my developing child either.

http://www.box.net/shared/static/3xds692rax.pdf

Regardless of their goals, society is gender based. It doesn’t matter if they like it or not, that’s how it is. So, they are creating a situation where their child will be a freak once he’s part of society. Other people – particularly other children, but adults too – will not know how to deal with him. This will result most frequently in those other people being uncomfortable in his/her presence, which leads to ostracism or worse.

If they want to change the world, to reduce the impact gender has on how people are treated and what is expected of them, then there are many other ways to approaching this. Forcing a child into their agenda, at their child’s own expense, is cruel at best.

The singular “they” as a genderless pronoun has been in use to greater or lesser acclaim or derision for over five hundred years.

If your inner English nerd is shuddering at such usages, I respectfully submit that your inner nerd is in need of recalibration.

Otherwise, you are effectively suggesting that your English ninjitsu trumps the art of the language attested by the likes of Shakespeare, Wilde, Twain and the King James Bible.

Being as erudite as you no doubt are, I’m sure your linguistic snobbery could be more profitably trained on worse things, like people who say “bemused” when they don’t mean to suggest confusion or people who point out purported errors in English that actually have a long distinguished pedigree of usage (thus bringing us full circle, in this particular jerk).

By the bye, nice post, Kyle!

Yours in letters,
Cheeseburger Brown

I mean, honestly, the answer is obvious, and the questions invasive, and personally I think they don’t even warrant any kind of reply at all.

I think this is a key point that people who have been devolving into hysterics are overlooking. What this means is that for the first few years of this child’s life, the four people who will be interacting with it(?) constantly (Mom, Dad, and both big brothers) will all know and their interactions with the child will be affected by that knowledge. So the parents really aren’t going to be shielding this child from all gender-based interaction stereotypes (either this is not their intent, or if it is, they’ve not thought it through), only from those stereotypes and expectations originating from outside their nuclear family. SO really it just boils down to an expression of a common parental desire to minimize the greater society’s influence on their children and maximize their own.

The child’s siblings are 2 and 5 years old. 2 and 5 years! Just how long are a 2 and 5 year old going to be able to keep such a secret. It’ll probably last no more than halfway through the 5 year old’s first completely school year. This also suggests that the parents intend for the secret to be kept only for a limited time period, namely the child’s most formative toddler years, and no more. (And if that is not their intent, then again they haven’t really thought things through).

And it seems to me a very good indication that if they’ve already told the siblings, they’re going to tell the child, too, as soon as the child is old enough. Remember that one of those siblings who has already been told is only 2 years old. And once the child knows, the frankly the rest does not matter anymore, not one whit.

And I absolutely agree with Kyle’s point that in English and a lot of other languages assigning sexed pronouns is how we humanize people. In fact I think that’s a really brilliant point and one that really, really helps explain the incredible resistance otherwise sensible people are feeling about the parents decision not to disclose it.

What’s tough is all the baggage we happen to overload on the assignment of sex. For instance the first five words of an article about Storm’s parents decision are “Bruising boy or blushing girl?” Which kind of gets to the heart of the problem of gender as opposed to sex. A 4-month old is unlikely to either bruise someone else or to blush. Unfortunately just by knowing which gender a child is encourages onlookers to decide whether it’s ok for Storm to be bruised (if he’s a boy) or ok for Storm to blush (if she’s a girl.)

And what sucks about that is that in fact girls and boys are perfectly capable of both blushing and bruising in roughly equal measure. And so when we go assigning “blushing” to one or “bruising” to another we’re basically demanding that they restrict perfectly natural qualities they’re born with in order to further meet our expectations of how gender “ought” to be.

That’s not to say that the sexes are either biologically indistinguishable or socially irrelevant. It just means that in addition to the natural differences of sex it’s stupid that the processes we believe make someone “more of a man” involves subtracting from them to a point where they’re scared literally out of their senses that someone will mistake them for “gay.” Same with women who are constantly admonished to be “more lady-like,” which almost always involves subtracting thoroughly natural and often enjoyable behaviors associated with “masculinity.”

Anyway, while I agree the parents are milking the attention they’re getting they by no means are responsible for generating that attention. Even the best parents make the occasional stupid self-serving mistake with their children every now and then and less prepared parents do it every day. But they don’t wind up in nearly every newspaper in the world with an English language edition. That’s not the baby’s fault, and it’s not the parent’s fault either.

The baby will be fine. As soon as it’s important to the boy or girl to let people know he or she will do so. And it’s not very likely the parents will do anything to prevent it. But until then this is just a great natural experiment in the way language actually does structure the way people think. To a point where we have the equivalent of a “phantom limb” or lexical gender dysphoria when we don’t know which pronoun to use.

figleaf

(Publicising as widely as you can, that you believe gender questions are voyeuristic, is massively hypocritical and self-serving. “Everyone look at me! I’m being private!” And that hypocrisy doesn’t bode well for the mental health of the children.)

Weird parents without an agenda, otoh, tend to have massively normal kids. It’s not the parents’ weirdness that was the problem, it seems to be the act of trying to force the kid(s) to fit into the agenda.

Kyle,
I think that’s also the reason for the fascination with the story. It’s not our horror (or whatever) at the genderless child, it’s our recognition of (and instinctive dislike of) those sorts of parents. We cringe on behalf of the kids.

This strikes me an awful lot like outlawing gravity or making a rule against heartbeats.

Some things are not mutable – they just are what they are.

BTW Kyle, my experience with young parents is that they tend to get quite irritable with people referring to their infant as “it”, a phenomenon that supports your thesis.

@jumblepudding: Hey, no disagreement here. The parents are probably trolling for publicity. But the interesting part is why saying their baby has no gender gets so much publicity.

Assuming that this genderlessness does persist, the two possibilities seem to be that the child will be forced to think as an “it” and suffer the stigma attached (regardless of that stigma’s injustice), or will be able to associate only with people on the leading edge of the social sciences. Neither seems ideal in my humble opinion. It is certainly their right to parent as they wish, and children have been raised fine in FAR more ridiculous circumstances. I see no reason, however, that it should be trumpeted as virtuous behavior to make a child into a social experiment for no other purpose than to start a discussion, however much that discussion may need to be started.

As for suggestions: I don’t know; my expertise doesn’t even come close to touching issues such as this. Whatever the eventual solution though, it will undoubtedly be awesome to refer to an AI with a real, actual pronoun that doesn’t imply it’s just a dead hunk of metal.