“Well Duh, That’s How You Raise a Kid”: Gender-Open Parenting in a (Non)Binary World

Abstract

While parenting practices that resist traditional gender norms for children are not new, the advent of “gender-open parenting” in recent years poses a new and understudied phenomenon in childhood socialization. Assisted by new “nonbinary” gender possibilities and pronouns, these parents: do not assign a sex/gender to their child, keep their child’s anatomy private, and use they/them pronouns until the child can express their own sense of gender. Using interview data from 21 parents and 11 grandparents, this study presents foundational insights on their gender-open practices, including their educating others, birth plans, and gender-neutral language. Discussion and analysis employs Risman’s concept of “gender as a social structure” to map these practices onto broader dimensions of our social structure, exposing their potential for significant social change. Parents’ efforts reflect the multi-dimensional nature of gender in society, where all levels are engaged to resist cisgender norms and ideologies—including individual, interactional, and institutional. Conclusion addresses implications for educators, clinicians, and policymakers, as well as future research.

Keywords:

• Parenting
• gender-open
• gender-neutral
• transgender
• nonbinary
• they/them pronouns

Introduction

Parenting practices that resist conventional gender norms for young children are not new. Historically, there have been many iterations of what we might broadly consider “gender-expansive parenting,” where parents permit childhood expressions that fall outside of traditional gender roles and expectations. Anthropological records show, for example, that gender-expansive options beyond a Western binary have long existed in other times and cultures, such as among the two-spirit persons of pre-colonial Native American tribes and the hijra of South Asia (Herdt, 2012). In 19^th-20^th century North America, Gill-Peterson (2018) finds cases of children we would consider transgender today, whose parents facilitated childhood gender transitions under the guidance of medical researchers.

Later, as part of a wider social movement and praxis toward gender equality, second-wave feminists pushed for “nonsexist” parenting, urging parents to resist sex-based stereotypes for boys and girls (Bem, 1983; Risman & Myers, 1997). The “William’s Doll” book (Zolotow & du Bois, 1972) and related song from Free to be You and Me (Thomas, 1972) was emblematic of this paradigm, encouraging boys to embrace emotional sensitivity and play with conventional “girl” toys if they wanted. In a related vein, LGBT parents and families over the last 40 years have been shown to yield gender-expansive socialization patterns for their children (Averett, 2016; Patterson, 2000; Pyne, 2013). Gay and lesbian parents, for example, are less likely to expect or enforce gender conformity in their children (Stacey & Biblarz, 2001).

As other scholars have noted, however, gender-expansive parenting paradigms have yielded limited effects, especially for children assigned male. Through the 1990s, many parents and parenting experts still negatively associated childhood gender nonconformity with adult homosexuality, and did not want to encourage too much gender-atypical play (Martin, 2005). While some parents do seek to pass on feminist and gender-expansive beliefs to their children, their ideologies can prove less influential than their gender-stereotypic behaviors, as well as those of their children’s peers (Halpern & Perry-Jenkins, 2016; Risman & Myers, 1997). Even avowedly gender-progressive parents, who otherwise permit gender-atypical toys and activities for their children, still often presume their child’s gender identity based on the normative limits of their assigned sex (Kane, 2012), eclipsing gender-diverse or transgender possibilities.

Despite these limitations, the last twenty years has seen a sea change in recognition for transgender people and their rights (Travers, 2018). This includes a growing number of youth who identify as transgender and gender-diverse (GLAAD, 2017), as well as pre-pubescent children whose parents facilitate early childhood gender transitions on their behalf (Rahilly, 2018), which has been well-documented at this journal (Abreu et al., 2019; Field & Mattson, 2016; Kuvalanka et al., 2014). The rising visibility of transgender youth, and related institutional responses for their inclusion (Meadow, 2018), has left contemporary parents increasingly aware of this possibility for their own children during the life course. What is especially significant to today’s cultural context is the mainstreaming of “nonbinary” identities and “they/them” pronouns in popular discourse and consciousness (Darwin, 2020; Saguy & Williams, 2022). These terms offer contemporary parents a relatively new conceptual space in which to rear young children that is free of gendered assumptions.

Using interview data from 21 parents and 11 grandparents, this article offers one of the first concerted analyses of gender-open parenting, a new iteration of gender-expansive parenting emerging in this cultural moment (Morris, 2018; Myers, 2020). This term comes from the parental community itself, and refers to parents who: do not assign a gender at birth to their child and do not disclose their assigned sex; use they/them pronouns for the child until they can express their own sense of gender; parent inclusively in terms of the toys, clothes, and activities to which the children have access. For these parents, no assignment of any kind is made from day one of childhood, allowing the child freedom to develop without gendered assumptions or stereotypes. Outside of doctoral research (Davies, 2020), and its role in broader forms of gender activism (Rees & Saguy, 2022), the phenomenon has received little scholarly attention to date. The findings advance the literature in LGBT family studies in important new directions. Given the new neutral pronouns and identifiers at parents’ disposal, these children may well represent the first modern generation raised truly “gender free.”

I begin with a brief discussion on terminology. I then present several dominant themes parents articulated about their gender-open philosophies, starting with their original motivations and proceeding with the gender-open strategies they enact, including educating others, birth plans, nondisclosure, and gender-neutral language. In the analysis, I discuss these findings through the broader lens of Risman’s (2004) framework, “gender as a social structure,” highlighting the implications of this new paradigm for changing multiple levels of our social structure—with individuals, in interactions, and against wider social institutions. Indeed, as a principal social mechanism for the maintenance of gender norms in society, parenting has long been recognized as a site of potential social change, too (Coltrane & Adams, 2008; Maccoby, 1992; Martin, 2009). I conclude with limitations as well as important considerations for key stakeholders in childhood development, including schools, clinicians, and other researchers in LGBT family studies.

Gender-open parenting: Terms and definitions

Given the broad history of “gender-expansive parenting” outlined above, where many different practices and philosophies might apply, it can be hard to draw firm lines between each new iteration, including what might distinguish today’s “gender-open” variation from the rest. Green & Friedman’s (2013) edited volume, for example, Chasing Rainbows, charts multiple testimonials from scholars and activists about what they call “gender fluid parenting,” which sounds similar to the “gender-open” approach detailed in this study. This is also true for Brown’s (2014) and Lucas-Stannard’s (2012) parenting guides, which recommend many “gender-neutral” practices for raising today’s children. One distinguishing factor, however, for gender-open parenting is the explicit refusal to assign a gender in the first place and the irrelevance of assigned sex, which gender-open parents otherwise keep undisclosed. Earlier anthologies and guidebooks do not quite reflect this level of gender neutrality from birth—a sex category is often assigned, and mentioned, however permissive the parents may be about the gender expressions that follow.

“Baby Storm” in Canada in 2011 marks the first high-profile case of gender-open parenting, with subtle conceptual differences (Poisson, 2011). As repeated in the media, Storm’s parents “did not reveal the sex” of the baby and only used the baby’s name in interviews, not pronouns. This is slightly different from the gender-open parents interviewed here, who feel there is no official “sex” to reveal in the first place; for these parents, this category is as socially constructed and arbitrary as gender, which I discuss below. Moreover, today’s gender-open parents use they/them pronouns, a defining feature of the practice that was not available to prior generations of parents (using these for children is a requirement, for example, for the online forum from which I recruited interviewees). Several years after Storm, another parent in Canada, Kori Doty, who identifies as nonbinary and trans, was the first in the country to successfully omit a sex/gender marker from their baby’s health card, whom they are raising gender-open with they/them pronouns (BBC, 2017). Doty has also recently co-edited a related anthology about parenting “beyond the binary” (Doty & Lowik, 2022). These cases indicate the “gender-open” brand of parenting analyzed here has only emerged within the last decade, and is ripe for social-scientific analysis.

Many parents under this paradigm use the term “gender creative” because they feel they are letting their child explore a full of range of interests, which is more “creative” than traditional norms permit. I privilege the “gender-open” descriptor instead because I feel it best captures what these parents are doing—leaving “open” their child’s sex/gender identification so that the child may express this on their own time, versus “creating” a gender, per se, on the child’s behalf, which can be a misconception of the practice. Indeed, some of the backlash this model has received rests on the notion that these parents are “forcing” alternative identities onto their children or that the parents are seeking to remove gender altogether from the children’s lives (Brown, 2019; Rosethorn, 2018). These parents challenge both these characterizations. Tellingly, most parents I interviewed were vocally averse to the term “gender neutral”; for them this connotes something “boring” and genderless, akin to dressing their children only in “grey onesies.” Rather than eliminate gender, they want to allow all possible gendered expressions and interests for their children, just without traditional attachments to the male/female binary.

Gender-open parenting has been popularized in the media with the term “theybies,” a coinage that refers to the babies raised under this paradigm (Morris, 2018). I quickly learned, however, how unpopular this term is among parents too, both for the hype it has created and related misconceptions about the practice. These parents do not see their children as inherently they/them-identified, at least not at the outset of childhood. Instead, they use gender-neutral signifiers as a placeholder for children’s self-determined gender down the line. As such, “nonbinary” functions less as an actual gender identity among these families than as a space-holder for children to explore their self-expressions prior to any designation. One parent, Dani, termed this more aptly as “antegender,” or the space and time a child is given to explore their own sense of gender:

Antegender is pre-gender, right? Which means that all these children are going to have to go through a conscious gender process that no one has had to go through before. Going from nothing to something. Those of us who are trans and nonbinary, we’ve had to go through a change, but never a choice. We went from something that didn’t work to something that didn’t work better. So these children are going to have a very different experience.

Relative to modern Western culture, the freedom of an “antegender” upbringing may be unique to this generation of children, as Dani suggests, and signals the significance of the paradigm for disrupting our gendered social structure.

Methods

Conceptual framework: Gender as a social structure

Barbara Risman (2004) conceived of gender as a “social structure” to reflect the multi-dimensional workings of gender in society. These dimensions include individuals, interactions, and social institutions, each of which structure, and are structured by, dominant gender norms and expectations that are rooted in a male/female binary. Rather than treating these dimensions as competing theoretical models of gender, the structural framework incorporates all of these for understanding the pervasive influence of gender on social patterns, at the micro and macro levels of society. As Risman (2004) writes, “Gender is deeply embedded as a basis for stratification not just in our personalities, our cultural rules [for interaction], or institutions but in all these, and in complicated ways” (p. 433). A structural viewpoint also emphasizes the recursive relationship between human agency and social structure (Giddens, 1984), where each both shape and change the other. No one dimension is more important in this dynamic than the other; changes in institutional rules can change smaller interactions, and conversely, changes in individuals’ perspectives can shift interactions and institutions (Risman, 2004, p. 435). Following my presentation of the findings, I employ this framework to discuss parents’ gender-open strategies in the broader terms of the social structure and their modes of resistance. Each reflect and affect multiple levels of the structure, including their interactions with other individuals and institutions, as well as the gender-expansive understandings they craft for their children. As Risman (2017) notes, “We must pay attention both to how structure shapes individual choice and social interaction and to how human agency creates, sustains, and modifies current structure” (p. 209).

Research questions

Given the novelty of “gender-open parenting” relative to prior gender-expansive paradigms, as well as the potential of childhood socialization to resist dominant social norms, this study aimed to capture several foundational insights on this new group of parents, via the following research questions:

1. When and why does a parent decide to practice gender-open parenting?

2. What specific strategies or rules do parents adopt to actually practice this model and ensure their child’s gender self-determination?

3. What are parents’ experiences, and challenges, with other social actors as they attempt to practice the paradigm in wider society?

Sample and design

This project received IRB approval (H20255), and recruitment and interviewing of the parents occurred between December 2019 and December 2020, with one additional interview occurring in July 2021. The main avenue through which parents were recruited was a private Facebook group specifically designed for gender-open parents. I contacted the moderator of the group, who agreed to distribute a blurb on my behalf, which she posted on two separate occasions, several months apart. While I had hoped to include online comments and discussions from this group as well, as a non-parent, I did not have access, and members sought to preserve the forum’s privacy. The inclusion criteria for participating in the study included being a current parent of a child whom they were raising gender-open—that is, the parent(s) had not assigned a gender, did not reveal the anatomy of the child, and were using they/them pronouns for the child. This could include parents of children who had recently declared an identity and/or pronouns, but who had been raised from birth as gender-open. One couple were rotating all three pronouns at the time of interviews for their baby (she/he/they), and I included them.

In turn, parents who were planning to raise their child(ren) this way but did not yet have any such children were excluded, as well as parents who were practicing broader forms of gender-expansive parenting but not quite gender-open parenting—i.e., they had assigned a sex/gender and were using gendered pronouns but were otherwise permissive about their child’s clothes and interests and/or understood their gender identity and/or expression may change, or they were currently raising a trans- or gender-diverse-identified child. All of these parameters are different from the gender-open paradigm I sought to capture, which is when parents explicitly reject any sex or gender designation from birth. In fact, for these gender-open parents, one cannot claim whether a child is ultimately trans or not since that would require disclosing an original birth sex assignment, which they avoid. The private Facebook group from which I recruited subjects effectively ensured these inclusion/exclusion criteria among its members, though they did allow entry for prospective gender-open parents who wanted to learn and prepare for the practice before childbirth. While the forum has an international reach, with over 400 members at the time of the interviews, I was unable to confirm the range of demographics represented. Based on participant comments, the members are largely woman- or non-male-identified.

In total, 21 parents were interviewed for the project, including 6 couples. Three of the parents were recruited via snowball sampling of original recruits. Not of all these participants constitute “LGBT families” per se, but much of their motivation to adopt the practice is rooted in LGBT awareness, including the challenges to traditional gender norms this entails. The parent-interviewees refer to 19 children, two-thirds of whom were under 3 years old at the time of the interviews (12 of 19 kids). The rest were between 4 and 9 years old (7 of 19). This includes a 9-year-old and 7-year-old, who were not explicitly raised “gender-open” from birth, but were embraced as transgender and nonbinary, respectively, later in childhood. Their parent (Dani) started gender-open parenting explicitly with the third child, 2 years old at the time of the interview, which is why they were included in the study. Except for Dani, all parents started gender-open parenting with their first child, during pregnancy, and the majority had only one child at the time. Parents’ average age was 34.

While I did not set out to include grandparents in this study, it was soon into my first few interviews with parents that I realized the important role that grandparents serve in this paradigm, who, as secondary caregivers of the grandchildren, are called on to learn and honor its tenets on behalf of their adult children. Moreover, the grandparents were often more likely to receive direct questioning and probing from friends and extended family about the parents’ gender-open decisions than the parents’ themselves. As such, during my interviews with the parents, I asked if any of them would be open to connecting me to their parents (the grandparents) for an interview. I ultimately spoke with 11 grandparents, including 3 couples, and these interviews occurred between June 2020 and December 2020. All of the grandparents were related to the parents in the project; however, in the interest of confidentiality and anonymity, I do not denote which grandparents and parents are related (Forbat & Henderson, 2003). This article focuses predominantly on the parents, though grandparents held key insights too, as other scholars in LGBT family studies have shown (Kuvalanka et al., 2020; Scherrer, 2010). I attend more extensively to the grandparents’ perspectives in a separate analysis.

Full sample demographics are listed in Table 1. Overall, parents and grandparents were predominantly white and middle class, though their gender and sexual identifications were more diverse: approximately 40% of parents identified as non-cisgender and over half of parents (57%) identified as non-heterosexual, though most were in heterosexual partnerships. All grandparents were cisgender and heterosexual, except one woman who identified as bisexual and was remarried to a female partner. The majority of families live throughout the continental U.S., with one family residing in Canada and another in the U.K.

Table 1. Participant Reference Chart.

All interviews were conducted via telephone and digitally recorded, save two interviews prior to pandemic-related lockdowns which occurred in person, and lasted 1-2 hours each. There were no noticeable differences between those conducted via telephone and those done in person. Some couples were interviewed jointly, while others were interviewed separately. Each participant was sent a $50 gift card incentive and formal consent forms to sign.

I am not a parent, nor am I transgender or nonbinary. As a sociologist, however, I study childhood socialization as one key site where social norms can be resisted, especially for gender and sexuality. While my positionality marks me as an “outsider,” my distance afforded my interviewees expert status on parenting; I came with no personal experiences or presumptions about what it should look like. Several participants asked me what I thought about gender-open parenting. This was a welcome opportunity to signal my advocacy of gender diversity and children’s freedom to develop without gendered assumptions, a source of rapport and trust with my interviewees.

Data analysis

Interviews were transcribed either via a professional transcription service or an automated software program that utilizes AI technology (Otter.ai). Transcripts were then reviewed and edited by myself or a research assistant for accuracy and clarity, which enriched my understanding of the data set. In the vein of thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), I first coded transcripts for recurring themes and patterns using NVivo. I kept the coding open and inductive to capture the full breadth of possible salient themes and experiences from participants, versus limited the coding to a predetermined schema or framework (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 83; see also grounded theory perspectives, Charmaz, 2014; Glaser, 1992; Strauss & Corbin, 1998).

Initial coding was followed by reiterative reviews wherein I grouped dominant codes into larger thematic clusters—for example, Motivations (Trans people, No restrictions, Intuitive logic, Social-justice background). Some of these themes ended up reflecting topics from the interview guide, while others emerged uniquely from the data set, such as “Deconstructing Sex.” The themes presented below mark those that seemed most central parents’ gender-open practice, including: educating others, birth plans, nondisclosure, deconstructing sex and, relatedly, gender-neutral language. These themes were reviewed again for broader analytic insights, which ultimately evoked Risman’s structural framework; parents’ experiences and perspectives reflect the multiple dimensions of the gendered social structure, which they seek to resist and transform for their children. This reiterative process was similar to the six steps that Braun and Clarke (2006) suggest, though as these and other qualitative practitioners advise, flexibility and variability are at the core of the methodology, where rich accounts and insights can emerge via various steps and pathways (p. 78).

Findings

Below I detail findings from the interviews in which parents’ describe their gender-open philosophies, starting with their motivating concerns about gender at the beginning of parenthood. I proceed with the strategies and interactions they manage with others, including educating others, birth plans, nondisclosure, and the gender-neutral language that they use.

Motivations

Early in the interviews, I asked parents when and why they decided to embark on gender-open parenting. Parents voiced several different motivations for deciding on the practice, but a dominant theme among them was their awareness of transgender persons. Having observed the experiences of trans people within their own social networks, it did not make sense to these parents to risk misgendering their own children and exacting those same harms. This includes people from within their own social networks or, for the teachers in the sample, students at school. As Bryn said of both her and her wife’s experiences teaching, “We had seen students who were gender-nonconforming or nonbinary or transgender … and we’ve seen … what an arduous process of self-identification that can then be … even for students with fairly accepting families.” Van made similar observations when they worked at an LGBT youth summer camp, which prompted them to think about how they wanted to raise their own child:

[D]oing that camp … really shone a light on how difficult it is to be … trans or gender-nonconforming. … I had been trying to get pregnant for about two years, and it had gotten me really thinking about, Okay, what do I want to do with a kid? How do I want to try to positively affect this child’s life so that they can never have to tell me that I was wrong [about their gender]?

Dani, who lives in a polyamorous household with other trans and nonbinary adults, described gender-open parenting as simply a “foregone conclusion” and “a given” from the trans community’s experiences with gender: “I feel like gender-open parenting is queer philosophy finally breaking out into mainstream culture a little bit. This is a really normal evolution in my culture and community. […] It is our life philosophy being demonstrated in all aspects of our lives, including our parenting.” As Dani elaborated, gender-open parenting “is the only not toxic way” to raise a child, based on prior trans experiences:

We [typically] look at a baby and we look at their body and we say, “I’m just going to fuckin’ guess, I’m just going to throw one out there. And you can change it later if you want, you can just un-program years of aggressive programming from me, your life-giving caregiver … I’m just going to burden you with that … .” [G]enitals do not equal gender, and to say otherwise is transphobic, so there’s no way you can assign a gender to a baby and not be transphobic and toxic and bio-essentialist.

These motivations testify to the influence of transgender and nonbinary awareness on these parents’ decisions.

Equally important to parents’ motivations, however, were the limiting and harmful effects of gender stereotypes outright, apart from transgender considerations. Parents wanted to eliminate stereotypical gendered associations in their children’s lives, letting them develop their interests first without any attachments to notions of “boys” and “girls.” As Jessie said of her 4-year-old:

I love that [my child] likes shows with trains and cars and robots, and they love shows with princesses and rainbows and ponies. … Their interests in media are actually really all over the place. I think that’s pretty cool, and we haven’t forced them into it, right? We’re like, you should totally be able to … wear your butterfly wings while you create this Derby [race] track, you know? That feels good.

Jessie ultimately captured the two major prongs of parents’ original motivations—trans awareness and gender stereotypes:

[T]here are these enormous [gender] disparities that are so socialized … and so … there’s no way that I’m going to have a baby and put them into this binary bullshit … . [S]o I think that it was these two things: … I could assign my kid a gender and I might get it wrong, and also I could assign my kid a gender and they could be harmed by the way we stereotypically socialize kids, even if they were cisgender.

Despite these concerns, few parents went into childrearing explicitly aware of “gender-open parenting” as a praxis. Instead, during the course of their pregnancy and their ruminations as a future parent, they learned of the approach through an acquaintance who was already doing it, an online blog, or through the high-profile cases of Kori Doty or Baby Storm, described above. Upon discovering the model, parents said that it just made intuitive, logical sense, an obvious choice in how to raise a child given their concerns about gender. As Kate remarked after encountering a gender-open parenting blog, “Well duh, that’s how you raise a kid!” Similarly, after his wife Bekah brought Baby Storm to his attention, Brian said,

I think it pretty much immediately made sense. It was almost like, that was the answer I didn’t know existed to some question I had, which was, how to resolve gender, how to treat it as a parent. Because I was sort of without that knowledge … without that final step of like, Oh, you don’t have to do anything [you don’t have to assign a gender] … . And so yeah, when Bekah brought it up, it was like, “Yeah, of course, that’s what we should do.”

With these examples, parents shifted their original concerns into a more practical, concrete approach to parenting.

Educating others

In more practical terms, parents described multiple strategies to protect their child’s gender-open status, often starting in pregnancy, which were manifest in their stories and interactions with others. Several of these reflected educating others. At least four parents mentioned using their baby shower as an opportunity to teach friends and family about gender-open parenting, starting with an introductory description or website on the invitations. Susan, for example, prepared miniature informational booklets (“zines”) for family and friends explaining the approach, including examples of gender-neutral terms they can use for the baby (e.g., “pumpkin,” they/them pronouns, etc.). The parties included creative educational exercises and activities for party guests, and for some families, explained the role of sperm donors. Kate, for example, described their baby shower as “a science fair,” with different “stations” and poster boards set up for guests to learn more about gender. Guests were invited to participate in a “Gender Unicorn Exercise,” where they reflected on the “multi-faceted” dimensions of their identity across a spectrum, including for sex, gender, clothing presentation, and romantic attraction. Kate and their partner also used the party as an opportunity to speak directly to friends and family about their approach, to the effect of: “This is our philosophy … this is how you will support us, and these are the pronouns we are going to use.” As Kate said, “We did our best to come at it head on.” Similarly, at Nicole and Bryn’s baby shower, one exercise entailed guests reading passages from stories like the Bible or Harry Potter, but they had to change the pronouns of the characters, flipping the dominant gender patterns in the scripts.

Family and friends were also encouraged to purchase clothes, toys, and other gifts from across the gender spectrum, except when it came to apparel that parents characterized as “hyper-gendered” (e.g., “Daddy’s Little Princess”); virtually all parents rejected this. As part of their entrée, grandparents were given informational material explaining the approach and the terminology, including in some cases homemade websites or brochures, as well as links to related blogs, news articles, and academic literature describing children’s gender disparities and the mental health benefits of supporting gender diversity for children. Grandparents described these materials as invaluable and instrumental in their learning process.

Birth plans

Parents’ birth plans marked another key aspect of gender-open practice. Many parents specifically sought out midwives and doulas who were versed in gender-expansive practices—including some who were queer- and trans-identified—and arranged for home births where they could have more control over the process. As Kate said, “We were open around this conversation from the very beginning, and part of why we chose a home birth was so that we could choose our birth team really carefully, and we chose really queer and trans-competent midwives.” Similarly Jen advised, “Our main midwife is a trans person that goes by they/them. We chose our midwives based on that, yes.” Whether at home or in the hospital, parents told birthing personnel not to announce the presumed sex of the baby upon delivery (i.e., no “It’s a boy/girl!”) and to keep materials gender-neutral, such as the placards on the bassinet (usually blue or pink). Kate, for example, chose the color of the baby’s wristband ahead of time, regardless of what the sex classification would be, to challenge this practice.

Given the contingencies of childbirth, however, these plans did not always stick. In the haze of a delivery that went off-plan, for example, Kate revealed the sexual anatomy of their baby to family and friends who were pressing for answers over text, which they now regret. Moreover, even without contingencies, several parents noted that gender norms slipped into the birthing process anyway. Even amidst the most explicit gender-open preparations with an educated home-birthing team, for example, a gendered pronoun was still uttered within seconds of Maddy’s baby’s delivery, based solely on the child’s body:

As [our baby] was being born, the midwives who were supporting us had been so awesome and really understood and tried their best to respect our words and pronouns and language, but as I was pushing them out of my body, I did hear somebody slip up and use a pronoun, a gendered pronoun. … And that just feels like such a clear moment to me … of why we’re doing this, because even in that moment that they came into the world, like the time on the clock that’s on their birth certificate … somebody was gendering them.

This reminded Maddy of how early gendered assumptions stick to a young child and solidified the importance of their gender-open practice, especially with medical personnel.

Parents’ approach to birth certificates marked some debate. Most parents resided in locations that did not allow for nonbinary or blank markers on birth certificates, especially for children who were not medically classified as intersex. As such, most parents obliged putting what would be the child’s assigned sex—as they put it, “the binary sex assignment that typically would be assigned with the genitals.” Many parents decided to abstain from the bureaucratic battles that fighting for an alternative option would entail, and sought to streamline other aspects of the child’s documentation that required a sex marker, including health insurance, social security cards, passports, etc. As Maddy said, “In theory, I would love for that not to be the case and for the certificate to not have a sex, but in our state, you have to have it. This didn’t feel like a really good place for us to spend our energy.” Jessie felt ethically bound to oblige the system; she felt it was risky compromising “vital records” and population-level health data, including for intersex persons, by leaving a nonbinary or unknown marker for a child who was technically not intersex. Given the privacy that birth certificates usually carry, Jessie did not feel this was a necessary aspect of her gender-open approach, even though she recognizes the root significance of birth sex assignments to gender stereotypes.

A few other parents, however, felt differently, and advised that resisting binary markers on birth certificates is central to the wider ideological project of gender-open parenting. After months of proactive, and complicated, negotiations with state bureaucracy, one parent was successful in leaving the marker blank on the certificate (designated by asterisks), and may be the first in their state to do so outside of intersex cases. Dani also felt strongly about these efforts, stating that gender-open parenting is part of a broader “advocacy and activism” that demands challenging bureaucratic systems, such as birth certificates, if gender-expansive options are to be achieved in society at large:

I did a lot of work to make [my baby’s] birth certificate not have a binary assignment, because it was important to me, not just for my family personally, but it was important to me politically, it was important to me philosophically, it was important to me as an activist, not just a parent, so I understand that other people don’t identify as activists, and they don’t identify as trying to break the system down, even though guess what, you’re going to have to break the system because you decided to not assign a gender.

Nondisclosure

Following the birth of the child, keeping the child’s anatomy undisclosed is perhaps the most important gender-open effort with others, especially with those who are not immediate caretakers. Originally, Nicole was adamant that they should not shield the child’s body from others as a matter of principle. The purpose of the gender-open exercise, in her mind, is for adults to learn to abandon gendered assumptions, regardless of a child’s genitalia. Several months later, however, Nicole indicated some “internal unrest” over this decision in a written reflection she emailed me, given the insistent gendering of her child by others once they knew their anatomy: “[This has] forced me to question whether we made the right decision for our child by diapering and pottying in front of others. After each stereotypically gendered encounter, I have an urge to not allow our child to return to the space with those adults, fearing for the ways in which the gender stereotypes are so strongly at work.”

Precisely because of Nicole’s observations, many parents choose to shield the child’s body from others (including limiting who can partake in diaper changes or bath time), but children’s bodily privacy is more commonly handled discursively, in terms of refusing to name a sex or gender with others in social interactions. Indeed, parents inevitably confront the “boy or girl?” question out in public, especially during children’s infancies. Most parents answered this question with a measured, crafted response, such as, “We haven’t assigned a gender yet, we’re waiting for them to tell us, we’re using they/them pronouns,” or “We’re doing this thing called gender-open parenting, it’s kind of unusual.” Several parents said they “answered” the question by modeling gender-neutral pronouns instead, such as, “This is Ray, they’re 11 months old, they love walks in the park and dogs.” Rarely did parents encounter overt confrontations or questioning about this from strangers; usually these were quick, polite exchanges, though this may signal strangers’ confusion or discomfort with the practice, not their understanding or acceptance. More often, it was the grandparents, or family “once removed,” who received more direct probing (including from peers about the child’s assigned sex). Grandparents came to recognize as absurd the seeming incessant obsession of others to know the child’s genitalia. As Audrey said, she will never ask someone the “boy-or-girl” question again.

Equally frequently, however, parents noted that most people assumed the child’s sex on their own and gendered them accordingly, especially past infancy, depending on the child’s clothing, hairstyle, or even the context. The resounding approach among parents in these instances is to “go along with it” if the person is unlikely to be seen again (e.g., waitperson), a dominant theme I coded as “let them assume.” As parents explained, these fleeting interactions do not warrant extended explanations of gender-open parenting, which, as Jen said, would require a “gender 101” lesson in public.

Jessie demonstrated this with one story from a family vacation. On a tour boat ride, a fellow guest assumed the toddler was female, calling them a “beautiful princess” the whole way. Jessie did not comment or intervene. On the way back, Jessie needed to change the child’s clothes, which changed everyone’s perception of their sex: “Everyone was like, Wait a minute, so do you have a son and not a daughter?” Jessie proceeded to explain her approach of gender-open parenting, but the same guest looked visibly “betrayed” and ruffled that she had been using the “wrong words” without being “corrected,” saying, “So you’re actually a handsome prince!” Jessie advised me that she did not mind these interactions: her child had yet to declare a specific gender, so no one was technically misgendering them. She actually likes that her child is exposed to a range of gendered attributions; in some parents’ view, this helps facilitate a gender-open exploration process for the child.

When it came to close caregivers, there was more variability around disclosure, often due to geography and/or pragmatics. Many grandparents, for example, assisted with childcare relatively soon after childbirth, or were at the birth itself, including some who shared the same household as the parents. Others, however, were kept ignorant of babies’ anatomies for several months, allowing time to bond with the baby without any gendered associations. Conversely, a few families expressly decided to learn the baby’s anatomy in utero to allow themselves time to abandon gendered associations. In short, disclosure was more negotiable among close family contacts who would be providing childcare than circles further out.

Deconstructing sex

One of the most notable themes from interviews was parents’ explicit deconstructionist take on the concept of “biological sex,” and not just gender. In multiple instances, parents articulated that what is assigned “male” or “female” at birth is a farcical construct of the medical establishment, one that relies on limited information (i.e., genitalia, despite several other dimensions of biological sex) and unduly brands bodies into different gendered types. This belief was best reflected in parents’ language: parents rarely if ever used the term “sex” itself in interviews, if only to critique it. Instead, they used “genitals,” and sometimes “anatomy” or “what’s in their diaper,” to refer to their baby’s body. Such precise terminology distills “biological sex” down to its main bodily referent, evading more the binary and gendered proxies of “male” or “female.” As part of this understanding, several parents mentioned intersex persons, who were as significant to their decisions as transgender persons, to indicate both the falsehoods of assigned sex categories and how these are exclusionary and harmful to different kinds of people.

Alex exemplified this perspective during our discussion of their efforts to resist a sex designation on their child’s birth certificate. Alex pursued the “unknown” notation on paperwork instead, which is traditionally reserved for intersex babies:

I heard [about “unknown”] and I was like, yeah, “unknown,” that’s what I want. I don’t care how we have to get it. I just knew everything [in the bureaucracy] was already so problematic that I didn’t worry about stepping on toes because I was like, this whole system is fucked. I just want our birth certificate to say “unknown.” The point is, it’s less about “unknown,” it’s more about, I don’t want it to be marked with F or M.

Alex emphasized the importance of deconstructing sex to gender-open parenting, even while technically knowing the baby’s chromosomal markers in utero:

Sorry, I’m going to spend a minute going off on this tangent, but this is super important to me: […] I think that sex is also a spectrum and currently operates as a very flawed binary system … . I just want to make it clear that we don’t know our kid’s sex, I normally just say “sex/gender” because I think it’s … impossible to distinguish between the two because they’re both so socially constructed and wide-ranging, and the parameters that make each one are just put in place by people. It’s like there’s no real—it’s just socially constructed.

Similarly, Dani mentioned using new anatomical language in their household that was less binary, as well as less “dysphoria-inducing and disrespectful” to gender-nonconforming people. For example, instead of defaulting to “penis” or “clitoris,” they try to use “erectile tissue” for all genitalia. As Dani put it, traditional medical language is “lazy,” and healthcare professionals should ask the questions they really mean: “Don’t ask, Are you biologically female? Ask what you mean. Are you at risk of getting pregnant? … Are you at risk of ovarian cancer? … Do you have a urethra that is shorter and thus at greater risk of urinary tract infection?” Dani has educated healthcare professionals about such language, too.

Danielle advised that the private Facebook group for parents avoids the terms “AMAB” or “AFAB” as well (“assigned male at birth” or “assigned female at birth”), even though these are often considered trans-aware terminology in other parenting and LGBT forums. Echoing Alex above, Danielle explained that these concepts defeat the purpose of gender-open parenting, which is to not assign anything at all: “The way we think about it is, we actually don’t know what [our child’s] sex is. We know what their genitals are, but we don’t know what their sex or gender is.” This perspective related to other dimensions of parents’ linguistic practices as well.

Language

Beyond parents’ understandings of “sex”—including their noticeable rejection of using that terminology in conversation—their use of gender-neutral language is arguably the most important gender-open practice they perform with their children. Most parents’ children were pre-verbal or not at the age of extensive conversations; however, the exchanges parents did have with their children were especially illuminating of the work they do to resist cisgender norms and assumptions. As Kate said, even with their 11-month-old, “We do so much language modeling for them.”

Exemplary of these practices, Jessie detailed numerous efforts she and her partner have taken to eschew traditional gendered thinking from their language: “We really have put our money where our mouth is and separated these concepts [gender and sexual anatomy], like I have never said to them ‘boy bodies’ or ‘girl bodies’ or ‘boy body parts’ or ‘girl body parts,’ never, I’ve never referred to my own body as a ‘woman’s body.’” As her child learns to understand the concept of gender, Jessie explained that, “They’ll also be able to understand that there are girls who have penises and boys who have vulvas … and nonbinary kids who have penises … these things have remained two separate concepts that can overlap but aren’t innately binary.” As part of these efforts, Jessie noted that she emphasizes the similarities between bodies, not their differences: “We try to talk more about how mom’s and dad’s bodies are really quite similar … the overwhelming majority—like we have so many of the same body parts.”

Like all parents, Jessie strives to use gender-neutral language unless she knows otherwise, including using they/them pronouns for strangers, as well as adding nonbinary options to various nouns and groups: “I will try to always say, that grown up, that person, that kid, that little one, that baby … . We’ll say, there’s mommies and daddies and zazas, I’m always trying to disrupt that there would only be two options.” In one instance, her child referred to a person with long hair as someone’s “mommy.” Jessie clarified that regardless of hair length, they really didn’t know the person’s gender, responding that, “‘Well, we don’t know that’s a mommy, we don’t know what their gender identity is, so we’ll just say “that grown up” for now,’ like I kind of tried to just slide in, and narrate inclusively.”

Doug and Lynn exemplified a similar intervention. Around 3 years old, their older child started returning home from daycare using a gendered pronoun for their younger sibling (7 months old), which they had likely picked up from daycare providers. Doug and Lynn gently advised their child that they did not yet know the gender of their sibling and to use they/them pronouns until they express their own identity.

Parents issued similar interventions when it came to children’s books and media, swapping out gendered pronouns for they/them or rotating pronouns so there’s more of a mix in the story, often in non-stereotypical ways—for example, the doctor or firefighter gets “she” while the teacher at school gets “he.” Several parents mentioned the preponderance of male pronouns in children’s books, even for animal characters, which they purposely replaced with she/her pronouns to add balance. If a children’s program on TV starts with, “Hello, boys and girls!”, Jessie makes a point of adding aloud, “And our nonbinary friends!” Parents also purchased children’s books that were explicitly gender-expansive, such as, It Feels Good To Be Yourself: A Book About Gender Identity. Shortly after our interview, Doug informed me that they had been reading this to their older child when he stated that he liked using he/him pronouns for himself, which they have since obliged.

In addition, several parents mentioned questioning the way they refer to their pets now that they have a child audience, which is traditionally very gendered. To refer to a pet as a “very good boy” or a “pretty little lady,” strictly based on the animal’s anatomy, would counteract the very gender-expansive understandings they sought to impart to their children. As such, a few parents started using they/them pronouns for their pets as well.

They/them pronouns were foundational to grandparents’ efforts to honor the gender-open approach of their adult children. For most, this was challenging and uncomfortable at first, though some adopted this relatively easily over time while others seemed more flustered. Bekah, for example, noted that her own mother would frequently make stereotypically gendered comments about the child based on their anatomy, but would insert “they/them” pronouns into the sentence anyway, signaling to Bekah she had not fully internalized gender-open ideology, but was trying to oblige the pronouns. In contrast, Alex reported that their parents were not only using they/them pronouns for their grandchild, but were starting to use them for strangers out in public too, as well as for the child’s stuffed animals. As Alex remarked, “I think that’s level—if not 10, it’s like level 9 [of gender-open awareness].” Contrary to stereotypes about “boomers,” most grandparents interviewed came to honor the ethos of the practice.

As the stories above indicate, parents described gender-open parenting as a matter of infusing everyday commentary with gender-expansive language and understandings—and doing so gently and without judgment, so the child doesn’t feel shamed if they regurgitate stereotypes—rather than holding formal, sit-down conversations. As Danielle said: “We’ve sort of always been having these conversations from the start … they’ve sort of just grown up with it … it’s not like we had one conversation where we said, This Is How Things Are (emphatically).” Danielle also advised that as parents in a queer relationship (her child’s father is a trans man), they had been attending queer and trans parenting events for a while, where clarifying pronouns upfront has been a routinized practice for their child. Similarly, Dani described run-of-the-mill “coffee-table conversation” in their household as “5000-level gender deconstruction theory, just for fun,” where they/them pronouns are a naturalized part of the lexicon.

Several parents, however, did articulate the challenges of trying to define gender more explicitly to their children, as their more open notion of gender was one that had been detached from more concrete referents for their kids—such as to anatomy, clothing, or hairstyles. Instead, gender is a “feeling” one has, sometimes a fluid or changing one at that, an even less tangible concept to try to define to a young child. As Jessie said,

I’m realizing, how the hell do you explain a man or a woman to a kid you’re trying to raise in a gender-creative way? Like you don’t say women have long hair, you don’t say women are mommies, you don’t say women are feminine, it’s like the concept of gender is so, ugh, I don’t even know how to explain it to them right now, so I just try to explain gender as a feeling. Like, well, you’ll know in your heart and your mind.

Ben articulated a similar conundrum:

Thinking about how you explain gender to kids—this is why, or one of the big reasons why we haven’t brought it up with the kids, is that it’s a hugely meta and theoretical concept in the non-bio-essentialist definition. Because what is it? It’s how you feel. Okay, but how do you know if you feel like a man? Well, you just know. How do you know if you feel like a woman? Well, you just know. Well, how do you know? That’s how a conversation with a three-year-old goes.

Despite these challenges, Ben and Cassie issued a particularly memorable explanation of gender when their children were around 5 years old, which was prompted by the sex-segregated bathrooms at the airport (the children asked why they couldn’t all use the same restroom, catching the parents off-guard). In his response, Ben framed traditional understandings of gender as pre-scientific, a product of agrarian societies before modern science learned that these understandings were false:

B: Basically, I said something along the lines of, way back thousands of years ago, everybody assumed that if you had a vulva, then you were a girl and if you had a penis, you’re a boy … and [I said] something about agriculture and people had to spend most of their days making and growing food, so they didn’t have time to do any science, but since then, we’ve done a lot of science and learned a lot of things and found that it’s not really the case that men and women are that different. Yes, they have different genitals but—

C: Not all people with vulvas are women.

B: In this society, we realized that there are some people with vulvas that don’t feel like a woman, they feel like a man, and vice versa. That some people don’t have a vulva or a penis and it’s somewhere in between. Some people with vulvas don’t have ovaries and so there’s kind of this mix-around.

This response is exemplary of the work these parents do to create alternative understandings of gender and bodies for their children in everyday verbal interactions.

While parents were careful to articulate expansive definitions of gender, they also indicated the desire to reduce the significance of gender in children’s lives. Dani, for example, stated an indifference to gender and described themselves as a “gender atheist”: “[J]ust like atheists want space to not care about God, I’m like a gender atheist. I really don’t care about gender and I want space to be able to do that, I want to go to places where my gender legitimately doesn’t matter.” Dani went on to compare gender to musical preference, an aspect of someone’s personality that ultimately tells you little about them:

I make an analogy frequently about how gender is like music. … [So] if you’re hanging out with someone, eventually you might be like, Oh, what’s your favorite band, but you’re not asking them immediately upon shaking their hand and deciding how you’re going to treat them … that’s the level of how personal, arbitrary, and uninfluential [gender] should be.

Similarly, Danielle said that she is far more preoccupied with “trying to get [my child] to be polite and kind and not use certain language and not be throwing hard things at their friends” than she is with their gender: “those take up so much more of our mental energy.” Interestingly, Martha, a grandparent, said that after spending several years with her grandchild, she cannot see them picking one static gender, and now hopes that they won’t, viewing their free and fluid self-expression as “beautiful”: “I think they’re just beautiful. I don’t necessarily think that the goal is anymore that somebody picks what they are. I just don’t think that’s going to happen. […] I actually hope—I don’t really want them to pick one now.” In short, parents gestured to a careful and potentially contradictory balance between wanting to expand their children’s understandings of gender in the way of self-determination while not over-emphasizing its role in their lives.

Discussion

As noted earlier, Risman (2004) devised the framework of “gender as a social structure” to conceptualize the embedded nature of gender throughout society, emphasizing the “interconnection between gendered selves, the cultural expectations that help explain interactional patterns, and institutional regulations” (p. 433). All of these dimensions contribute to the reproduction of—and potential resistance to—conventional gender norms and expectations. Parents’ efforts to cultivate a gender-open environment for their child reflect this multi-dimensional operation of gender in society; just as gender norms are reproduced at multiple levels of the structure, so too must parents engage all those levels to attempt transformative social change. This includes individuals, interactions, and the wider social institutions that shape them. As Risman (2004) says, “Social structures not only act on people; people act on social structures” (p. 432).

At the micro levels, parents’ gender-open efforts impact a range of social interactions and the individuals within them, often starting in pregnancy and within their immediate social networks. Through baby showers and other informational materials, friends and family learn that the baby will not be assigned a gender and that their sexual anatomy will be kept private. In turn, they are taught alternative understandings of gender that resist both binary and sex-based formulas and endorse a spectrum of gender identities and expressions instead, which are independent from sexual anatomy. Perhaps most importantly, these social actors learn to adopt they/them pronouns for the children and remove stereotypically gendered language from their speech. These creative baby showers are a powerful counter-point to “gender reveal parties,” and demonstrate that gender-open parenting often requires parents’ direct education with others. Eventually, this includes teachers, daycare providers, and other school staff as well. Grandparents often become a frontline defense with others, learning to deflect the “boy-or-girl” question and to stop asking it themselves. All this work signals the transformative impact that gender-open parenting may have beyond its immediate practitioners to other agents and interactions within the structure.

Parents’ interactions with strangers resist sex/gender assignations as well, disrupting a fundamental aspect of micro-level practices within the structure (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Having young children who dress and present all across the spectrum alternately (e.g., blue jumpsuit with airplanes one day, pink onesie with ruffles the next) makes these parents especially attuned to gender’s role in micro-level encounters. Their experiences recall how parents of transgender and gender-diverse children sometimes “play along” with others’ attributions of their children’s gender (Rahilly, 2015), often when they are first developing a newfound gender consciousness. Similarly, these testimonials show parents’ acute awareness of the arbitrary lens that sex/gender categories prove in interactions, a key aspect of the structure that gender-open parents seek to subvert.

Parents’ birth plans and related medical interactions expose the implications of this paradigm for the macro-institutional levels of society, especially the medical establishment. Parents try to ensure a gender-open childbirth, seeking out gender-diverse birthing assistants and/or advising hospital staff to avoid traditionally gendered pronouncements upon delivery. Moreover, some parents try to avoid traditional sex markers on birth certificates. Parents’ deconstructionist position on “biological sex” recalls post-structuralist perspectives on the constructed nature of both sex and gender (Butler, 1990), and distinguishes this paradigm from prior iterations of gender-expansive parenting, including recent trans-affirmative trends (Meadow, 2018; Rahilly, 2018). Parents of transgender children, for example, often theorize about biological mishaps regarding the child’s body, such that the child “should” have been born normatively male or female, but something went “wrong” in the womb, effectively reifying birth sex categories as legitimate if prone to error (Rahilly, 2020). Parents here, in contrast, seek to resist if not dissolve assigned sex categories, signaling their potential for disrupting the institutionalization of the gender binary in society. They reflect a growing chorus of medical practitioners who want to retire birth-certificate markers as well (Frellick, 2021).

Parents’ socialization efforts with their children are deeply significant of the work they do to resist the traditional gender logics of the structure, especially via the language they use in everyday conversations. At every turn, from books and other media to passing strangers, parents work to invoke nonbinary or gender-neutral references, including adopting they/them pronouns for others until they know otherwise. Parents of transgender children often learn to adopt such expansive “gender literacy” too (Rahilly, 2015), often in an attempt to reverse prior gendered statements (e.g., “No honey, you’re a boy because you have a penis”). But gender-open parents make a point of issuing these understandings from the beginning, before any gender is declared. Parents will intervene when their children make gendered presumptions of others as well. Parents practice the same rule with their children, impressing upon them that their gender and pronouns are their own province, if these ever become important at all. While these efforts certainly entail interactions between parents and children, I seek to emphasize their potential impact on children’s individual identifications and self-expressions—that is, on the “gendered selves” they may become. This reflects parents’ transformative work at the most foundational level of the gender structure, with individuals, including the identities and ideologies they can internalize.

While parents seek to ensure their children’s gender self-determination, some of their efforts, perhaps paradoxically, rendered moot the concept of gender altogether. Several parents testified to the challenges of defining what is left of the concept of “gender” under a gender-open paradigm—that is, an increasingly elusive “feeling” one has about themselves that has been freed from anatomy, clothing, play interests, personality traits, and other self-expressions. While parents care about ensuring their children’s gendered autonomy, they also signal the diminishing import that gender may have during from their children’s early psycho-social development. To be clear, these parents do not intend to eliminate gender altogether from their kids’ lives, nor would they resist the gender a child eventually claims. But the gender-expansive understandings they craft for their children also radically limit just what, if anything, gender can signify. This element realizes some of the earliest goals that second-wave feminists once envisioned for “gender-neutral” ­parenting—namely, reducing the salience of gender or “the culture’s sex-linked associative network” for children (Bem, 1983, p. 610). All told, parents’ gender-open strategies target multiple dimensions of the gendered social structure, resisting if not outright rejecting its binary logics and culture, and signal their potential for significant social change.

Conclusion

In a society with rapidly diversifying gender and pronoun possibilities (Darwin, 2020; Meadow, 2018), it is increasingly important to examine those ideas and interactions that shake the bedrock of the gender structure and its foundational ideology. The advent of “gender-open parenting” poses one such crucial site. This study expands scholars’ understandings of the role of parents in childhood gender socialization (Coltrane & Adams, 2008), especially gender-expansive and LGBT-aware forms of socialization (Kane, 2012; Martin, 2005, 2009), by examining a relatively new “gender-open” paradigm, where parents reject any sex/gender assignment from birth, use they/them pronouns as a placeholder, and work to protect their kids’ gender self-determination. Not only does this ensure the child’s autonomy in self-expression, it also leaves open the possibility that the child may never claim a fixed gender at all.

The findings bear important implications for key stakeholders in childhood development, including educators, clinicians, and policymakers. At a time when many institutions are becoming versed in gender-diverse inclusion, these efforts may require refining beyond typical progressive approaches—that is, moving beyond “just” expanding gender categories to overhauling school curricula and materials that include conventional gendered references. Teachers and childcare providers might strive to cultivate a school environment that is free of gendered language and associations, as well as adopt gender-neutral pronouns and references as part of the routine lexicon of the classroom. Medical and school personnel should reconsider the role that sex/gender markers play in paperwork (Davis, 2017; Travers, 2018), as well as how their practices and beliefs may collide with a child who has not yet learned conventional gender stereotypes. Additionally, traditional models of childhood development suggest that children cement their gender identities between 4-7 years old (Ruble et al., 2006). The rise of transgender and gender-diverse youth in recent years have troubled these models, suggesting that some childhood trajectories may pose more flux and that encouraging a more exploratory path may be heathier for children (Keo-Meier & Ehrensaft, 2018). This new generation of “antegender” children, however, raised under an explicitly “gender-open” paradigm from birth—versus children who first present with “gender-atypical” behaviors—may further expand how clinicians conceptualize “normative” gender identity development. Several parents wondered in interviews if the gender-open model may indeed change or delay the expected developmental journey in children; future research is needed.

Limitations and future research

This study was limited by a relatively small qualitative sample, especially for the grandparents. The pandemic likely complicated recruitment efforts, as the project unfolded during a time that parents and families were juggling new work and childcare routines. The sample’s demographics were not very diverse, either, and parallel other studies concerning LGBT populations, where white, middle-class participants dominate, especially regarding parents of LGBT children (Abreu et al., 2019). This reflects ongoing needs to diversify research and recruitment approaches, but may also signal the structural underpinnings of gender-expansive parenting: parents who are less socioeconomically secure may feel less leeway to embrace gender diversity for their children against wider social institutions (Robinson, 2020). Additionally, most parents in this study had young, pre-verbal or pre-school-aged children, under 3 years old, limiting more extensive dialogue between parents and kids. Broadening and diversifying research samples of gender-open families will be key to better capturing the prevalence of this paradigm and its impacts on cisgender norms and assumptions. Researchers might track the long-term developmental trajectories of the children, when they become more verbal, more immersed in peer cultures, and can start articulating their own senses of gender. We might also examine how other institutions, including schools and medicine, incorporate gender-open principles. This entails moving beyond “just” expanding gender categories, but working to limit their reach altogether, starting with assigned sex.

Acknowledgements

Funding for this project was provided by Georgia Southern University’s Office of Research and Academic Affairs. I am grateful to my research participants for sharing their time and insights on this important parenting practice. Thank you to my wonderful undergraduate research assistant, Alexandria Caughman, and to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their incisive comments and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.