Should Children Be Raised Genderless?

More recent feminist movements, such as the third wave feminist movement, has garnered a question regarding gender stereotypes and children: should children be raised “genderless.” It is very understandable to raise children to not rely upon stereotypes and to help society become more cognizant of its implications. However, relying upon, and positing as truth, social construction theory of gender alone misses the inherent biological and innate differences of people that raising kids genderless does not properly address. Gender neutral parenting is the act of raising children without any emphasis or hint of gender/sex. Dr. Debra W. Soh, a neuroscientist who writes mostly about topics pertaining to sexuality, wrote in her article for the L.A.

However, some studies say there are no differences between male-female brains, while others were able to “correctly identify whether a given brain was male or female 73% of the time” It is particularly social constructionists and feminists who conflate the ideas of sex differences are sexism. There is in fact differences between the sexes, on an average of course. It is wholly irrational to reduce people based solely upon the average, as the average is the measure of the distribution and therefore does not in any manner represent a single individual. Rationally, that is the case that each person differs more one another, so why are we then so concerned about stereotypes and disproving them? I am in no manner denying that stereotypes can be harmful when taken to extremes, and I do not endorse the use of stereotypes. There is, however, evidence that stereotypes are in fact fairly accurate, highly replicable in social psychology, and even conform to changes over time. Gender stereotypes, which raising children gender-neutral attempt to avoid, are not inherently harmful. Stereotypes are used as superficial markers in an attempt to understand new people as easily as possible; they use actual observations, with surprising accuracy, in order assess others. Stereotyping can be expedient, and should not be solely relied upon, but most people do not live their life only

Gender is a conflated word, and the definition of gender is not entirely clear (the implied meaning tends to be viewed as more contextual now). Gender originated as a term relating to the grammatical agreement of a word and its arbitrary but distinguishable characteristics. We then can extrapolate the original definition of gender with its representation of sex; that is, gender is in agreement with sex and certain characteristics associated with sex such as societal ‘roles.’ Therefore, gender as a word has seen some grey area, where some use it in place of identifying one sex and others use it to identify other characteristics (which takes the arbitrary nature of the word far beyond its intent.) Thus, if gender represents the subclass characteristics, then gender is the generalised identifier (stereotype, if you will) in which people use to create their initial impressions of other