It's a boy! Couple reveal sex of their 'gender neutral' kid after five years

[marions ghost]

120. It does say he wasn't forced

to wear girls clothes, wears gender neutral clothes which I think is fine. He only played dress up in the tutu. Yeah the Mom is leading him on, but I see parents all the time doing that about other things. I just don't see this as the worst thing in the world.

I am certainly not going to argue that boys and girls don't have distinct differences--they do, from birth. But I wonder--if our society was not so polarized, and if the traits that are considered "boy" and "girl" were really encouraged in the opposite sex, if we would have the same negative attitudes about it after awhile. Because of course we all have both "male" and "female" traits. Both boys & girls need to be taught to be gentle and nurturing when appropriate and assertive and active when appropriate. But do we really do that? I think we still reward those behaviors differently for boys vs girls.

Take the following as hypothetical only:
When your son jumped on the doll, was the reaction of the parents to a) laugh? Or was the reaction b) to say, "Johnny, this is how to be kind to your baby." Very different message in the response examples. The second approach is the one you'd use if a girl was aggressive toward the doll. My sisters and I would dismember dolls and torture them, bury them alive & stuff. Was that showing "male" tendencies. No, I think what your son did and what we did to our dolls are just kid tendencies.