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

[Ms. Toad]

165. I think the point of hiding his gender

Was more to change how others interacted with him. That indirectly changes his view about gender because (presumably) people are interacting with him in an ungendered way because they cannot interact with him based on his actual gender.

Where the experiment falls apart is that when gender is not obvious (and in young children even when it is obvious), people assume a child is male.

When my daughter was young (under 2 or so) she had a wide selection of clothes from clothes which were intended for boys to clothes which were intended for girls. No matter what she was wearing (including when she was wearing very frilly pink clothes) people addressed her using male pronouns (what is his name, for example). I started talking to parents of other young children and found that nearly universally male children were addressed by the gender pronouns which matched their sex - and nearly universally female children were not.