It's not easy being a man who longs for a woman's world. Which is why, when VICE offered me this column, I decided that it had to be written anonymously. I hope that that doesn't lead you to take me any less seriously - yours, Logan Stuart.
My son was raised for the first four years of his life as a girl-boy. We wanted to create a gender-neutral zone which he could inhabit, where he would be freed from as many stereotypes as possible. While this seemed like nothing more than the means to a utopian end for myself and my life-partner, we weren't naïve.Certainly, we knew that the world out there was doing everything it could to put him in a box marked "male oppressor". That even at pre-school, he would soon be exposed to gender-stereotyping that told him female footballers were worth less than their male counterparts, even though there are no physiological reasons for this to be the case. That breastfeeding in the middle of a fast food restaurant was "unnatural". That women who danced naked for male enjoyment were "sluts", rather than normal people with real hopes and dreams trying to pay their way through university.
But in our own home – thank god – we could still make our own rules.
So we gave our child a gender-neutral name: Sam. Was it Fox or L. Jackson? No one could tell at the outset, and that was the whole point. Even in the hospital, we didn't ask for his gender, instructing the nurses not to tell us. For the first 48 hours, we got my mother to change his nappies, and then tranferred the baby to my father so we couldn't see the reaction on her face, to make it fully double-blind.
When we did peel back the swaddling clothes, it was a boy. No massive tragedy, and we soon regathered ourselves and began putting our plan into action. Instead of gendered toys like guns, dolls or Cluedo, we gave him neutral, gender-unbiased toys to sooth him. As you can imagine, in today's world this was no easy task. It meant that, in the main, his collection of playthings chiefly consisted of various anthropomorphic plastic blobs of one description or another, bought from a lovely woman who runs her own ethical toy shop in Brighton Lanes.
There was a time within that period where it looked like he was identifying too strongly with the colourful plastic blobs. I remember a conversation we had on the subject in which my life-partner openly worried that she didn't want our child to turn out being attracted to colourful plastic blobs. “Neither do I, if I'm honest," I retorted. "But at the same time, surely we need to leave it to make up its own mind?”
Unfortunately, we'd never really gotten over the notion of calling our gender-neutral child "it" – we'd tried various other permutations, but for obvious reasons, it's difficult to make a compound-word out of he and she. Shehe… that had been one week. But it was too clumsy. Another time, we'd adapted the "Ms" template, and just gone with "Se", but that didn't really seem to have a common phonetic way of pronunciation. So "it" it was.
We agreed we would give it another few weeks. But these things have a way of working themselves out in the end. Naturally, we always made him sit down to pee. And we would sometimes put him in a swimsuit so that my life-partner could take him into the girls' changing rooms at the swimming baths. That way he got a range of perspectives on nudity that were both non-threatening and non-arousing. And certainly we didn't refer to his genitals by type – simply termng them "your reproductive organs".
Mostly, people were surprisingly OK with our choice. When he left the house, he would generally be dressed in something neutral – normally a one-piece body-stocking. Or if it was cold, a one-piece puffa-suit. My wife bought several in different neutral colours, like green and beige: they were extremely easy to keep clean.We gave him a gender-neutral bob haircut. And we tried to limit the number of gender-traditional influencers in his life to an absolute minimum – of course, this inevitably led to a decline in the number of parties and social gatherings he went to at school. But when he grows up to hold a prominent position in what will, by then, be a woman-dominated world of work, we're sure that he'll agree with us that it was all worth it. He could be anything – a nurse, a writer for The Independent… perhaps he'll even start his own NGO.
Of course, it couldn't last forever. Heavy was my heart the day I had to sit down and tell him what it meant to be a boy. ('Your reproductive organs are weapons, your reproductive organs are weapons,' was the thought that kept scrolling through my mind– stupid, I know, but of course I picked choicer, less brusque words to break this news to him.)Now that he is nearly 13, I get the sense that he looks back on that stage with a mixture of awe and inspiration. Of course, a lot of what Odd Future have to say is pretty vile stuff, I must admit. And if I weren't validating his individual choices, I wouldn't choose to have it under my roof. Neither do I much care for his interest in the Saw films. But we have tried to make him better, and really, after a few years of total control, you simply have to validate your kids' autonomy, no matter what they turn out to be.Previously: Confessions of a Male Feminist - I Pee Sitting Down