My neighbours in the Netherlands just had a baby and have proudly decorated their window with pink balloons and a garland saying: ”Hooray, a girl!”
This would probably be shocking to a new category of Swedish parents, who refuse to reveal the sex of their baby to family and friends as well as to daycare staff. The baby is given a gender-neutral name, and will be dressed in anything but pink and light-blue.
Why? The parents don’t want their child to be subjected to society’s division of human beings into male and female, claiming that the stereotypes linked to it limit the child’s freedom.
While this remains rather rare, there is a rapidly increasing number of preschools in Sweden where gender equality is the main ideological and educational basis.
In these schools, the staff strives to treat girls and boys equally in all respects. They don’t hide the fact that both sexes exist, but don’t make a point of it and won’t encourage the children to play and behave in a way that is typical for their sex. They won’t call them girls and boys, but refer to them as ”friends” or ”children”.
Conveniently enough, a new pronoun is making its way into the Swedish language: ”hen”, meaning both ”he” and ”she” (”han” and ”hon” in Swedish). When the practice of using ”he” for both sexes in law texts was changed to the more cumbersome ”he or she”, texts became difficult to read and people started looking for other solutions.
The idea of ”hen” comes from the Finnish language (although Finnish is completely different from Swedish; its closest relative among European languages is Hungarian), which uses the pronoun ”hän” for both sexes. Apart from being used in texts to increase readability, the Swedish pronoun ”hen” is now used by advocates of gender neutrality.
The new pronoun and gender-neutral preschools are hot topics in Sweden right now. An increasing number of people like and make use of them, but a big part of the population is very critical towards them.
Sweden is one of the leading countries when it comes to gender equality. Thanks to the important work that has been done in this regard, women and men now basically have the same opportunities in all areas of life.
When gender equality turns into gender neutrality, however, are we still going in the right direction? Isn’t there a risk that gender-neutral treatment introduces another type of prejudice? When girls behave in a traditionally girly way, and boys behave in a traditionally boyish manner, will this be happily accepted or will they feel that their behaviour is wrong? Will there be a new ideal of tough girls and soft boys, as some critics fear?
How will children develop when their parents actively try to conceal what sex they are? Will they think that it’s bad to be a boy or a girl? Will they revolt against their upbringing and shower their own daughters with princess stuff, and their sons with cars and toy guns? Or will these children simply be freer and more unprejudiced than those who grow up in more traditional families, and contribute to a positive change in society?
Time will show.
What are you thoughts on this modern, Swedish approach to gender equality?
Kristina was born in Hamburg, Germany, but moved to Sweden at the age of 8 (her mother is German, her father Swedish). She studied French and linguistics and works as a translator. At the moment she lives in the Netherlands with her French husband and their two daughters, aged 17 months and 4 years. Kristina is interested in psychology and right now particularly focuses on child and family psychology. Working three days a week and being a full-time mom the remaining days, she doesn’t find as much time to read, write and practice yoga and music as she would like, but appreciates her early mornings in trains. There is nothing like contemplating an awakening landscape from a train with a cup of hot chocolate.
The image used in this post is credited to Jonathan Stonehouse. It holds a Flickr Creative Commons attribution license.
I believe that anything, when taken to the extreme, does more harm than good! My kids are practically “grown up” (20 and 17 years old respectively). I dressed up my little girl in pink and my boy in blue … but I also allowed my little girl to play with cars and my boy to play with dolls. We simply did not “make a fuss” about gender roles. As a result both are equally comfortable baking as they are tending the yard, and both are equally comfortable relating to both male and female friends. My honest opinion is that “political correctness” has been taken too far and that everyone should just relax and enjoy their children for who they are!
Yes, Simona, I also believe that everything should come in moderation. My girls also play with many things including lego and other kinds of blocks, and my boy even has a really cute blue boy doll! My girls are mostly dressed in pinkish, my boy wears blue but they also have other colours.
Completely with you … there was an article over here a while back about a couple who were not telling anyone the gender of their child .. and it was a secret. This even included their other child not being able to tell … was a bit much.
I hadn’t heard of this before. It’s really interesting as an idea, but I am not sure how I would feel about it yet. Not because I am strict with gender identity norms. Not at all. But I also haven’t thought through how that looks as the kids are older. Puberty? Adolescence? Hmmm….how will it all work?
I didn’t know things were this extreme in Sweden nowadays!
There are some things I do agree on, like having a unisex ‘hen’ instead of han or hon. That would certainly be convenient when writing.
I don’t know yet how I feel about gender-neutrality. I like it as a principle, since I very strongly believe children should be able to play as they choose. In fact I don’t like my daughter wearing pink, since it is so stereotypical. Before she arrived, we had strong resolutions on not buying pink stuff for her. But than we saw how she was drawn to it. And along the way, we decided ‘fuchsia’ was not really pink. Neither was ‘old pink’. And now, well, she seems to wear pink and sparkly thing nearly every day. But I still don’t like it. I do like seeing her in dresses and skirts, which she doesn’t like. Sigh.
With extreme gender-neutrality, I’m indeed afraid girls will grow up believing it is wrong to wear pretty (pink) skirts and boys will be reluctant to show they really like dinosaurs. I guess they should prepare for a troubled puberty…
So interesting, Kristina!! I don’t know where to begin. I’m so curious to see how the children will see the world, if differently or the same, growing up in this culture, but I also wonder about the extremism. Can’t we still celebrate being a girl? Or celebrate being boy?
Great reporting!
Jen 🙂
Good grief.
I would rather celebrate each child for who they are rather than by gender and have three VERY masculine boys who used to dress in fairy-dresses and play ‘fairies fishing’…often!
But I would also hate not to acknowledge they are boys and would worry they didn’t feel comfortable with their boyishness in a gender neutral situation…anyhoo, I wonder if it really can be done?
Thanks for all your comments!
Like many of you, I also don’t quite know how I fell about gender neutrality. I don’t particularly like the word: it gives the idea that the goal would be to eradicate the differences between the sexes, that everyone should be the same – when, at least in my opinion, it should be to allow children to explore the world freely without judging them when they go against the norm of what girls and boys “should” do (or, for that matter, go against other norms – as long as they are not hurting anyone).
Concerning clothes: When my first daughter was born, a friend told me she had baby clothes for girls that she could pass on to me, as her recently born second child was a boy. I was – honestly – surprised: a baby is a baby, what do you mean? I hadn’t realized to what extent already baby clothes are addressed to boys and girls. When I found out, it made me quite sad – especially for the boys’ sake. Girls have access to everything – all the colours and shapes – but boys are supposed to look like little bankers or football players already in the cradle. In this area, much can be done.
I was smiling when I read your comment, K10K – When my daughter was a baby I bought clothes in all sorts of colours for her (I never much liked pink), but now it’s mostly pink and purple, because she likes it. But does she like it because she is a girl or because she sees other girls wearing it and wants to wear the same thing, as she identifies with them? Would a boy want to wear pink and purple and sparkly things as well if society didn’t go against it?