News emerged this week that a baby in B.C. was issued what is believed to be the first health card in history without a gender ID. Instead of F or M, the baby’s health card reads U, shorthand, most likely, for unspecified.

It may not surprise you that the baby’s parent, Kori Doty, a non-binary transgender person who uses the pronoun “they,” wishes to raise their child genderless — for now at least.

“I do not gender my child,” Doty told reporters this week. “I am not going to foreclose their choices based on an arbitrary assignment of gender at birth based on an inspection of their genitals.”

What will Doty do? Wait till their baby is old enough to make up his or her or their own mind about how he, she or they would like to identify. (I’m totally on board with this stuff, but you do have to admit it makes for quite a mouthful.)

And what will we, the people, do? Take sides of course.

There appears to be two vocal schools of thought when it comes to genderless child rearing. There’s the lefty take: “More power to you! Do whatever is necessary to smash that gender binary!” And then there’s the righty, or you could say the alt-righty take: in the words of Canadian conservative commentator Lauren Southern, on Twitter: “This child’s future is being sacrificed because of its parents’ delusions.” (I knew “they” was in vogue as a pronoun but “it” is a new one.)

I’m going to go mostly left on this one. I don’t see the problem with allowing kids to explore their gender identities and deciding for themselves whether he, she, they or Beyoncé is how they’d like to identify. Knowing a few kids whose parents allow for this kind of exploration probably helps; to my knowledge they are all perfectly healthy and happy. I suspect that most people who think there is something wrong with gender-variant kids don’t know any. And anyway, I think it’s vastly more important that kids have good manners than that they cleave to gender convention. I can abide a cross-dressing child, but I can’t abide a rude one.

That said: I’ve become a little bit uncomfortable in recent years with the zeal that some of my lefty brethren have exhibited for this kind of exploration among children. It’s one thing to give kids the reins on their gender journeys — as Doty is giving them to her baby — but it’s another thing altogether to take the reins from them.

In one of her recent columns, Globe and Mail columnist Leah McLaren writes that she signed her now 4-year-old son up for ballet class because he went through a phase of “rejecting all things ‘girlish.’ ” I’m sure McLaren is a great parent but this attempt to steer a kid toward playing with gender norms by imposing recreational activities on him that he would otherwise avoid, is, I think, a little misguided. So is the suggestion made by British politician Jo Swinson in 2015 that boys should be encouraged to play with dolls so that they may become more nurturing and caring.

But what takes the cake in misguidedness is the notion that parents should actually intervene in play itself. Here’s the Huffington Post last month, extolling the virtues of “norm-challenging parenting” inspired by the Swedish parenting book Show your Child 100 Possible Ways instead of 2: “Move the toys around in your child’s room and put them in new places. Let the Batman action figures move into the toy kitchen. Spiderman can “play house” and Barbie can be the superhero. When participating in your child’s play, try switching and replacing gender pronouns and see what happens; for example, refer to the teddy bear as she if it’s usually called he.”

Or here’s a novel idea: don’t micromanage your kid’s play at all. Let them use their toys as they see fit and if they choose to put Ken in Barbie’s dress (a tight squeeze), or Batman in the bassinet then good for them. Smile and act like it’s no big deal because it isn’t. But intruding in your kids’ play and directing them toward a more gender exploratory path is just as backwards as asking a kid to conform to traditional gender norms. Exploration shouldn’t be an imperative. It should be a known option.

It was for me. I feel very strongly about this not because I have an affinity for traditional gender norms but precisely because I don’t and never did. Like a lot of lesbians, I was a huge tomboy as a kid. I don’t mean I liked to play with my brother’s G.I. Joes. I mean I had my own collection and I didn’t wear girl’s clothes or shop in the girls department until puberty. Until about Grade 3 I was routinely mistaken for a boy — and bullied as a result. But my parents, thank God, were totally accommodating. They didn’t make me play with dolls and they didn’t make me wear dresses. They just let me be.

If I had been born a boy with typical boyish interests I’d like to think they’d have done the same. Letting kids be themselves doesn’t always mean they’re going to be different. And that’s OK. If you want to let your kid choose their gender, go ahead. But respect that choice — even if it’s conventional.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Read more about: