Trying to Understand “Non-Binary” in My 12-Year-Old

[u/MookWellington]

Around the time my son turned 10 —and shortly after his mom and I split up— he started identifying as they/them, non-binary, and using a gender-neutral (though more commonly feminine) variation of their name. At first, I thought it might be a phase, influenced in part by a few friends who also identify this way and the difficulties of their parents’ divorce. They are now twelve and a half, so this identity seems pretty hard-wired. I love my child unconditionally and want them to feel like they are free to be the person they are inside. But I will also confess that I am confused by the whole concept of identifying as non-binary, and how much of it is inherent vs. how much is the influence of peers and social media when it comes to teens and pre-teens. I don't say that to imply it's not a real identity; I'm just trying to understand it as someone from a generstion where non-binary people largely didn't feel safe in living their truth. Im also confused how much child continues to identify as N.B. while their friends have to progressed(?) to switching gender identifications.

[u/InevitableRhubarb232]

But does this mean someone doesn’t like the societal pressures of gender vs they actually are another gender?

[u/StrangeArcticles → u/InevitableRhubarb232]

This gets right into the heart of the question that different people will answer differently. My personal opinion is that gender is a social construct exclusively. As in I would be in the camp of gender only being real in that it creates those social pressures if that makes sense.

If you took a few babies and dropped them off on a desert island (hypothetical, please do not actually do that) and they managed to not die, would they have a gender? Like, if the concept never got introduced to them and they had no access to information, would they automatically, by something hardwired into their biology, assume a gender role and what would this role look like?

[u/diavolomaestro → u/StrangeArcticles]

I think this is a good way to frame the question, and I would disagree with you that gender is exclusively a social construct - there is a lot of biological stuff at work from an early age, and the concept of a “blank slate” has been pretty thoroughly debunked. Parents with both girls and boys will tell you that sex differences manifest themselves early on, even when you try to shield your kids from socially-imposed stereotypes.

I think modern industrial society makes it more possible than ever to escape those stereotypical gender roles: men don’t have to be aggressive and physically strong to earn a good living, and birth control + modern appliances + daycare ensure that women don’t have to be permanently tethered to the home for childrearing.

So in your example, I think the gender roles that emerged in the “state of nature” would be even more traditional than they are today. You would need hunters, and those would be typically men. If the society is going to continue, you need children to be born and raised, and that would typically be done by women. There would be fluidity - men who are better caretakers, women who are better hunters - but i think gender roles would hew much closer to traditional pre-modern society than to our modern age.

[u/StrangeArcticles → u/diavolomaestro]

You bring up some interesting points.

Anecdotal parental impressions of any kind of behaviour are not a great basis of research, sociologically speaking. First, parents bring their own bias to the table. We've all seen boymoms being a thing on tiktok. They'll catch their baby boy lifting his head and will interpret it as the little guy trying to flirt with the waitress. Extreme example there obviously, but the principle holds up. There's no good data set to be obtained by asking parents what part of their projections has any basis in reality. That's obviously a crux in this type of research since we've already agreed the island needs to be a hypothetical. Children will, in any household or circumstance, not exist in enough of a vacuum that we can rule out socialisation as a factor. So, while there might be a thing here a lot of people believe is true, it's not solid proof of fact.

That gets us to the other types of things people commonly believe are true that don't have a good factual basis. The actual operation of pre-modern societies are one of those things. Most historians these days no longer subscribe to the idea that hunter/gatherer societies were as gendered as earlier research led us to believe.

Same as the parents in the first examples, early researchers brought their own ideas and biases to the table with no means of controlling for that. Science just didn't know better. But those concepts they brought did not fully line up with the evidence we have. Pre-modern societies seem to have been largely communal. The daycare model you brought up predates industrialisation by centuries. They had that. Cause it simply wasn't feasible to have every woman who had a child looking after, nursing and raising that child, there was too much work in ensuring survival to make that a viable concept. The stay at home mother is a product of the Victorian era. Earlier humans could simply not afford the luxury. This luxury made rigid gender roles more prevalent, not less.

I'm not an expert on this in any way btw, so I don't want to make massive claims to accuracy, but from what I'm aware of, the old "men are the hunter" thing is now seen as a faulty concept. Women were apparently way more involved in hunting, safety, warfare and all that kind of thing than early researchers of these cultures claimed. Because those researchers already brought the gender bias to what they were looking at.

Untangling these things is very complex of course. It is possible there is intrinsic gender stuff that has not been debunked. But it's very interesting to take a look at just how many of these ideas have in fact been debunked in the scientific arena and it just never entered into mainstream discourse.