Is it possible to raise your child entirely without gender from birth? Meet the parents raising theybies
For months leading up to the birth of his child, Bobby McCullough was nervous. His partner, Lesley Fleishman, had enjoyed an easy and uncomplicated pregnancy. The couple’s sunny Brooklyn apartment was now stocked with a crib and diapers and soft, tiny clothes. They were as ready to enter parenthood as any two people could be, and they welcomed it. But still, McCullough worried that the first few seconds of his child’s life would unfurl like some Hollywood script, the wriggling newborn lifted up into the air while “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl” rang out across the hospital room — both pronouncement and fate. “It just would have fucked us up,” he says now, eight weeks later, as, nuzzled against his chest, his tiny baby sleeps, a sweetly mewing black-haired dollop of a human. And so he told hospital staff, “ ‘At minimum, do not describe the anatomy, or what you think the anatomy means, when this baby’s born.’ We definitely wanted to prevent them being gendered in any intense moment. And everybody was aware of that.”
In fact, McCullough and Fleishman already knew what anatomy their child would have. They’d learned it toward the end of the first trimester through a fairly routine test and had instinctually sent an email to close friends and family with the news. They didn’t particularly care what the baby’s sex was but also didn’t feel that it needed to be kept a secret. Then, just a few days later, an article showed up in McCullough’s Facebook feed about a Canadian baby who had been issued a health card without a gender designation — perhaps the first instance in the world of a government entity not assigning a gender at birth. For McCullough, this was a revelation. “Definitely the concept of not enforcing gender stereotypes was something that was on our radar, but we simply didn’t know or have the idea on our own to not assign the baby a gender,” he says. He began scouring the internet, looking for more information, for other families who might have made the same choice, for guidelines as to how one might go about it. He found a Facebook group and asked to join. Soon he was privy to the names and photos and thoughts and conversations of a small but hard-core group of families who were raising theybies — babies whose parents had decided not to reveal their sex, who used they/them pronouns for their children, and whose goal was to create an early childhood free of gendered ideas of how a child should dress, act, play, and be.
For McCullough, who is black and describes himself as an “outspoken ally” of the trans community, it was a sort of utopia come to life. “This specific group really empowered the hell out of us to do this,” he says. “It was my favorite place to go on the internet. It was just like, ‘Wow, there’s something that we can do parenting-wise that completely goes with our value system.’ ”
Fleishman was at work when, armed with several articles, McCullough reached out with the idea that their baby should be a theyby. At first, she wasn’t so sure. “It sounds a little ‘cas,’ ” — as in casual — “like, ‘I was just browsing Facebook and then we made a major life decision off our newsfeed,’ ” she tells me later, sitting next to McCullough on the sofa in their living room. “As a concept, I was always like, ‘Sure, this makes total sense.’ But it was just the pronouns conversation. I mean, having a baby is already difficult, but then having to explain that to your grandma?” By the next day, however, she’d come around to the idea. It would be sometimes hard and sometimes confusing and sometimes uncomfortable, but it was, she says, “the right thing to do.”