“I’m raising my child without gender”

What are you having?” I’d be standing in line at the post office or a movie theatre, and I’d realise a stranger was staring at my belly. The kind person thought they were asking me a simple question with a simple answer: Is it a boy or a girl?

If you want to get technical, my partner, Brent, and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender. The only things we really knew about our baby was that they were human, breech and going to be named Zoomer. We weren’t going to assign a gender or disclose their reproductive anatomy to people who didn’t need to know, and we were going to use the gender-neutral personal pronouns they, them and their.

We imagined it could be years before our child would tell us, in their own way, if they were a boy, a girl, non-binary or if another gender identity fit them best. Until