Skylar was born a girl, meaning they were assigned female at birth by their doctors. Today, Skylar identifies as male. Their preferred pronouns are he/him or they/them.

I raised Skylar as a girl. Up until a few years ago, they were, in my mind, unequivocally my daughter. Long hair and pretty dresses were their thing, but so were hunting for bugs, dreaming of dinosaurs, and digging in the dirt. I didn’t expect Skylar to play with dolls, or for them to be a princess on Halloween when they preferred Legos and Dracula costumes. Skylar’s preferences often swung toward what society might deem boyish things, but then again, they were a sucker for a skirt they could really twirl in.

Skylar didn’t come to me as a young child and proclaim that they were not a girl or that they felt like they were born into the wrong body. In fact, there were no conversations with Skylar regarding them not feeling in alignment with the sex and gender of their birth until puberty.

When Skylar did begin to express feelings of being transgender, it wasn’t easy for me. I felt incredible internal resistance, even loss. But I also knew that Skylar did feel safe enough to explore these feelings and to lean on me for guidance and support.

Now, Skylar is moving out, leaving California for Oregon. As they get ready to launch, it makes me question if my parenting, which looking back, might be labeled gender neutral, has prepared them for a world outside our family’s orbit—a world where gender roles are fraught with divisiveness.

The word neutral has many meanings: indifferent, impartial, disengaged. When you talk about neutrality in terms of parenting, it means something completely different. In the past few years, there has been a growing resurrection of the conversation around gender-neutral or gender-responsive parenting.

This kind of parenting was already a thing by the early ’70s, when I was a quintessential girl: shy and bookish, I hated sports, loved my dolls, and could spend a perfect summer afternoon watching soap operas with my grandma. My mom was an interesting mix of traditional and hippie who insisted on good manners and “ladylike” behavior, but who also wanted me and my sister to be original thinkers and stand on our own two feet.

When Skylar was growing up, Erin M. Eichinger writes that she always encouraged them to be “free” to be themselves: someone who loved to twirl in skirts and hunt for bugs.

Eichinger set out to raise Skylar (pictured) and her other three children with an awareness of gender identities that are “unique, fluid, and complex.”

Looking back, Eichinger writes that she wouldn’t change much about her parenting style, aside from being even more conscious and intentional around language and her attitudes surrounding gender roles.

When I was around 5, Mom gave me a copy of the children’s album Free to Be You and Me, which came out in 1972.

At the heart of the album was a message about gender-neutral parenting that encouraged kids and adults to see themselves in ways that broke loose from rigid notions of what it meant to be a boy or a girl. Boys can play with dolls. Girls can run fast.  And, it’s okay for all of us to cry.   Tapping into the Gloria Steinem-style feminism of the time, the album was a reaction to a hyper-gendered postwar America, where marketers painted everything in shades of pink or blue.

Free to Be You and Me provided a new vision of how things could be. I wore that record out, playing it on my white suitcase record player until I knew every song and story by heart.

About 25 years passed from the first time I listened to the album to when I became a mom myself. My approach to parenting my three step kids and Skylar, my first and only born, turned out to be fairly gender neutral. I taught my kids that boys and girls are a lot more alike than they are different. I encouraged them to be “free” to wear whatever they like; play however they like and be however they like.

I was winging it, with Free to Be You and Me as my compass.

Skylar hopes to be a parent themselves one day, and their thoughts on gender-neutral parenting are interesting: “I would keep things neutral when it comes to my child. I would use neutral pronouns, names, toys, and clothes.”

While Skylar realizes that total neutrality would be an impossibility, they would try, at least with those in the child’s inner circle, to maintain as neutral an environment as possible.

If this caused confusion, once the child had more contact with people outside their family group,  Skylar feels that it could be a launching point for communication. “It would be a way to talk to them about gender from a young age, like kids who are raised always knowing they are adopted. They may not understand the concept when they are little, but once they do, there is no fear around it.”

Many people seem to think gender neutrality is something completely new and foreign.

What I’ve come to believe is that we have a generation of young people who are giving us a new lexicon surrounding gender. They are not describing a new phenomenon; they are, as historian Laura Lovett has noted, “resuscitating an old movement, not creating a new one.”

As far as public discussions around gender go, we have made great strides, and yet with that, comes pushback. In 2024, there have been more than 600 anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in 43 states. In Florida, the state board of medicine is acting to block any kind of gender-affirming care for people under the age of 18, even with parental consent. In California, Elon Musk announced he’d be moving his Space X headquarters out of the state. This, in response to a bill that bans teachers from forcibly outing transgender students to their families. Musk is the father of a transgender daughter from whom he is estranged, and he blames her California private school education for “making her trans.”

Gender roles are imprecise, constantly changing, and ever-evolving. Because of this nebulous quality, they are often confusing and even misleading. As a pushback to what they see as socially imposed rules, some parents today are taking the concept of neutrality in parenting even further, a strict concealment of their baby’s gender from all but a small circle of caretakers. In doing so, they aim to make the child’s formative years completely free of gender markers or stereotypes. Think gender-neutral names, clothing, and toys. Definitely no gender-reveal parties. At some point, the thinking goes, the child will naturally express their gender with no need for any outside influence.

This reminds me of the widely read short story about “Baby X,” a fictional child whose gender is revealed to only a select few. The piece was published in Ms. magazine in 1978, just a few years after Free to Be You and Me—and it pushed readers to question the impact gender roles have on children and society at large.

While my approach of raising children with an awareness of gender identities that are unique, fluid, and complex feels right, the idea of raising kids with total neutrality seems unnecessary to me. I wonder if the practice could be needlessly confusing, leading to misinterpretations and misunderstanding for the child and those who love them, not to mention the level of watchfulness required on the parent’s part.

If I had the chance to raise Skylar again, I am not sure I would change my parenting style. Maybe I would be more conscious around language or more intentional about my attitudes surrounding gender roles.

Here’s the tricky part about raising kids: If you do a good job, the reward is that they become one of your favorite people in the whole world. The other reward is that they learn to stand on their own two feet. And then, they leave you.

So, you help them leave. You break your own heart in service of their future and you wonder if you have prepared them for the world out there.

So, here I am, helping my child take their next step. As I look into the proverbial rearview mirror, to the kid Skylar was, and to the adult they are becoming, I can only hope I prepared them well. I hope too, that when they look into the mirror, they see what I see: a funny, loving, wicked smart, and compassionate person.

What else could a parent want for their child?

The post Parenting Beyond the Gender Binary appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For example, in his recently published book Midlife, the MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya looks at the topic from a philosophical perspective. Declaring gender differences irrelevant, Setiya presents the quest for self-knowledge as an endeavor that concerns primarily men: the author himself (who experienced a crisis at the age of 35) and the great men of philosophy, from John Stuart Mill to Arthur Schopenhauer. When he reads Leo Tolstoy, the moral philosopher is interested in Count Vronsky, not the title heroine Anna Karenina.

What has almost entirely dropped out of sight is that the midlife crisis was initially a feminist idea that became popular in the mid-1970s. Back then, “midlife crisis” described how men and women abandoned traditional gender roles: Approaching 40, women re-entered the world of work, while their husbands stepped in to help at home.

But in the years since then, the tale of the midlife crisis has come to focus on men in a way that bolsters gender hierarchies, rather than challenging them. Indeed, the male midlife crisis has been used to limit women’s rights and advancement.

It was the Yale social psychologist Daniel Levinson who presented one of the earliest formulations of the male midlife crisis, which circulated widely in the media and professional psychological community. In 1978, he published The Seasons of a Man’s Life, based on a study of 40 men between 35 and 45 years old, mostly white and educated. It depicted the “midlife decade” as a period of change, during which men reinvented themselves. The book’s key case study, “Jim Tracy,” was a vice president and general manager at a Connecticut-based arms manufacturer. After a series of sexual escapades, he divorced his wife and married a younger woman, then left the corporation to open his own business. Levinson held that such a “mid-life transition” or “mid-life crisis” (a term coined by the psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques in the 1950s, but not widely used until 20 years later) was a universal feature of human life, shared across social and cultural differences.

However, Levinson made an exclusion to the concept: He did not study women’s lives, interviewing the 40 men’s wives only to learn about their husbands. Despite this lack of empirical evidence, the psychologist’s description of the male midlife crisis was closely tied to his understanding of women’s roles: At a time when the women’s movement was widely popular in the United States, influencing public opinion as much as social policy and legislation, Levinson opposed the transformations in women’s lives. He used psychological research to bar women from changing their lives.

In Seasons, Levinson emphasized the importance of marriage to a man in his twenties and early thirties. He used the term “special woman” to describe the devoted at-home wife and mother who helped a man to become successful, or, in Levinson’s terms, fulfill his “Dream,” a concept borrowed from the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. If the “special woman” had a job at all, it was as an unmarried woman seeking a husband, or in an occupation such as teaching or nursing “where she is appropriately maternal, sub-ordinate and non-competitive with men.”

Levinson stressed the significance of separate spheres—breadwinning father, homemaking mother—to a man’s professional advancement by contrasting the “special” with the “liberated” woman whose involvement in a career produced “bitter discontent and conflict” in a marriage and was in his view against nature: “It is hard enough to form a life structure around one person’s Dream. Building a structure that can contain the Dreams of both partners is a heroic task indeed, and one for which evolution and history have ill prepared us.”

The psychologist highlighted the motherly implications of a perfect wife’s virtues. She was “generally maternal and caring and makes things easier for him.” Drawing again on Winnicott’s well-known definition of the “good enough mother,” Levinson compared the “good enough” wife’s relationship to her husband to that of a mother and child. Like a boy’s mother, too, the special woman was a “transitional figure”: “During early adulthood, a man is struggling to outgrow the little boy in himself and to become a more autonomous adult. The special woman can foster his adult aspirations […]. Later, in the Mid-life Transition, he will have to become a more individual person. With further development, he will be more complete in himself and will have less need of the […] special woman.”

A man’s midlife crisis, then, was a justification for abandoning his wife. As relevant as she had been in their 20s and early 30s, for the middle-aged man, his wife was “neither necessary nor desirable.” The professional success the at-home wife had helped to build was no longer the established 40-year-old’s priority; indeed, at middle age, her “special” qualities were considered “overly controlling,” “smothering,” “depriving and humiliating.” And just as for Winnicott, the child did not owe its mother anything—she was “devoted” by nature—so for Levinson, the husband had no obligations toward his wife, while her responsibilities continued nonetheless. The psychologist bemoaned that many wives did not fully “appreciate” their husbands’ “need for a greater measure of autonomy,” and that some even acted as a “destructive witch or selfish bitch using both her strength and her weakness to keep him in line and prevent him from becoming what he truly wants to be.”

Not just a reiteration of gender stereotypes, Levinson’s concept of midlife crisis was anti-feminist. By excluding women from his concept of midlife change, the psychologist banned them from redefining their lives and seeking self-fulfillment outside the home. For Levinson, women’s liberation hindered men from releasing their full potential.

Levinson claimed that a woman’s “growing assertiveness and freedom” in middle age would result in her partner’s “severe decline.” He warned of the moment when a wife “becomes the voice of development and change,” “takes the initiative in reappraising the marriage,” and “seeks to expand her own horizons and start new enterprises outside the home.” Levinson cautioned that “the husband may then become the voice of the status quo. Moreover, a man who feels that his own youthfulness is in jeopardy may be more threatened than pleased. […] He has less authority […] and feels increasingly obsolescent […]. Where this occurs, it is a serious problem for the entire family.” Several years later, Levinson’s follow-up The Seasons of a Woman’s Life argued at book-length that in midlife, women discovered that it was impossible for them to find satisfaction in work or professional careers. A woman’s place was in the home.

Levinson’s idea came with scientific credentials and it was quickly picked up in the academy and beyond. The science writer Robert Kanigel expressed the thoughts of many critics when he praised Seasons as a profound and life-changing book: “I came away weak with wonder at the drama in every human life.” For Richard Rhodes, the widely published writer and historian, Levinson’s work was not just “authoritative” but indeed “as important and fully as extraordinary, as Kinsey’s [reports on human sexual behavior].”

During the 1980s, as an anti-feminist backlash became widespread in the United States, Levinson’s ideas were frequently reiterated. Psychological and psychiatric experts who published on the topic, often with reference to Levinson’s Seasons, were now joined by physicians. In his 1984 book Crisis Time!, the prominent surgeon Robert Nolen suggested married women wait for their husbands—two years seemed an appropriate benchmark—and consider the situation: “Can she absolutely not tolerate his relationships with other women? Or can she write it off as ‘men will be men’?” Similarly, the Californian psychiatrist Jim Stanley, who regularly treated middle-aged couples, charged women for holding “unrealistic” expectations of men and advised them to be understanding, patient, and “more accepting” of their husbands’ midlife behavior.

In 1989, Levinson himself capitalized on the continued success of his theory and turned Seasons into a documentary. Broadcast on PBS, Halftime: Five Men at Midlife chronicled the midlife crises of five male Yale graduates, Class of 1963, selected by Levinson, who also interviewed them at length in front of the camera (individually and in a group session). Among them were Hollywood executive Steve Sohmer, complete with fat cigar, Rolls Royce, and Rolex, who talked about his experience of going through multiple marriages, love affairs, and jobs, and Mike Redman, a former Olympian, who aired his anger over his wife’s request for a divorce.

By then, the male midlife crisis was an accepted cultural phrase. Its academic cachet allowed it to parade as a scientific, methodologically rigorous discovery. Even now, many are unaware of the profoundly anti-feminist stance that motivated the idea of men’s midlife crisis. As a defensive reaction against the women’s movement, Levinson’s definition of the midlife crisis drew on the language of personal development to stabilize gender hierarchies and prevent women from changing their lives. Retelling this account of the male midlife crisis today—tuning out Anna Karenina’s story in favor of Vronsky—means nourishing a narrative that has played important political roles.

The post How Feminists Invented the Male Midlife Crisis appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.