Kate Hudson raising daughter 'genderless': 'We still don’t know what she's going to identify as'
Actress Kate Hudson recently revealed that she is raising her daughter "genderless" until her child decides how she wants to identify.
"It doesn’t really change my approach, but there’s definitely a difference. I think you just raise your kids individually regardless — like a genderless [approach]" Hudson, an Oscar-nominated actress said in an interview with AOL.com last week, when asked if raising a girl will change her parenting style. Hudson is also a mom of two boys.
"We still don’t know what she's going to identify as," she said of her baby girl, Rani Rose, who was born in October. Pronounced like "Ronnie," she was named after her current boyfriend's father.
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At present, the actress said, her daughter is "incredibly feminine in her energy, her sounds and her way."
Hudson is not the only celebrity indicating that she is adopting a or "genderless" approach with regard to parenting.
Singer Pink boasted in 2017 about raising her kids in a "gender-neutral" way, praising the fact that children are having the conversation about gender, after having seen a bathroom sign at a local kindergarten that read "Gender Neutral – anybody" and calling it "progress."
The more extreme version of a "genderless" approach to parenting has been called raising "theybies," where parents do not disclose the sex of their child and use plural pronouns "they, them, and their" when addressing them, so the kids can decide for themselves if, when and how they wish to identify. Raising kids this way, their parents say, is to allow them to be free from stereotypes.
In July, liberal commentator Cathy Areu defended the idea on Tucker Carlson's Fox News program, saying that it is fine for parents not to label their kids and that the children can choose for themselves what gender they want to be around age 4. Choosing one's gender is "not a profound life decision," she maintained.
Critics argue that refusing to tell children the truth about their bodies, which declares biological sex both in DNA and in anatomy, is distorting reality. Central to the notion that a child can be raised "genderless" is that biological sex is materially unimportant.
"There's something very particular and intentional about male and female in the created order in the creation narrative in Genesis 1," Jerry Walls, philosophy professor at Houston Baptist University, said in an interview with The Christian Post in July regarding the "theybies" phenomenon.
"And to mess and play around with this is really an assault on something utterly fundamental.
"It's easy to laugh this off as a few zany, fringe people, and maybe that's all it is for the moment. But there's something really serious going on in that fundamental challenge."
He added: "Yes, you can teach little girls to be strong. You can teach little boys to be sensitive, kind, and gentle. You can teach girls to be leaders. Nothing wrong with any of that, and that's perfectly fitting with the creation design. Yet in order to correct what they see as these stereotypes, they're reaching for an extreme measure way out of proportion to the nature of the problem."
