TIME

I didn’t assign a gender to my kid. It’s up to them to decide what identity fits them best

WHAT ARE YOU HAVING?” I’D be standing in line at the post office or a movie theater, and I’d realize 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 is 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 and We imagined it could be years before our child would tell us, in their own way, if they were a boy, a girl, nonbinary or if another gender identity fit them best. Until then, we were committed

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from TIME

TIME2 min read
A Man In Full, Adapted And Redacted
Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full is a massive book, in more ways than one. The 742-page social novel about a swaggering Atlanta real estate mogul, which took Wolfe over a decade to write, sold a jaw-dropping 1.4 million hardcover copies after its publicatio
TIME3 min read
Modi-fying India
In April, two Indian writers published an ode to their Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Titled “Forever in Our Hearts,” it recounts his achievements while singing his praises. Such gushing reverence captures the essence of Modi’s popularity at home and
TIME1 min readInternational Relations
Protests Spread
Members of a student protest movement in support of Palestinian civilians link arms on Columbia University’s Manhattan campus on April 18. When the protesters, who called on Columbia to divest from companies that supply weapons to Israel, refused to

Related Books & Audiobooks