A couple of times a week, I’d do a big ‘centre-spread’ feature for the Cambridge News about anything local and interesting that caught my eye. This local and verrrrry interesting story about a woman who’d decided to bring up her child to be ‘gender neutral’ became, in the words of my boss, a ‘global media shitstorm’. It made headlines around the world, was discussed on everything from Radio 4’s Today programme to Loose Women, and was picked up by every British broadsheet and tabloid. And won me an award. Even so, my original story is no longer available on the web - UNTIL NOW! Enjoy.
Beck Laxton gave her baby son a neutral name, and for months refused to tell anyone if he was a boy or a girl. She tells EMMA HIGGINBOTHAM why – and why she’s happy to dress Sasha, now 5, in girls’ clothes.
Sitting in a circle at a mother and baby group, the new mums excitedly introduced themselves and their infants, each adorably clad in a pink or blue babygrow. Except one.
“I was the last person to introduce myself, and I said 'I'm Beck, and this is Sasha’. And of course somebody said straight away 'So is it a boy or a girl?' and I said 'I'm not going to tell you,’” grins Beck Laxton.
“I discovered later that I’d been described as ‘that loony woman who doesn’t know whether her baby is a boy or a girl’. And I could never persuade anyone in the group to come round for coffee. They just thought I was mental…”
Beck, who’s 46, may not be mental, but she’s certainly eccentric: after all, concealing the sex of your baby is hardly the norm.
So why did she do it? “Because I wanted to avoid all that stereotyping,” she shrugs. “Stereotypes seem fundamentally stupid. Why would you want to slot people into boxes? It’s like horoscopes: what could be stupider than thinking there are 12 types of personality that depend on when you were born? It’s so idiotic.”
But for Beck, slotting a child into a ‘male’ or ‘female’ box isn’t just idiotic, it’s potentially damaging. “It affects what they wear and what they can play with, and that shapes the kind of person that they become. And if that’s skewing their potential, then it is wrong.
“That’s when I start to get cross about it: it’s not just a harmless bit of silliness, like horoscopes, it’s actually harmful.”
Beck, a web editor who also designs and edits her village magazine, Sawston Scene, has been questioning stereotypes since childhood: “My mother’s very sporty and practical, and my dad was very emotional. We’d watch The Wizard of Oz and always start crying, whereas my mum would think we were really soppy. So it’s always seemed obvious to me that stereotypes didn’t fit the people I knew.”
A self-confessed ‘radical feminist’, Beck never intended to have children, until a romance with a father-of-three changed her mind. The relationship didn’t last, but the biological pull did and, aged 39, she began to explore artificial insemination. Then she met Kieran: “I don’t believe in love at first sight, but it pretty much was. Kappow! He moved in less than three months later.”
Kieran already had two young children, and was happy to have another. A year later, Beck became pregnant, but finding out the sex at the ultrasound scan was a definite no-no: “I think that’s awful. I’d ban it! It’s like opening your presents before Christmas, and I worry that people start making all these presumptions about what the child’s going to be like, which is just stupid.”
An idea began to form in Beck’s head. What if no-one knew the sex of her baby, even when it was born? The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea, and duly drew up a list of gender-neutral names.
Sasha’s birth – at home, drug-free – was quick, and the midwives were asked not to announce the baby’s sex; instead, they simply wrapped him in a towel: “and we actually didn’t look for about half an hour.” Wasn’t she curious? “I was a bit, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t making any assumptions myself. So we just sat there, a bit zonked, just gazing at Sash, and at each other.”
They broke the news to family and close friends by email, simply stating they’d had a baby called Sasha, “and there were a couple of people who assumed it was a boy, because that’s the default: something's male unless you say it isn't,” says Beck. “I thought that was very interesting.”
The couple did tell family and friends if pressed, but strangers were kept firmly out of the loop. A keen blogger, Beck refused to reveal his sex online either, simply referring to him as ‘the infant’.
In fact the secret was kept until the following summer, when Sasha took to running around naked in the garden: “So unless we'd given him a willy patch, there's no way we could've kept him under wraps,” she grins.
Yet Beck has continued to battle gender stereotypes. At their (television-free) home, Sasha, now 5, is encouraged to play with gender-neutral toys, as well as plenty of dolls (“except Barbie; she’s banned because she’s horrible”), and Beck won’t dress him in overtly masculine clothes: no skulls, camouflage or combats.
Conversely she’s happy to put Sasha in pink, partly for money-saving reasons: hand-me-downs from Kieran's daughter now fit him, and Beck is a self-confessed jumble sale rummager: “and if you buy second hand, you have to take what there is.”
But she also admits to an ulterior motive: to make mums who choose overtly ‘girly’ garb for their daughters think about what they're doing.
“These women dress them up like dolls, but they’re not dressed like that, so why are they doing it to their children?
“I helped out at playgroup a couple of times, and the girls all sat in the sandpit, while the boys were running around, throwing things and having fun. The girls were really, really boring!
“Almost none of them wore trousers; they were wearing tights, boots, miniskirts, little waistcoats. Fussy things, impractical things, uncomfortable things that restricted their movement and that they had to look after. And only one had sensible short hair; the rest of them had long, tangly, tied-back, fussy hair with clips and dangly bits.
“A friend of mine said the other day ‘My daughter lost her hair clip again’, and I thought, well, if she’s got some prissy thing she’s got to take care of, and she gets told off if she loses it, then she has to be picky about it - and then she becomes a person who’s slightly prissy and picky. But you’ve made her like that!
“She can’t climb a tree because she’s wearing a skirt, so then she can’t climb very well. But you did that, because you shaped her environment. You shaped what she could do!”
And that, says Beck, has an impact later in life. “I wonder whether the reason that childbirth was easy for me was because I do a lot of physically active things, like rock climbing. I know what my body can do, so give me something that’s absolutely at my physical limits, like childbirth, and I have confidence that my body will get through it.
“But I can’t imagine what it’s like to be suddenly forced to have that physical experience when you’d never done anything physical before. Of course you’d be freaking out and asking for drugs that would numb your whole body. It seems obvious to me.”
Sasha’s school uniform is another of Beck’s bugbears. She bemoans the uniform list, where cardigans are officially ‘girls only’, and shows me a white polo shirt Sasha wears for school: with its ruched sleeves and scalloped collar, it’s clearly intended for a girl.
Has he ever been teased about it? Have other parents pointed at him? “Nobody’s ever mentioned it,” she shrugs, “and I would hope that if they actually said something to Sasha, he’d be confident enough to make a good response.
“I don’t think I’d do it if I thought it was going to make him unhappy, but at the moment he’s not really bothered either way. We haven’t had any difficult scenarios yet.”
Out of school, Beck thinks nothing of putting Sasha in flowery tops, and is adamant that he doesn’t mind: “He wouldn’t say anything about flowers, because nobody has ever told him that flowers are for girls. And I don’t see why they should be! Why do the girls get the flowers? It’s not fair! I’ve often bought flowers for blokes, and they’ve never been anything other than thrilled.
“So he’d be very unlikely to say ‘I won’t wear the pink flowery one because everyone will laugh at me’. Either that doesn’t happen, or he doesn’t really notice it.”
His all-in-one pink swimsuit – complete with glittery butterflies – is undeniably an eyebrow-raiser too: “But children like sparkly things,” insists Beck. “And if someone thought Sasha was a girl because he was wearing a pink swimming costume, then what effect would that have?!”
So is she hoping that dressing Sasha in pink will change anything? “Yes. If it just made one person think ‘no, I won’t put that frilly dress on her because it’s a bit silly’ or ‘yeah, if he really likes that doll, then that’s okay,’ then that would be really brilliant. All I want to do is make people think a bit.”
And will she mind if Sasha grows up to be a butch rugby player or, indeed, a hairdresser? “I just want him to fulfil his potential, and I wouldn’t push him in any direction,” says Beck.
“As long as he has good relationships and good friends, then nothing else matters, does it? What’s more important than being happy, and making other people happy? It’s all that matters.”
January 2012 (c) Cambridge News