Raising my son has taught me that unconscious gender bias runs deep

The interests of my 17-month-old son align pretty spectacularly with the archetypal boy.

For one, he is obsessed with cars. He spends his mornings lining up his little plastic vehicles on the windowsill before driving them across every surface he can reach. He loves cars almost as much as he loves airplanes – which he can spot whether they are flying directly overhead or are tiny specks far in the distance.

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When he does see a plane, he raises his arm in the air, almost as if saluting it, before making the most adorable sound of extreme awe. Then he looks up at my wife and me and does the sign for more, convinced we have the power to manifest a personalized show in the clouds.

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He is also extremely physical. If you can climb it, jump over it, jump off of it, or sprint across it – he’s your guy. When he’s not hitting a baseball off the little tee we got him or leaping into my arms from the side of a pool, he’s shoving as much food into his mouth as he can and then throwing his leftovers across the room. Then, of course, he’s hysterically laughing about it.

Like I said, an archetypal boy.

I wouldn’t change one thing about my son. He is funny, joyful, smart, and creative, and nothing makes me happier than watching him bloom. But I can’t help but wonder if he just so happens to be the way he is or if it’s because my wife and I have already begun to subtly push him down this path due to the unconscious gender biases that have been shoved down our throats since birth.

When my wife and I decided to have kids, we vowed to do our best to raise them to know that they can wear, play with, be, and do anything, regardless of their sex or ultimate gender identities.

We plan to prioritize conversations exploring the many possibilities for who they could become. For me, one of the hardest parts about trying to figure out I was gay was that – like pretty much all kids of my generation – I was never really told it was an option. I just had to get there on my own. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, and I won’t let my kids feel as lost in the dark as I did.

Nevertheless, raising my son without a gendered bent has been harder than I thought. I knew it would be impossible to escape the influence of books and media, but I didn’t realize just how hard it would be to push past my own internal biases. I want to be the kind of person who will put my son in a dress just because. But until he’s old enough to ask for one himself, I have been surprised to discover I am not.  

It’s not like I’m averse to buying him dolls or anything (in fact, he has several dolls that he loves to hug and feed and it makes me melt). But gender normativity has somehow still manifested in our family without any effort on our part. I notice it when I am rifling through his dresser and can only find clothes depicting trucks or dinosaurs or monsters. I notice it when he ends up wearing all blue about 75% of the time. I notice it when I look around our playroom and see mostly basketballs and Hot Wheels tracks and Legos. I notice it when I laugh as my son climbs up his little plastic slide, and instead of sliding down, leaps off the ladder onto the couch. Would I laugh as hard if he were a girl, I wonder, or would I try to stop her?

Of course, none of these toys or activities are inherently problematic, but I know that we have not yet struck a balance between toys typically associated with girls and those typically associated with boys. This is in part due to the biased decisions we make without thinking and in part due to how lucky we are to be flooded with gifts from extremely well-meaning loved ones. One gendered gift does not a “boy” room make – but they add up pretty quickly.

It’s amazing to me that even being so aware of all this has not made the habits easy to break. I’ve accepted that for now, I will just have to keep thinking about it and keep questioning it and keep pushing myself to do better.

And when my son is older, I won’t hesitate to support whatever he wants, whether it’s a dress, a football, painted nails, an airplane-themed room, or all of the above. Because the most important thing I hope to teach him is that no matter how you identify, you don’t have to box yourself into the stereotypes associated with your gender. I will be honest with him about how I’m still working on escaping that box myself, and I will tell him I hope we can explore the world outside of it together.