There's nothing ambiguous about the baby's genitals. But as Stocker puts it: "If you really want to get to know someone, you don't ask what's between their legs." So only the parents, their two other children (both boys), a close friend, and the two midwives who helped deliver the now 4-month-old baby know its gender. Even the grandparents have been left in the dark.
------------
I am not sure this is such a great idea from a parenting point of view. It's their choice of course, but certainly isn't mine or anybody who has kids that I know. I think gender and sex play such a foundational social role that I think its a mistake to play around with it on some theory of equality and power.
And different cultures definitely have their own system of divisions and power relations.
I got to see a bit of cultural difference in the Japanese wife who was the third wife of my errant stepfather. I liked her a lot. She was nice look middle aged woman about five foot tall. Unfortunately she dressed like Queen Elizabeth. Maybe that was government fashion in Japan. Step dad was six foot three and from his beatnik days he evolved in Tokyo into a blue blazer, laundered blue shirt and gray slacks. Well in Tokyo he was a business school English teacher. What happened to his jeans and huaraches from Guadalajara days?
Both M and MOC were very intelligent and very well schooled in both Japanese and Western arts and culture. She held a relatively high position in the Japanese ministry of culture. While she struggled with discrimination a glass ceiling at work, she was more than equal to the old man at home. At a guess she left her first Japanese husband for his no doubt `traditional' attitudes about women places in the hierarchy. On the other hand, she also had to suffer the effects of a racist code, where Japanese do not marry westerners. They could wonder around traveling together in other countries, but in Japan it was not considered okay for her to bring him to official functions, unless he stayed in the deep background. She did not tell her mother she had married a westerner. The old woman died without knowing. Strange stuff. I assume most of their Japanese friends didn't know they were married and just assumed a long term affair. They kept separate addresses all their lives together.
It was fun to watch them after a few drinks start bickering in a light way of banter back and forth. It reminded me of my childhood watching my mother do the same thing. The difference was that M could handle herself well and did not argue to wound, while my mother started loosing her temper and her Irish (verbal) brut came out---they were two Irish drinking, an essentially bad idea. On the other hand, a Japanese and an Irishman somehow fit well together in this live battle of wits and power, saki and beer.
I've decided that mutual respect is the best place to be in these gender wars which seem eternal as greek myths. I am watching the recapitulation of these wars through my grandaughter and grandson, and in my son and daughter in law. In the parents case, they are so close they resemble a single individual with two sides. It's very beautiful to see that.
We had a lot of fun the other night at a big dinner tracking down blonde Mexicans because the kids look Austrian, going over beer, protestantism, and polka and Maxmillian the Hapsburg. E's maiden last name is very high falutin, which should include a hypenation that's been lost. It composes the name of a town in Valencia. It goes back to the 12thC. I wish this name was in the grandkids as a middle name in the Spanish tradition, just to remind them later of their place in geopolitical history between England and Spain in the new world. Since it is missing, it acts like a cultural erasure of half their relatives in Mexico---ironic since there are more there than here. They used to show up in Berkeley for summer because its nice and cool for summer. Now the drug wars have stopped that. On the other hand the grandkids have matching first names, which has a nice unity, in my view. These deep sister-brother systems will form the foundation of their later gendered lives as men and women, mothers, fathers, the stuff of the human condition from this unity which came about in some organic fashion, nobody understands.
We sat around the dinner table, drinking lightly, sharing family stories from England, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, since all of us were the children or grandchildren of immigrants. It turned out that my uncle followed my friend's father up Italy in WWII in the US Army. L was in the water purification unit, and uncle C was in artillary. Meanwhile step father MOC was in the Pacific on a destroyer killing Japanese by the boat load from Guadalcanal to Yokahama. He sat out the end in Nagasaki Bay with no shore leave. This war dominated my childhood in the errie silence on holiday meals where the men watched football, drank, and said nothing.
I read a report recently that came from near the end of WWII that discussed the problem of the corruption of allied troops after their contact with Japanese and German soldiers who began to torture, take trophies, and collect body parts as grim souvenirs.
CG