Sweden Plans to Experiment on Its Young

I read an article titled, Can Kids Be Raised in a Gender-neutral Society? Sweden Thinks So . Sweden is preparing to do a social experiment on its kids. Sweden is attempting to create a gender-neutral society. Sweden’s National Encyclopedia now contains the gender-neutral pronoun, “hen.” “Instead of calling children ‘boys and girls,’ teachers are referring to students as ‘buddies.’ One school even stopped allowing free playtime during the day because ‘stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.’”

I can kind of understand the idea of calling the students “buddies,” but I don’t support stopping free playtime. Free playtime is good for most young students because it teaches them more about socialization than anything they could learn in the classroom. If the teachers are afraid of stereotypical gender patterns then the teachers should have more active roles during playtime. The teachers can structure activities that force the kids to interact with each other while still allowing the students to play. It’s okay for the kids to identify more with a certain gender. I don’t think it is fair to make it a bad thing that young boys tend to gravitate to other boys and young girls seem to gravitate to other girls. The schools should neither encourage it, nor try to prevent it. Allow the children to make friends the way most children make friends.

In the article, one columnist expressed concern over the term “hen” because she thought that it “could confuse children because it introduces an ‘in between-gender.’” I don’t see the term hen as confusing children if it is explained to them that hen is just another word for a person. We are all hens, just as we are all humans…hopefully.

I read a few comments on the article. One person expressed concern about shared bathrooms, but a person claiming to be from Sweden quickly explained that bathrooms in Sweden are much more private than American bathrooms.

The other major recurring theme was the idea of sports. Males and females are built differently. No one can dispute that. I’m wondering how Sweden will deal with this issue once theses group of children reach an age where the differences are too apparent to be ignored.

What Sweden is attempting to do is free these children from the constraints of gender roles that are arbitrarily assigned based on genitalia and allow these children to express themselves however they choose. Your physical body determines your sex, but your brain tells you your gender. The idea reminds me of a very heated discussion in my Gender Roles class in college. The class discussion revolved around the idea of how society dictates gender when in fact it should be the individual person who dictates their gender. A boy is a boy because he has a penis. He is expected to like “boy” things and when he doesn’t, there is an automatic concern. The same is true for girls. A girl is a girl because she has a vagina (and breasts in some cases) and she is expected to like “girl” things. We have these rigid ideas of what it means to be a boy and what it means to be a girl and we tend to forget that everything occurs along a spectrum. There are some boys who naturally gravitate to “boy” things, but there are also some girls who naturally gravitate to “boy” things and vice versa. Having a penis no more makes you a boy than having a vagina makes you a girl and yet societies always default to these physical attributes as a way of assigning traits.

Sweden’s idea is noble because it accommodates the children who don’t fit the mold for their gender and it helps all of the children realize that a body part does not determine who they are. Unfortunately, I don’t know how plausible it’s going to be. Especially after the children reach puberty. In my opinion this is one of those ideas that is great on paper but unable to work well in real life because there are too many factors that need to be considered and too many issues that will undoubtedly need to be addressed.