Maybe I'm very conservative here, but you can't avoid being the sex you are unless you have surgery, and even then, it sort of comes through. Let's face it, a transexual person may feel male or female, but they still look the sex they were born with. You may feel like a woman and have breast implants, but if you were born a man, there is no way you can be shorter, have narrower shoulders, a slim waist, big hips, soft facial features and a vagina. And ok, I know that there are some tall women with broad shoulders, no waist, slim hips and strong facial features, but that's not the rule, and even then, they look like women because they are. I think you cannot desexualize someone for two reasons: one, sex is obvious sooner or later hen we grow up, two, we are an extremely sexualized society so we DO care about sex, and a lot. Now, gender is something different, but it is something that lies within the person, not the physical appearance. I'm ok with giving boys some dolls, and not dressing girls in super sweet and pink dresses, because it's good to break with stereotypes, but by telling someone the sex of child you are not giving in to stereotypes. And I think the question of 'is it a girl or a boy?' comes mainly because we have two different personal pronouns to refer to people, and English actually has the pronoun 'it', which you guys use for babies and dogs, but Spanish doesn't have such thing, so even dogs, furniture pieces and cities have gender. My cat is a female and people refer to it/her as 'gata', whereas if she/it happened to be a male cat, they would talk of her/it as a 'gato'. It's this plain and simple. Not telling people the sex of the baby is actually making it harder for people to talk about the baby. So what, when s(he) becomes ten years old, they will refer to her/him as 'it'? As in, 'oh, Storm? it's a great person'. That's just ridiculous to me, and it's nothing compared to the identity issues a kid may happen to suffer from just because he or she is denied a sex and is different from the rest of the kids. And it's still a lost battle, because Storm WILL know his or her sex, because kids become aware of their genitals at an early age, and become aware of the other's genitals at an early age as well, and what will happen when he or she asks for certain toys or clothes? Will they deny him or her this or that because he or she is falling to the stereotypical roles? Silly. Someone said they didn't want to know their child's sex until it was born, and I think that's up to the parents, and there's nothing wrong in waiting, but I guess that if you are planning everything ahead -including names- it's reasonable that you would want to know the child's sex so you can think of appropriate names for it. It just happens to be that Personal Names are the most sexualized ones, and even though you can always call your kid 'Storm' or 'Tree', the truth is that names like 'Mary', 'Johnattan' or ' Jesus' are extremely 'genderized' and if you try to change that and call your boy 'Mary', wait and see what happens when he hits school and everybody starts making fun of him.
